“He who risks and fails can be forgiven. He who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole being.”
Failure is not the opposite of success; it is part of it. These quotes reframe setbacks, mistakes, and flat-out disasters as the raw material of growth. Not empty optimism — real talk from people who fell down, got back up, and learned something useful on the way.
“Feminism is doomed to failure because it is based on an attempt to repeal and restructure human nature.”
“He who risks and fails can be forgiven. He who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole being.”
“What matters is this: Being fearless of failure arms you to break the rules. In doing so, you may change the culture and just possibly, for a moment, change life itself.”
“Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.”
“The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.”
“However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure.”
“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.”
“The freedom to fail is vital if you're going to succeed. Most successful people fail from time to time, and it is a measure of their strength that failure merely propels them into some new attempt at success.”
“Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.”
“The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen.”
“I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”
“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.”
“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 they love the produce of the second.”
“If you get into a Broadway show and it doesn't work, you're a failure. And if it does work, you may be stuck for who knows how long. It just doesn't sound great to me!”
“If you've gone into a marriage and you haven't been clear about how you're going to handle money, how you want to raise kids, who is going to work or stay home or what have you, then you've set yourself up for failure.”
“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.”