failure
Quotations
Quotations on the topic of ‘failure’ from all listed authors (click on the ‘click to view listing’ links to view each quote in full).
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“Failure is more frequently from want of energy than want of capital.” -Daniel Webster
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“I don’t understand a way to work other than bold-facedly running towards failure.” -Cate Blanchett
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“We create success or failure on the course primarily by our thoughts.” -Gary Player
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“Well, I think that there’s a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you’re likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line.” -Richard Branson
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“It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.” -Samuel Smiles
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“Success and failure are both part of life. Both are not permanent.” -Shahrukh Khan
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“That sense of failure, I don’t know where people put it who don’t write songs and aren’t able to emote physically. It must go somewhere.” -Sting
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“In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in failure.” -Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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“If you’re the type of person who has to fulfill your dreams, you’ve gotta be resourceful to make sure you can do it. I came out to California when I was 21, thinking my New York credentials would take me all the way. I came back home a year later all dejected and a failure.”…
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“I think you have to try and fail, because failure gets you closer to what you’re good at.” -Louis C. K.
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“About the only problem with success is that it does not teach you how to deal with failure.” -Tommy Lasorda
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“The main failure of education is that it has not prepared people to comprehend matters concerning human destiny.” -Norman Cousins
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“I want to swim in both directions at once. Desire success, court failure.” -Alan Rickman
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“I have a tendency to sabotage relationships I have a tendency to sabotage everything. Fear of success, fear of failure, fear of being afraid. Useless, good-for-nothing thoughts.” -Michael Buble
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“We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes – understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.” -Arianna Huffington
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“Without failure there is no sweetness in success. There’s no understanding of it.” -Glenn Beck
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“But I look at failure as education. In that respect, I am so well-educated.” -Kathy Ireland
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“There is no such thing as darkness only a failure to see.” -Malcolm Muggeridge
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“Success is usually the culmination of controlling failure.” -Sylvester Stallone
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“Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail their failure must be but a challenge to others.” -Amelia Earhart
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“Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person’s car is the only place where he can be alone and think.” -Marshall McLuhan
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“If we don’t succeed we run the risk of failure.” -Dan Quayle
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“Most of us spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.” -Fred Allen
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“Ultimately, all human activities have as their goal the realization of happiness. Why, then, have we ended up producing the opposite result? Could the underlying cause be our failure to correctly understand the true nature of happiness?” -Daisaku Ikeda
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“I’ve probably earned the right to screw up a few times. I don’t want the fear of failure to stop me from doing what I really care about.” -Emma Watson
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“I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure – which is: Try to please everybody.” -Herbert Bayard Swope
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“For families across the UK who are income-poor, but more than that, whose lives are blighted by worklessness, educational failure, family breakdown, problem debt and poor health, as well as other problems, giving them an extra pound – say through increased benefits – will not address the reason they find themselves in difficulty in the…
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“Not failure, but low aim is sin.” -Benjamin E. Mays
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“We know there is no such thing as freedom without the risk of failure.” -Rick Perry
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“Heaven knows that I have done all that a mortal could do, to save the people, and the failure was not my fault, but the fault of others.” -Davy Crockett
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“There are no mistakes, save one: the failure to learn from a mistake.” -Robert Fripp
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“So many financial dreams are thwarted by the failure to act upon good intentions.” -Suze Orman
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“A minute’s success pays the failure of years.” -Robert Browning
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“Who I am as a guitarist is defined by my failure to become Jimi Hendrix.” -John Mayer
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“There’s no right or wrong, success or failure.” -Miley Cyrus
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“Most success springs from an obstacle or failure. I became a cartoonist largely because I failed in my goal of becoming a successful executive.” -Scott Adams
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“Sometimes the best lighting of all is a power failure.” -Doug Coupland
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“Man’s sin is in his failure to live what he is. Being the master of the earth, man forgets that he is the servant of God.” -Abraham Joshua Heschel
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“Young players need freedom of expression to develop as creative players… they should be encouraged to try skills without fear of failure.” -Arsene Wenger
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“I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, ‘the ability to conceive failure as progress.’” -Jerry Saltz
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“This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy.” -Henry A. Wallace
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“A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.” -Gertrude Stein
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“Any man who has $10,000 left when he dies is a failure.” -Errol Flynn
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“There is much to be said for failure. It is much more interesting than success.” -Max Beerbohm
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“You have to be able to accept failure to get better.” -LeBron James
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“Success is simply a matter of luck. Ask any failure.” -Earl Wilson
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“The will to persevere is often the difference between failure and success.” -David Sarnoff
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“I believe in trusting men, not only once but twice – in giving a failure another chance.” -James Cash Penney
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“Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama’s Waterloo.” -Camille Paglia
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“The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the process of getting to the top.” -Joyce Brothers
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“The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.” -Audre Lorde
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“Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.” -J. K. Rowling
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“I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.” -Tennessee Williams
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“We need to teach the highly educated man that it is not a disgrace to fail and that he must analyze every failure to find its cause. He must learn how to fail intelligently, for failing is one of the greatest arts in the world.” -Charles Kettering
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“It is often the failure who is the pioneer in new lands, new undertakings, and new forms of expression.” -Eric Hoffer
