126 Inspiring Failure Quotes

Have you ever felt like failure was the end of the road, a permanent barrier stopping you in your tracks? You're not alone. Many of history's most successful individuals have faced monumental failures before achieving greatness. Understanding that failure is an integral part of growth can be transformational. To help you embrace setbacks and learn from them, we've curated a collection of the top 126 Inspiring Failure Quotes. These powerful words of wisdom will motivate you to see failure not as a defeat, but as a stepping stone to success. Dive in and let these quotes revitalize your perspective on overcoming obstacles and turning failures into opportunities.

1. “His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in the correct and acceptable fashion.” - Julian Barnes

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

3. “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

4. “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.” - Theodore Roosevelt

5. “The greatest discovery any alien anthropologist could make about our culture is our overriding response to failure: If it didn't work last year, do it AGAIN this year (and if possible do it MORE)” - Daniel Quinn

6. “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” - Samuel Beckett

7. “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” - Paulo Coelho

8. “I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.” - John Keats

9. “To err is human, to forgive, divine.” - Alexander Pope

10. “Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again.” - Henry Ford

11. “When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.” - John Steinbeck

12. “Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt --O, marvelous error -- That there was a beehive here inside my heartAnd the golden bees were making white combsAnd sweet honey from all my failures.” - Antonio Machado

13. “You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try.” - Beverly Sills

14. “I assumed that everything would lead to complete failure, but I decided that didn't matter – that would be my life. ” - Jasper Johns

15. “The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.” - Randy Pausch

16. “Success is most often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable.” - Coco Chanel

17. “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.” - Truman Capote

18. “Failure? I never encountered it. All I ever met were temporary setbacks.” - Dottie Walters

19. “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

20. “Always suffer delusions of grandeur with your art. What you are unable to face will never hurt you” - Ginnetta Correli

21. “Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

22. “But instead of spending our lives running towards our dreams, we are often running away from a fear of failure or a fear of criticism.” - Eric Wright

23. “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” - Henry Ford

24. “There is something good in all seeming failures. You are not to see that now. Time will reveal it. Be patient.” - Swami Sivananda

25. “Giving up is the only sure way to fail.” - Gena Showalter

26. “It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word.” - Arundhati Roy

27. “One often has to do what they have to do in order to do what they want to do; however if you only do what you want to do then you will never do what you have to do!” - Dr. C. Moorer

28. “Have you had a failure or rejection? You could get bitter. That's one way to deal with it. Or...you could just get BETTER. What do you think?” - Destiny Booze

29. “Don't worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth.” - Dorothy Day

30. “I'd rather be partly great than entirely useless.” - Neal Shusterman

31. “I'm done with those; regrets are an excuse for people who have failed.” - Ned Vizzini

32. “Look at Charlie Brown's face. Would you please hold still a minute Charlie Brown? I want Linus to study your face. Now this is what you call a failure face, Linus. Notice how it has failure written all over it. Study it carefully Linus. You rarely see such a good example. Notice the deep lines, the dull vacant look in the eyes. Yes, I would say this is one of the finest examples of a failure face that your liable to see for a long while.” - Charles M. Schulz

33. “I had made up my mind to find that for which I was searching even if it required the remainder of my life. After innumerable failures I finally uncovered the principle for which I was searching, and I was astounded at its simplicity. I was still more astounded to discover the principle I had revealed not only beneficial in the construction of a mechanical hearing aid but it served as well as means of sending the sound of the voice over a wire. Another discovery which came out of my investigation was the fact that when a man gives his order to produce a definite result and stands by that order it seems to have the effect of giving him what might be termed a second sight which enables him to see right through ordinary problems. What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it.” - Alexander Graham Bell

34. “Pressure is a word that is misused in our vocabulary. When you start thinking of pressure, it's because you've started to think of failure.” - Tommy Lasorda

35. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” - Samuel Beckett

36. “I took the sleeper out of Glasgow, and as the smelly old train bumped out of Central Station and across the Jamaica Street Bridge, I stared out at the orange halogen streetlamps reflected in the black water of the river Clyde. I gazed at the crumbling Victorian buildings that would soon be sandblasted and renovated into yuppie hutches. I watched the revelers and rascals traverse the shiny wet streets. I thought of the thrill and danger of my youth and the fear and frustration of my adult life thus far. I thought of the failure of my marriage and my failures as a man. I saw all this through my reflection in the nighttime window. Down the tracks I went, hardly aware that I was going further south with every passing second.” - Craig Ferguson

37. “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 T. Kiyosaki

38. “Remember the two benefits of failure. First, if you do fail, you learn what doesn't work; and second, the failure gives you the opportunity to try a new approach.” - Roger Von Oech

