Quotes about Failure

The secret of being wrong isn't to avoid being wrong! The secret is being willing to be wrong. The secret is realizing that wrong isn't fatal. The only thing that makes people and organizations great is their willingness to be not great along the way. The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success.

Mediocre is merely a failed attempt to be really good.

Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance. Tell yourself enough vivid stories about the worst possible outcome of your work and you'll soon come to believe them. Worry is not preparation, and anxiety doesn't make you better.

If you never fail, either you're really lucky or you haven't shipped anything.

The Cul-de-Sac and the Cliff Are the Curves That Lead to Failure If you find yourself facing either of these two curves, you need to quit. Not soon, but right now. The biggest obstacle to success in life, as far as I can tell, is our inability to quit these curves soon enough.

The act of trying to guarantee the success of an innovation is almost certain to make it less likely that it will succeed.

Perfect closes the door. It asserts that we're done, that this is the best we can do. Worse, perfect forbids us to try. To seek perfection and not reach it is a failure.

Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.

Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.

There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that—to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail.

Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.

My sense of my own superiority over many of my classmates would have been much more muted if I knew that they had seen me failing miserably at woodwork or cross-stitch.