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failure quotes

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“Failure is an opportunity.” Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
“Violence . . . is the last refuge of the incompetent.” Isaac Asimov, Foundation
“Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again. There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail.” Henry Ford, My Life and Work
“Success is as dangerous as failure.” Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
“In any case you mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
“We learn from failure, not from success!” Bram Stoker, Dracula
“The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.” Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
“Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.” George Eliot, Middlemarch
“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
“Failure is a state of mind. It’s like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it.” John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent
“What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure.” Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“There is nothing which is so weak for working purposes as this enormous importance attached to immediate victory. There is nothing that fails like success.” G. K. Chesterton, Heretics
“Where others have failed, I will not fail.” Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
“In all failures, the beginning is certainly the half of the whole.” George Eliot, Middlemarch
“When reason fails, the devil helps!” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
“Nothing is more usual than to feel that others have shared in our failures, just as it is an ordinary reaction to forget those who have shared in our achievements.” Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
“We are unjust towards these great men who attempt the future, when they fail.” Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
“Alas, how easily things go wrong! A sigh too much, or a kiss too long, And there follows a mist and a weeping rain, And life is never the same again.” George MacDonald, Phantastes
“if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another” Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
“When all else fails, give up and go to the library.” Stephen King, 11/22/63
“In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.” Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
“Looking back I see that I was always afraid of something: of the dark, of displeasing people, of failure. Anything I accomplished had to be done across a barrier of fear.” Eleanor Roosevelt, The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt
“My past is everything I failed to be.” Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
“being . . . rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.” J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“It is not difficult to be alone if you are poor and a failure. An artist is always alone—if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.” Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
“No theory of government was ever given a fairer test or a more prolonged experiment in a democratic country than democratic socialism received in Britain. Yet it was a miserable failure in every respect.” Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years
“When I talk to graduating classes, I always tell a brief version of the story of my life and try to offer lessons everybody can use: have a vision, trust yourself, break some rules, ignore the naysayers, don’t be afraid to fail.” Arnold Schwarzenegger, Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story
“oft evil will shall evil mar.” J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
“We have not seen great things done in our time except by those who have been considered mean; the rest have failed.” Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
“A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions—as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
“The failure of global summits on the environment make it plain that our politics are subject to technology and finance.” Pope Francis, Laudato si'
“The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest...” John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

Related topics

success respect fear opportunity perseverance experience violence achievement dreams incompetence greatness danger life defeat darkness happiness socialism reason politics time

Related authors

Lao Tzu (2)
John Steinbeck (2)
George Eliot (2)
Isaac Asimov (1)
Paulo Coelho (1)
Malcolm X (1)
Stephen King (1)
Henry Ford (1)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1)
Jane Austen (1)
J. R. R. Tolkien (1)
Margaret Thatcher (1)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1)
Friedrich Nietzsche (1)
J. K. Rowling (1)
Charles Dickens (1)
Victor Hugo (1)
Henry Miller (1)
Bram Stoker (1)
Arnold Schwarzenegger (1)

Related sources

Tao Te Ching (2)
Middlemarch (2)
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1)
The Alchemist (1)
Foundation (1)
Great Expectations (1)
Tender Is the Night (1)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1)
My Life and Work (1)
The Winter of Our Discontent (1)
Crime and Punishment (1)
Dracula (1)
Tropic of Cancer (1)
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1)
The Prince (1)
Mansfield Park (1)
The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (1)
The Two Towers (1)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (1)
Heretics (1)