39. “...every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures.” - George Orwell

40. “A bad day for your ego is a great day for your soul.” - Jillian Michaels

41. “There is no failure except in no longer trying.” - Elbert Hubbard

42. “I coulda' had class. I coulda' been a contender! But instead I got a one way ticket to Palookaville.” - Budd Schulberg

43. “We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.” - Rudyard Kipling

44. “As Henry Moore carvedor modelled his sculpture every day,he strove to surpass Donatello4. and failed, but woke the next morningelated for another try.” - Donald Hall

45. “How many stopped-up men and women does it take to produce one Einstein? Ten? A thousand? A hundred thousand? ... So this is what Einstein meant when he looked me in the eye that day and said, I would be nothing without you. It was not success he saw written in my face. He saw, rather, that I would never accomplish anything at all.” - Rana Dasgupta

46. “Because in a small dark room, a broken child lies on a filthy bed and stares up at a high window. He waits for me, too.And I—I who have failed at everything and have failed everyone—I must not, I cannot, I will not fail him.” - Jennifer Donnelly

47. “If you live to fail, then you fail to live.” - Muhammad Misrad

48. “We are all failures- at least the best of us are.” - J.M. Barrie

49. “if you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want” - Richard Yates

50. “Sometimes, when we want something so badly, we fear failure more than we fear being without that thing.” - Matthew J. Kirby

51. “The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.” - Douglas Adams

52. “Whether or not there was room in her life for Tamani, Laurel knew that there was precious little room in Tamani's life for anything but Laurel. He lived to protect her, and he'd never failed her. Annoyed her, frustrated her, hurt her, maddened her - but never once failed her.” - Aprilynne Pike

53. “Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.” - Henry David Thoreau

54. “For some unknown reason, success usually occurs in private, while failure occurs infull view.” - Jill Shalvis

55. “I advise you to stop sharing your dreams with people who try to hold you back, even if they're your parents. Because, if you're the kind of person who senses there's something out there for you beyond whatever it is you're expected to do - if you want to be EXTRA-ordinary- you will not get there by hanging around a bunch of people who tell you you're not extraordinary. Instead, you will probablybecome as ordinary as they expect you to be.” - Kelly Cutrone

56. “With a hint of good judgment, to fear nothing, not failure or suffering or even death, indicates that you value life the most. You live to the extreme; you push limits; you spend your time building legacies. Those do not die.” - Criss Jami

57. “To be an artist was to have failure as your constant bedfellow.” - M. Thomas Gammarino

58. “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” - J.K. Rowling

59. “A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.” - Alain De Botton

60. “Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies' histories] towards success or failure: long-term planning and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives.” - Jared Diamond

61. “Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and others succeeded ... The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn in order that we may keep on succeeding.” - Jared Diamond

62. “Los Angeles is a town where status is all and status is only given to success. Dukes and millionaires and playboys by the dozen may arrive and be glad-handed for a time, but they are unwise if they choose to live there because the town is, perhaps even creditably, committed to recognising only professional success, and nothing else, to be of lasting value. The burdensome obligation imposed on all its inhabitants is therefore to present themselves as successes, because otherwise they forfeit their right to respect in that environment ... There is no place in that town for the "interesting failure" or for anyone who is not determined on a life that will be shaped in a upward-heading curve.” - Julian Fellowes

63. “Isana felt her throat tighten. "We failed." Serai lifted her chin and patted Isana's arm firmly."We have not yet succeeded. There is a difference.” - Jim Butcher

64. “The more I try to be perfect; the more I fail.” - Harley King

65. “And what of failure?"He shrugged."The consequence of not succeesing.Remember what Homer said.Circumstances rule men,not men circumstances.” - Steve Berry

66. “[T]he concern of man is not his future but his present, not the world but his soul. We must be just, we must strive, we must engage ourselves with the business of the world for our own sake, because through that, and through contemplation in equal measure, our soul is purified and brought closer to the divine. ... Thought and deed conjoined are crucial. ... The attempt must be made; the outcome is irrelevant. Right action is a pale material reflection of the divine, but reflection it is, nonetheless. Define your goal and exert reason to accomplish it by virtuous action; successs or failure is secondary.” - Iain Pears

67. “So, 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

68. “The bottom line is, insults only hurt when they come from someone I respect.” - Kresley Cole

69. “Just because you fail once doesn't mean you're gonna fail at everything.” - Marilyn Monroe

70. “Strength and success - they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn't seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught.” - John Steinbeck

71. “How we feel is not who we are. We might feel like failures, but as long as we are still trying, we are not failures. We are works in progress.” - Toni Sorenson

