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failure quotes

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“Success is as dangerous as failure.” Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
“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
“In any case you mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
“Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.” George Eliot, Middlemarch
“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
“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
“Failure is an opportunity.” Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
“Where others have failed, I will not fail.” Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
“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
“What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure.” Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“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
“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
“We are unjust towards these great men who attempt the future, when they fail.” Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
“The failure of global summits on the environment make it plain that our politics are subject to technology and finance.” Pope Francis, Laudato si'
“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
“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 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
“In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.” Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
“When all else fails, give up and go to the library.” Stephen King, 11/22/63
“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
“Violence . . . is the last refuge of the incompetent.” Isaac Asimov, Foundation
“oft evil will shall evil mar.” J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
“being . . . rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.” J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
“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
“if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another” Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
“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
“My past is everything I failed to be.” Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
“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

Related topics

success fear experience perseverance opportunity danger dreams darkness vision politics life others happiness merit time evil loneliness future past government

Related authors

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

Related sources

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