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“I read less and less. I have not forgiven books for their failure to tell me the truth and make me happy.” -Mason Cooley
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“The point is not to take the world’s opinion as a guiding star but to go one’s way in life and working unerringly, neither depressed by failure nor seduced by applause.” -Gustav Mahler
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“Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom.” -Erik Erikson
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“Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one’s better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk, and to act.” -Maxwell Maltz
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“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.” -Truman Capote
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“But while success and failure depend on conditions, the mind neither waxes nor wanes.” -Bodhidharma
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“It’s not necessary to fear the prospect of failure but to be determined not to fail.” -Jimmy Carter
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“Don’t think of it as failure. Think of it as time-released success.” -Robert Orben
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“Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State’s failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.” -H. G. Wells
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“Whether in success or in failure, I’m proud of every single movie I’ve ever directed.” -Steven Spielberg
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“Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility.” -Susan Sontag
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“Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.” -Edward Abbey
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“Keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final.” -Roger Babson
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“Mohammed was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from strength to strength to strength.” -Karen Armstrong
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“No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences, so-called trauma – but we make out of them just what suits our purposes.” -Alfred Adler
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“No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man’s front embraces the whole universe.” -Henry Miller
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“War remains the decisive human failure.” -John Kenneth Galbraith
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“Failure is only postponed success as long as courage ‘coaches’ ambition. The habit of persistence is the habit of victory.” -Herbert Kaufman
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“If Liberia has failed, then, it is no evidence of the failure of the Negro in government. It is merely evidence of the failure of slavery.” -Carter G. Woodson
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“However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure.” -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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“There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.” -John Keats
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“The only real failure in life is one not learned from.” -Anthony J. D’Angelo
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“I’m hopeful. I know there is a lot of ambition in Washington, obviously. But I hope the ambitious realize that they are more likely to succeed with success as opposed to failure.” -George W. Bush
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“As I said there is nothing wrong with failing. Pick yourself up and try it again. You never are going to know how good you really are until you go out and face failure.” -Henry Kravis
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“To begin to think with purpose, is to enter the ranks of those strong ones who only recognize failure as one of the pathways to attainment.” -James Allen
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“The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen.” -P. J. O’Rourke
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“Greatly begin. Though thou have time, but for a line, be that sublime. Not failure, but low aim is crime.” -James Russell Lowell
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“In Torch Song, I did that character almost non-stop from 1978 until I made the movie in 1987. Then I had some failure, which also colors how you react to doing other things.” -Harvey Fierstein
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“They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?” -Fidel Castro
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“Don’t fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have.” -Louis E. Boone
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“There are only really a few stories to tell in the end, and betrayal and the failure of love is one of those good stories to tell.” -Sean Lennon
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“Failure is a great teacher, and I think when you make mistakes and you recover from them and you treat them as valuable learning experiences, then you’ve got something to share.” -Steve Harvey
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“My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.” -Jack Kerouac
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“Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.” -John Dewey
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“Success or failure in business is caused more by the mental attitude even than by mental capacities.” -Walter Scott
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“You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.” -Mary Pickford
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“He who risks and fails can be forgiven. He who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole being.” -Paul Tillich
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“A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.” -Christian Nestell Bovee
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“One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.” -John W. Gardner
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“My father was not a failure. After all, he was the father of a president of the United States.” -Harry S. Truman
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“Forget about the consequences of failure. Failure is only a temporary change in direction to set you straight for your next success.” -Denis Waitley
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“There can be no failure to a man who has not lost his courage, his character, his self respect, or his self-confidence. He is still a King.” -Orison Swett Marden
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“I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.” -George Eliot
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“Every great work, every big accomplishment, has been brought into manifestation through holding to the vision, and often just before the big achievement, comes apparent failure and discouragement.” -Florence Scovel Shinn
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“While it is important for people to see your promise you must also remember that hope is the keeper of both happiness and disappointment, the father of both progress and failure.” -Bryant H. McGill
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“I’d rather be a failure at something I love than a success at something I hate.” -George Burns
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“Sound character provides the power with which a person may ride the emergencies of life instead of being overwhelmed by them. Failure is… the highway to success.” -Og Mandino
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“If there exists no possibility of failure, then victory is meaningless.” -Robert H. Schuller
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“Destiny: A tyrant’s authority for crime and a fool’s excuse for failure.” -Ambrose Bierce
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“Fear stifles our thinking and actions. It creates indecisiveness that results in stagnation. I have known talented people who procrastinate indefinitely rather than risk failure. Lost opportunities cause erosion of confidence, and the downward spiral begins.” -Charles Stanley
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“Failure is not an option. Everyone has to succeed.” -Arnold Schwarzenegger
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“Laziness is a secret ingredient that goes into failure. But it’s only kept a secret from the person who fails.” -Robert Half
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“No man is a failure who is enjoying life.” -William Feather
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“No man can be a failure if he thinks he’s a success If he thinks he is a winner, then he is.” -Robert W. Service
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“Failure is not our only punishment for laziness there is also the success of others.” -Jules Renard
