Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,808 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
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Success and failure
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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 (1871–1940) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Game of Life and How to Play It (1925)
“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 (1902–1994) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Childhood and Society (1950)
“As long as we work on God's line, He will aid us. When we attempt to work on our own lines, He rebukes us with failure.”
Theodore L. Cuyler (1822–1909) said by 1909 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In brief, sending a father-deprived child into the world and assuming everything is okay because the dad provides money is like sending a drunken driver onto the highway and assuming everything is okay because the gas is paid for. It doesn’t mean that the drunken driver will not get to his or her destination. It just means that the risks are enormous. And the consequences of failure are forever.”
Warren Farrell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If your son sees being an oppressor as his future, being a failure to launch might look like progress.”
Warren Farrell (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How far high failure overleaps the bound Of low successes.”
Lewis Morris (poet) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've always considered myself a failure: I feel I've never done anything wholly right. [...] Everybody will tell you, "Oh no, how can you say that, because ten thousand people clap you on a night?" But part of that is reflex action and part of it is because you're reasonably good. But if you're great, that's a different thing.”
Ronnie Drew (1934–2008) said by 2008 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On bourgeois ground … change is impossible anyway even if it were desired. In fact, bourgeois interest would like to draw every other interest opposed to it into its own failure; so, in order to drain the new life, it makes its own agony apparently fundamental, apparently ontological. The futility of bourgeois existence is extended to be that of the human situation in general, of existence per se.”
Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Principle of Hope (1959), N. Plaice, trans. (1986), p. 4
“Failure in any given subject is the first qualification towards becoming a teacher.”
David Baboulene (born 1960) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Spending Freeze? (referring to remarks by John Boehner), the brand named policy of economic fundamental misunderstanding endorsed by more conservatives than any other proven policy failure on the market today”
Rachel Maddow (born 1973) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC (6 March 2009)
“I will commit not the terrible crime of aiming too low. I will do the work that a failure will not do. I will always let my reach exceed my grasp.”
Og Mandino (1923–1996) said by 1996 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To me the greatest moment in an experiment is always just before I learn whether the particular idea is a good or a bad one. Thus even a failure is exciting, and most of my ideas have of course been wrong. But this time it worked!”
Ivar Giaever (1929–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.”
William Empson (1906–1984) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Missing Dates" (1937), line 1
“Be careful of your word, even in keeping the most trifling appointment. But do not blame another for a failure of that kind till you have heard his excuse.”
James Burgh (1714–1775) said by 1775 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Failure alone remains as the one single accomplishable experience;”
Imre Kertész (1929–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Back in 2014, when no one else was planning how to win the referendum, @DouglasCarswell talked tactics at the @Tate. He said: "We can win in one of two circumstances: a visible failure of the renegotiation, or one of the two main party leaders being neutral." In the event, we got both. Thanks @jeremycorbyn.”
Daniel Hannan (born 1971) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Series of tweets following Jeremy Corbyn's sacking of shadow ministers who defied a Labour whip not to support an amendment calling for the UK to stay in the single market after Brexit (30 June 2017)
“If you believe in what you are doing, why should disappointment separate you from it? If you believe in your business, why should failure cause you to abandon it? If you believe in your marriage, why should crisis separate you and lead to divorce?”
T. B. Joshua (1963–2021) said by 2021 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Give us, O God, the vision which can see Your love in the world in spite of human failure. Give us the faith to trust Your goodness in spite of our ignorance and weakness. Give us the knowledge that we may continue to pray with understanding hearts. And show us what each one of us can do to set forward the coming of the day of universal peace.”
Frank Borman (1928–2023) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Prayer from Apollo 8, on Christmas Day (25 December 1968)
“As much as I loved the ideas, I excelled at experimental failure, I found new ways to make experiments not work. I would mess up PCRs, add the wrong buffers, northerns, westerns, southerns. I would make them not work in quite ingenious ways, and I realized slowly, over the course of those years, that the secret to being a great scientist is to love the manual labor of it.”
Jonah Lehrer (born 1981) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.”
Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We can either passively continue on the road to utter domestication and destruction or turn in the direction of joyful upheaval, passionate and feral embrace of wildness and life that aims at dancing on the ruins of clocks, computers and that failure of imagination and will called work. Can we justify our lives by anything less than such a politics of rage and dreams?”
John Zerzan (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The end result of positively reinforcing bad behavior is that you get more of it. The culmination of a failure to punish predators is a debased, dissolute, slum-dog society in which, by legal decree, the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper.”
Ilana Mercer first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Is it ‘Moran’ or ‘Moron’?” WorldNetDaily.com, May 28, 2010].
“With a few exceptions, Fellini's films have failure and despair running through them: Life continues, but I can't imagine 'Felliniesque' as an exclusively uplifting adjective. Fellini's best films are the ones that distill this essence -- the paradoxical quality of melancholic ecstasy, a surreal, bittersweet vitality -- to perfection.”
Damian Pettigrew (born 1953) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the adjective ‘Felliniesque’, in The Los Angeles Times (April 2003)]
“War is always a failure. It means we’ve failed in diplomacy and we’ve failed in talking to one another.”
Martin Firrell (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I returned to China [from the United States], I didn’t have a U.S. passport, a wife, or a university degree. From the Chinese point of view, I was a total failure.”
