Failure Quotes, Sayings
This collection of failure quotes represents the best wisdom from business leaders, scientists, philosophers, and authors.
Whether you are looking for inspiration to overcome an obstacle, accept a setback, or even deal with a relationship breakup, these sayings will help you come back even stronger.
1. Best failure quotes for overcoming setbacks
Let’s begin with ten of our favorite failure quotes to inspire and motivate you.
Top 10 best failure quotes
1.) Failure is a bruise, not a tattoo.
Jon Sinclair
2.) Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fail.
Confucius
3.) You’ll always miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.
Wayne Gretzky
4.) Courage allows the successful woman to fail and learn powerful lessons from the failure. So that in the end, she didn’t fail at all.
Maya Angelou
5.) Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
Robert F. Kennedy
6.) Failure is a great teacher and, if you are open to it, every mistake has a lesson to offer.
Oprah Winfrey
7.) It doesn’t matter how many times you fail—you only have to be right once.
Mark Cuban
8.) The secret of life is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.
Paulo Coelho
9.) The one who falls and gets up is stronger than the one who never tried. Do not fear failure but rather fear not trying.
Roy T. Bennett
10.) Failure is opportunity in disguise.
Unknown
2. Famous sayings about failure
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
Thomas Edison
To err is human, to forgive, divine.
Alexander Pope
My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.
Abraham Lincoln
Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out.
Benjamin Franklin
It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.
Theodore Roosevelt
Failure is the mother of invention.
Thomas Edison
Winners never quit. And quitters never win.
Vince Lombardi
I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.
Benjamin Franklin
I am not concerned that you have fallen—I am concerned that you arise.
Abraham Lincoln
Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.
Chinese proverb
Success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan.
Benjamin Franklin
3. Failure quotes about success
Failures are the stairs we climb to reach success.
Roy T. Bennett
I can’t give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.
Herbert Bayard Swope
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
Winston Churchill
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
C.S. Lewis
Successful people don’t fear failure but understand that it’s necessary to learn and grow from.
Robert Kiyosaki
Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.
Coco Chanel
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
Henry David Thoreau
Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.
Robert Kiyosaki
Check out these famous success quotes and sayings
Achieving goals
I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.
Amelia Earhart
I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.
John Keats
I’d rather be partly great than entirely useless.
Neal Shusterman
Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I’ve met people who don’t want to try for fear of failing.
J.K. Rowling
Failure isn’t the end of the road. It’s a big red flag saying to you, ‘Wrong way. Turn around.’
Oprah Winfrey
Without failure sayings
There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.
Benjamin Franklin
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 have failed by default.
J. K. Rowling
See Inspirational Haters Quotations.
4. Failure quotes about life
My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.
Jack Kerouac
Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
J.K. Rowling
The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same.
Colin R. Davis
My past is everything I failed to be.
Fernando Pessoa
Failure is a bend in the road, not the end of the road. Learn from failure and keep moving forward.
Roy T. Bennett
Seeing somebody else’s success as your failure is a cancerous way to live.
Kevin Bacon
The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.
Frederic William Farrar
If you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes backbone to lead the life you want.
Richard Yates
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.
George Bernard Shaw
Lessons learned from failure
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
My grandmother once told me, ‘Don`t let failure go to your heart and don’t let success go to your head.’
Will Smith
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
Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.
Napoleon Hill
When we give ourselves permission to fail, we, at the same time, give ourselves permission to excel.
Eloise Ristad
Do not judge me by my successes; judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.
Nelson Mandela
Learning sayings
F.A.I.L.: First Attempt In Learning.
Unknown
Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.
Jules Verne
You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.
Maya Angelou
We’re born with success. It is only others who point out our failures, and what they attribute to us as failure.
Whoopi Goldberg
The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.
Elbert Hubbard
Check out these sports terms and idioms used in business
Failure teaches you quotes
You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.
Barack Obama
When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important.
Ellen DeGeneres
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
If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.
Ken Robinson
Fear of failure
I don’t want the fear of failure to stop me from doing what I really care about.
Emma Watson
Do not fear failure but rather fear not trying.
Roy T. Bennett
Fear causes more regret than failure.
Taryn Rose
Don’t fear failure—not failure, but low aim is the crime. In great attempts, it is glorious even to fail.
Bruce Lee
From failure to hope
You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try.
Beverly Sills
A word of encouragement after failure is worth more than an hour of praise after success.
Benjamin Franklin
Just because you have a failure, it does not mean that you are a failure. So fail gently, gracefully, bravely.
Tamara Levitt
I’d rather be a failure at something I love than a success at something I hate.
George Burns
Success is measured by how high you bounce when you hit bottom.
George S. Patton
Persistence quotes
If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.
H.G. Wells
Failure is a part of the process. You just learn to pick yourself back up.
Michelle Obama
All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
George Eliot
Just because you fail once doesn’t mean you’re gonna fail at everything.
Marilyn Monroe
Giving up is the only sure way to fail.
Gena Showalter
The real test is not whether you avoid this failure because you won’t. It’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, whether you learn from it, whether you choose to persevere.
Barack Obama
Growth quotes
Failure is an important part of your growth and developing resilience.
Michelle Obama
What else is failure if not an opportunity to challenge my own incapacities with joy and determination?
Sri Chinmoy
When I was young, I observed that nine out of 10 things I did were failures. So I did 10 times more work.
George Bernard Shaw
Don’t bury your failures, let them inspire you.
Robert Kiyosaki
Greatness sayings
Failure is another stepping stone to greatness.
Oprah Winfrey
The master has failed more times than the beginner has tried.