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“The failure of national economic policy is costing us more than jobs it has begun to weaken that uniquely American spirit of risk-taking, large ambition, and optimism about the future. We must rally them now to bold departures that rebuild our national morale as well as our material prosperity.” -Mitch Daniels
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“All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
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“No man ever achieved worth-while success who did not, at one time or other, find himself with at least one foot hanging well over the brink of failure.” -Napoleon Hill
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“A man can get discouraged many times but he is not a failure until he begins to blame somebody else and stops trying.” -John Burroughs
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“If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.” -E. O. Wilson
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“There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man’s lack of faith in his true Self.” -William James
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“Tragedy in life normally comes with betrayal and compromise, and trading on your integrity and not having dignity in life. That’s really where failure comes.” -Tom Cochrane
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“Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?” -Ernest Hemingway
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“The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God’s children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.” -H. L. Mencken
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“Failure comes only when we forget our ideals and objectives and principles.” -Jawaharlal Nehru
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“There’s always failure. And there’s always disappointment. And there’s always loss. But the secret is learning from the loss, and realizing that none of those holes are vacuums.” -Michael J. Fox
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“The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.” -Lyndon B. Johnson
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“I hate failure and that divorce was a Number One failure in my eyes. It was the worst period of my life. Neither Desi nor I have been the same since, physically or mentally.” -Lucille Ball
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“In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.” -Malcolm X
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“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.” -Thomas Sowell
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“Success is never final, failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts.” -John Wooden
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“Failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.” -Jim Rohn
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“My reputation grows with every failure.” -George Bernard Shaw
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“Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another steppingstone to greatness.” -Oprah Winfrey
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“Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure.” -Confucius
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“Like success, failure is many things to many people. With Positive Mental Attitude, failure is a learning experience, a rung on the ladder, a plateau at which to get your thoughts in order and prepare to try again.” -W. Clement Stone
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“A man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life.” -Christopher Morley
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“As kids we’re not taught how to deal with success we’re taught how to deal with failure. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. If at first you succeed, then what?” -Charlie Sheen
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“People in their handlings of affairs often fail when they are about to succeed. If one remains as careful at the end as he was at the beginning, there will be no failure.” -Lao Tzu
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“Once you start a working on something, don’t be afraid of failure and don’t abandon it. People who work sincerely are the happiest.” -Chanakya
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“Failure is the key to success each mistake teaches us something.” -Morihei Ueshiba
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“Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself.” -Charlie Chaplin
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“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.” -Colin Powell
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“I wasn’t afraid to fail. Something good always comes out of failure.” -Anne Baxter
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“Before you can win a game, you have to not lose it.” -Chuck Noll
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“Losing is no disgrace if you’ve given your best.” -Jim Palmer
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“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” -Winston Churchill
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“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” -Bill Cosby
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“You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.” -Johnny Cash
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“Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.” -Dale Carnegie
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“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” -Henry Ford
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“The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.” -Buddha
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“Failure is success if we learn from it.” -Malcolm Forbes
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“Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure.” -George Edward Woodberry
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“It has always seemed strange to me… 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, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first…
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“Success is never final, but failure can be.” -Bill Parcells
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“Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one has better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one’s ideas, to take a calculated risk – and to act.” -Andre Malraux
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“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” -Andy Grove
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“Failure to prepare is preparing to fail.” -Mike Murdock
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“Our failings sometimes bind us to one another as closely as could virtue itself.” -Luc de Clapiers
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“My life has been nothing but a failure.” -Claude Monet
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“You always pass failure on your way to success.” -Mickey Rooney
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“I never see failure as failure, but only as the game I must play and win.” -Tom Hopkins
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“We may be personally defeated, but our principles never!” -William Lloyd Garrison
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“The world is divided into two categories: failures and unknowns.” -Francis Picabia
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“I have probably purchased fifty ‘hot tips’ in my career, maybe even more. When I put them all together, I know I am a net loser.” -Charles M. Schwab
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“Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, I have failed three times, and what happens when he says, I am a failure.” -S. I. Hayakawa
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“Failure is a word that I simply don’t accept.” -John H. Johnson
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“The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by my failures.” -Humphry Davy
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“At least I have the modesty to admit that lack of modesty is one of my failings.” -Hector Berlioz
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“All human actions are equivalent… and all are on principle doomed to failure.” -Carl Sandburg
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“Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.” -Mia Hamm
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“Indecision and delays are the parents of failure.” -George Canning
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“A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.” -Alexandre Dumas
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“If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.” -Quentin Crisp
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