“If you don’t give up, You still have a Chance to Win. Giving up is a Great Failure.”
“Markets are not perfect, which is true even for rationally regulated markets. Nevertheless, over the last thousand years every attempt to organize sizeable societies without important dependence on markets has generated its own failure ...”
Paul Samuelson (1915–2009) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Enjoyable Life Puzzling Over Modern Finance Theory", Annu. Rev. Financ. Econ. 2009. 1:19–35
“As a result of this failure of communist ideology to comprehend the nature of man, Stalin decided to alter the Russian constitution. No longer would economic rewards be distributed on the basis of 'need'; rather, the new concept was to be 'to each according to his work.”
Robert LeFevre (1911–1986) said by 1986 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is fear of failure here. People keep saying what if this goes wrong, what if that doesn’t work. Every time I want to do something, there is this fear that it may go wrong. It comes up each time.”
Rahul Gandhi (born 1970) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After all, by what lights can you see atheism as a “leap of faith”? What is the “faith” there? Failure to accept gods is no more a leap of faith than is doubting the existence of the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, or Santa Claus. It’s not “faith” when you refuse to accept a proposition for which there’s no evidence.”
Jerry Coyne (born 1949) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Self-abasing atheist at the Guardian calls atheism is a “leap of faith”" October 29, 2015
“[on KFC's Famous Bowls] I just want kind of a light brown hillock of glop. If you could put my lunch in a blender, and liquefy it, and then put it into a caulking gun and inject it right into my femoral artery, even better! But until you invent a lunch gun, I would like a failure pile in a sadness bowl!”
Patton Oswalt (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Emotional Amoral Egoism indicates that ethnic conflict should be understood in terms of a reaction to a failure to satisfy a group’s basic physiological, security and ego needs due to discrimination, experienced by a group whose relations are premised, above all, on cultural affinities.”
Nayef Al-Rodhan (born 1959) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think a woman who's confident, who's aware of her own abilities and her own limitations and who accepts gracefully failure as part of her life. All this combination makes a beautiful woman.”
Mallika Sherawat (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I feel that I was made to complete things. To accomplish only a mass of beginnings and attempts would be to make a total failure of life. Perfection is the heritage with which my Creator has endowed me, and since this short life does not give completeness, I must have immortal life in which to find it.”
Randolph Sinks Foster (1820–1903) said by 1903 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every time there's a major intelligence failure there's talk about a makeover. But, every time there's talk about a makeover, it's transmuted into warnings about a takeover.”
Mark Riebling (born 1963) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Mysteries are the Mysteries, and ultimately personal—maybe the most personal thing in the universe. Evangelism, in my opinion, is a failure of the imagination. Beware of prophets: the best visions are the ones they leave in the desert.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Barren of events, rich in pretensions my earthly life. Obscurity my real name. Wholly unto myself I exist. I wrap no soul in my embrace. No mentor worthy of my calibre have I. I am all alone between failure and frustration. I am the red thread between nothingness and Eternity.”
Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fear is bound to disappear when you realize that failure is not something shameful, damaging, destructive, or painful, but something natural.”
Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life, and, once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable him to do so. Now that I no longer felt so guilty and anxious about him, he became too remote to be a reality.”
Karen Armstrong (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A lack of clarity is food for failure.”
Steve Maraboli (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Keynes tried to show that market economies could settle in equilibrium states in which the labour market did not clear, and in which the level of unemployment was high. He believed that this was due to a particular example of market failure, developed in his concept of effective demand.”
Paul Ormerod (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Remember: never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully — and imaginatively — for its hidden assets.”
Michael Korda (born 1933) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every major industry was once a growth industry. But some that are now riding a wave of growth enthusiasm are very much in the shadow of decline. Others, which are thought of as seasoned growth industries, have actually stopped growing. In every case the reason growth is threatened, slowed, or stopped is not because the market is saturated. It is because there has been a failure of management.”
Theodore Levitt (1925–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I was a boy I was always depressed and confused, now I think I'm not garbage. I don't try to prove to my parents that I am good at something anymore. But I am a failure with women. I can only be a one night lover.”
Vincent Gallo (born 1961) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is impossible to imagine a more dramatic and horrifying combination of scientific triumph with political and moral failure than has been shown to the world in the destruction of Hiroshima. From the scientific point of view, the atomic bomb embodies the results of a combination of genius and patience as remarkable as any in the history of mankind.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) said by 1970 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wherever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure: a larger heart, and a greater self-restraint, would put a calm autumnal sadness in the place of the instinctive outcry of pain.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) first seen 1902 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell: Contemplation and Action, 1902-1914, ed. Richard A. Rempel, Andrew Brink and Margaret Moran (Routledge, 1993, : Textual Notes, p. 555; also in Laurence J. Peter Quotations for o…
“Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.”
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He yawned. He had finished the day and he had also finished with his youth. Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism, smiling tolerance, resignation, common sense stoicism - all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason) (1945)
“All human activities are equivalent ... and ... all are on principle doomed to failure.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Genet is a man-failure: he wills the impossible in order to derive from the tragic grandeur of this defeat the assurance that there is something other than the possible.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) said by 1980 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source