Stephen McCranie
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
James Joyce
If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.
Ken Robinson
The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.
John C. Maxwell
It’s only when you risk failure that you discover things. When you play it safe, you’re not expressing the utmost of your human experience.
Lupita Nyong’o
I’ve failed over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.
Michael Jordan
Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I’ve met people who don’t want to try for fear of failing.
J.K. Rowling
5. Funny failure quotes
Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.
Coco Chanel
I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being—forgive me—rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.
J.K. Rowling
If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
Steven Wright
Lucy: You learn more when you lose.
Charlie Brown: Well then I must be the smartest person in the world!
Charles Schulz
Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself.
Charlie Chaplin
Check out these funny inspirational quotes.
6. Short failure quotes
Have no fear of perfection—you’ll never reach it.
Salvador Dali
Failure is another steppingstone to greatness.
Oprah Winfrey
The greatest teacher, failure is.
Yoda, Star Wars
We are all failures—at least the best of us are.
J.M. Barrie
Everything you want is on the other side of fear.
Jack Canfield
There is no failure except in no longer trying.
Elbert Hubbard
Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.
Truman Capote
The phoenix must burn to emerge.
Janet Fitch
Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.
Oprah Winfrey
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
Excuses are nails used to build a house of failure.
Jim Rohn
You always pass failure on your way to success.
Mickey Rooney
Make failure your teacher, not your undertaker.
Zig Ziglar
Failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.
Unknown
7. Failure quotes for students
By failing to prepare you are preparing for failure.
Benjamin Franklin
Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it’s not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way.
Barack Obama
Lack of willpower has caused more failure than lack of intelligence or ability.
Flower A. Newhouse
Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries.
Benjamin Franklin
Why worry? If you have done the very best you can. Worrying won’t make it any better. If you want to be successful, respect one rule: Never let failure take control of you.
Leonardo DiCaprio
Success is not final; Failure is not fatal; It is the courage to continue that counts.
Winston Churchill
8. Failure quotes from athletes
You have to be able to accept failure to get better.
LeBron James
Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.
Mia Hamm
Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.
Lance Armstrong
I can accept failure. Everyone fails at something. But I can not accept not trying.
Michael Jordan
Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be.
John Wooden
9. Business leaders failure quotes
It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.
Bill Gates
Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.
Jeff Bezos
You have to learn from failure. I’ve learned more from the jobs I’ve got fired from than the jobs I’ve liked. Every company I’ve failed, I’ve learned.
Mark Cuban
Success is not built on success. It’s built on failure. It’s built on frustration. Sometimes it’s built on catastrophe.
Sumner Redstone
Failure is just the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
Henry Ford
Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street.
Zig Ziglar
Leadership
All external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Steve Jobs
The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.
Mark Zuckerberg
Remember that failure is an event, not a person.
Zig Ziglar
Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.
Dale Carnegie
The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.
Henry Ford
Elon Musk
If something’s important enough you should try. Even if the probable outcome is failure.
Elon Musk
Showing up is half the battle. You have to try hard doing it and don’t be afraid of failure.
Elon Musk
If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.
Elon Musk
Failure IS an option here.
Elon Musk
Warren Buffett
No one that has the love and respect of others is ever a failure.
Warren Buffett
It’s a learning process, and mistakes made in one year often contribute to competence and success in succeeding years.
Warren Buffett
I like to study failure.
Warren Buffett
Failure comes from ego, greed, envy, fear, imitation. I have #success not because I am smart, but because I am rational.
Warren Buffett
Failure is not falling down; it is staying down.
Warren Buffett
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.
Warren Buffett
If we fail, I hope somebody else succeeds.
Warren Buffett
Decades ago, Ben Graham pinpointed the blame for investment failure, using a quote from Shakespeare: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
Warren Buffett
Success is a business of failure.
Warren Buffett
Failure comes from ego, greed, envy, fear, imitation. I have success not because I am smart, but because I am rational.
Warren Buffett
I developed more courage once I learned I could handle hardship. Maybe you should get your feet wet in failure.
Warren Buffett
Sir Richard Branson
If you have enough determination… It’s more likely that you will succeed because of what you learned from the occasions when you didn’t succeed, The most important thing is to not be put off by failure.
Richard Branson
Treat failure as a lesson on how not to approach achieving a goal, and then use that learning to improve your chances of success when you try again. Failure is only the end if you decide to stop.
Richard Branson
Failure is the most useful opportunity for learning and improving we have available to us. With each failure, we improve.
Richard Branson
Learn from failure. If you are an entrepreneur and your first venture wasn’t a success, welcome to the club!
Richard Branson
If you don’t succeed at first, there’s no need for the F word (Failure). Pick yourself up and try, try again.
Richard Branson
Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.
Richard Branson
Every person and especially every entrepreneur should embrace failure with open arms. It is only through failure that we learn. Many of the world’s finest minds have learned this the hard way.
Richard Branson
You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.
Richard Branson
Doubt kills more dreams than failure.
Richard Branson
10. Scientists
Failure is success in progress.
Albert Einstein
Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.
Nikola Tesla
A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
Albert Einstein
You never fail until you stop trying.
Albert Einstein
Thomas Edison
Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.
Thomas A. Edison
I didn’t fail 1000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.
Thomas Edison
Discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I’ll show you a failure.
Thomas Edison
Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.
Thomas Edison
Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
Thomas Edison
11. Philosophers
All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.
Sophocles
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 season of failure is the best time for sowing the seeds of success.
Paramahansa Yogananda
Thank you for reading these famous failure quotes and sayings. You may also enjoy these quote lists:
By Greg Johnson | Published 6/29/2021
