Failure Quotes

A university is not a service station. Neither is it a political society, nor a meeting place for political societies. With all its limitations and failures, and they are invariably many, it is the best and most benign side of our society insofar as that society aims to cherish the human mind.

Richard Hofstadte

Rigidly organized pre - School classrooms, which value obedience more than development, create the deficits in poor children, imposing a self - Image of marginality and failure.

Valerie Polakow

Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.

Sir Winston Leonard Spenser Churchill

Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.

R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1963

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

John Dewey

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

If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.

Thomas John Watson, Sr.

Every great work, every great 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

The main failure of education is that it has not prepared people to comprehend matters concerning human destiny.

Norman Cousins

Failure is defined by our reaction to it.

Oprah Winfrey, O Magazine February 2001 issue

Far better is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt, The Man in the Arena

Forget about the consequences of failure. Failure is only a temporary change in direction to set you straight for your next success.

Denis Watley

The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.

Napoleon Hill

Success always occurs in private and failure in full public view.

Unknown

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.

Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1966

Losers visualize the penalties of failure. Winners visualize the rewards of success.

William S. Gilbert

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.

Henry Ford

It is as hard to take success as it is failure.

Louise Nevelson

Every great improvement has come after repeated failure. Virtually nothing comes out right the first time. Failures, repeated failures, are the posts on the road to achievement.

Charles F. Kettering, quoted in Globe and Mail, Toronto, June 18, 2004, page A16, mkesterton@globeandmail. ca