45 Motivational Quotes on Failure

Failure teaches us that life is but a draft, a long rehearsal for a show that will never play.Hipolito, Amélie (2001)

The greatest teacher, failure is.Yoda, Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017)

There are always lessons in failures.Jaime Lannister, Game of Thrones, S7.Ep3: The Queen's Justice

Learning requires failure.Darius, Atlanta, S2.Ep11: Crabs in a Barrel

We learn from failure, not from success!Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)

There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure and moving on. Yet most people are stricken with fear. They fear failure so much that they fail. They are too conditioned, too used to being told what to do. It begins with the family, runs through school and goes into the business world.Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors have taken over the Ship (1998)

Restlessness is discontent – and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man – and I will show you a failure.Thomas A. Edison, The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison (1948)

We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.Rudyard Kipling, The Lesson (1901)

Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again.Henry Ford, My Life and Work (1922)

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort.Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life (1902), Page 2

The happy people are failures because they are on such good terms with themselves that they don’t give a damn.Agatha Christie, Sparkling Cyanide (1944)

Failure is the fog through which we glimpse triumph.Aldrich Killian, Iron Man 3 (2013)

Great success is built on failure.John Smith, The Man in the High Castle, S3.Ep10: Jahr Null

You can either be too strong to fail or too weak to try.Yennefer of Vengerberg, (to Ciri), The Witcher, S2.Ep7: Voleth Meir

I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860)

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, The Law of Success in Sixteen Lessons (1928)

The freedom to succeed goes hand in hand with the freedom to fail.Terry Pratchett, Going Postal (2004)

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.Thomas A. Edison, As quoted in an ad for GPU Nuclear Corporation, in Black Enterprise Vol. 16, No. 11 (June 1986), p. 79

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.Thomas A. Edison, This is presented as a statement of 1877.

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.Michael Jordan, As quoted in Nike Culture: The Sign of the Swoosh by Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson (1998), Page 49

One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake.Anton Chekhov, Letter to Aleksei Sergeyevich Suvorin (November 3, 1888)

Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters and Miscellanies of Robert Louis Stevenson (1902)

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: Try to please everybody.Herbert Bayard Swope, The world of Swope by Ely Jacques Kahn (1965), Page 429

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.Truman Capote, Truman Capote: Conversations by M. Thomas Inge (1987), Page 189

We must never stop failing, because the minute we do, we’ve failed.Edgin Darvis, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)

To fail is only to change the way.Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jodorowsky's Dune (2013)

You learn. You fail. Learn more. Fail more. And don’t let anyone outwork you. Ever.Beth Dutton, (to Carter), Yellowstone, S4.Ep3: All I See Is You

Never stop, no matter how many failures. When you know you’re doing what you’re meant to do, you have to try.The Van Gogh Docent, Ted Lasso, S3.Ep6: Sunflowers

You mustn’t confuse a single failure with a final defeat.F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (1934)

It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.Herman Melville, Hawthorne and His Mosses (1850)

In all failures, the beginning is certainly the half of the whole.George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)

You fail, you get up and try again.Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman (1981)

That this awareness of my own fallibility will prevent me from making many mistakes doesn’t alter the fact that I’m bound to make a great many mistakes anyway. But if we fall, we get up again!Vincent Van Gogh, Letter to Anthon van Rappard (Etten, November 2, 1881)

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (1983)

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.Robert F. Kennedy, To seek a newer world (1967), Page 232

Failure is not the falling down, but the staying down.Mary Pickford, Why Not Try God?, appeared in St. Petersburg Times (January 25, 1936)

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.William Faulkner, The Paris Review interview with Jean Stein (1956)

The only people who aren’t afraid of failure are madmen.Tyrion Lannister, Game of Thrones, S6.Ep10: The Winds of Winter

There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist (1988)

The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)

If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you’re already halfway down.Tana French, Broken Harbour (Dublin Murder Squad) (2012)

A real loser is somebody that’s so afraid of not winning, they don’t even try.Edwin Hoover, Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.J.K. Rowling, Harvard University Commencement Address (June 5, 2008)

Failure is how we grow. Actually, it’s how men grow. It’s how women shrink.Miriam 'Midge' Maisel, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, S3.Ep3: Panty Pose

If you are gonna fail, you’re gonna fail with an audience and you are gonna fail spectacularly.Susie Myerson, (to Alfie), The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, S4.Ep6: Maisel vs. Lennon: The Cut Contest

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.Winston Churchill

Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.Coco Chanel

If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.Thomas J. Watson

Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.Denis Waitley

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.Jack Kerouac