72. “Allow yourself to think that the possibility of failure is a necessary part of parenting well.... Avoiding the possibility of failure means avoiding the possibility of being an extraordinary parent-and avoiding what you want for your child.” - Lisa Coyne

73. “It is easier for one to take risks and to chase his dreams with a mindset that he has nothing to lose. In this lies the immense passion, the great advantage of avoiding a materialistic, pleasure-filled way of life.” - Criss Jami

74. “Failure is just part of the process, and it's not just okay; it's better than okay. God doesn't want failure to shut us down. God didn't make it a three-strikes-and-you're-out sort of thing. It's more about how God helps us dust ourselves off so we can swing for the fences again. And all of this without keeping a meticulous record of our screw-ups.” - Bob Goff

75. “It's failure that gives you the proper perspective on success.” - Ellen DeGeneres

76. “And of course, there is always the F for failure. F for failing falling festering failure. F for fault. F for forgotten.” - Marcella Pixley

77. “[W]e are not merely tempered and schooled by failure but compelled, in however subtle a fashion, to become something other than we were.” - Anthony Lane

78. “Failure is when you talk yourself out of becoming something amazing.” - Rudy Francisco

79. “The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. It's misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm” - Kurt Vonnegut

80. “All the time you're saying to yourself, 'I could do that, but I won't,' — which is just another way of saying that you can't.” - Richard P. Feynman

81. “Failure are given power, not success ..” - David S. Mark

82. “Never belittle love” - Preeti Shenoy

83. “From my boyhood I have had an intense and overwhelming conviction that my real vocation lay in the direction of literature. I have, however, had a most unaccountable difficulty in getting any responsible person to share my views.- Cyprian Overbeck Wells: A Literary Mosaic” - Arthur Conan Doyle

84. “Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.” - Alan J. Perlis

85. “The difference between Success and failure is not giving up.” - Steven Redhead

86. “When we fail we are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us.” - Richard Rohr

87. “If your failure is not a lesson, it's indeed a failure.” - Ogwo David Emenike

88. “That failure serves a purpose!” - Ogwo David Emenike

89. “Decode the message of failure and enjoy the fortune thereof.” - Ogwo David Emenike

90. “Failure is always an option” - Adam Savage

91. “I am facing the most difficult thing of my life, my own greatest failure.” - Richard Paul Evans

92. “Deep down, Story Easton knew what would happen if she attempted to off herself—she would fail It was a matter of probability. This was not a new thing, failure. She was, had always been, a failure of fairy-tale proportion. Quitting wasn’t Story’s problem. She had tried, really tried, lots of things during different stages of her life—Girl Scours, the viola, gardening, Tommy Andres from senior year American Lit—but zero cookie sales, four broken strings, two withered azalea bushes, and one uniquely humiliating breakup later, Story still had not tasted success, and with a shriveled-up writing career as her latest disappointment, she realized no magic slippers or fairy dust was going to rescue her from her Anti-Midas Touch. No Happily Ever After was coming. So she had learned to find a certain comfort in failure. In addition to her own screw-ups, others’ mistakes became cozy blankets to cuddle, and she snuggled up to famous failures like most people embrace triumph. The Battle of Little Bighorn—a thing of beauty. The Bay of Pigs—delicious debacle. The Y2K Bug—gorgeously disappointing fuck-up. Geraldo’s anti-climactic Al Capone exhumation—oops! Jaws III—heaven on film. Tattooed eyeliner—eyelids everywhere, revolting. Really revolting. Fat-free potato chips—good Lord, makes anyone feel successful.” - Elizabeth Leiknes

93. “Failure is authentic, and because it's authentic, it's real and genuine, and because of that, it's a pure state of being.” - Douglas Coupland

94. “She has failed. She wishes she didn't mind. Something, she thinks, is wrong with her.” - Michael Cunningham

95. “You have to be free to fail in this world.” - J.K. Rowling

96. “A series of failures may culminate in the best possible result.” - Gisela Richter

97. “I’ve witnessed, incognito, the gradual collapse of my life, the slow foundering of all I wanted to be. I can say, with a truth that needs no flowers to show it’s dead, that there’s nothing I’ve wanted - and nothing in which I’ve placed, even for a moment, the dream of only that moment - that hasn’t disintegrated below my windows like a clod of dirt that resembled stone until it fell from a flowerpot on a high balcony. It would even seem that Fate has always tried to make me love or want things just so that it could show me, on the very next day, that I didn’t have and could never have them.” - Fernando Pessoa

98. “To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose: and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness; -it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man's vanity. He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is - so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys - this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: -surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

99. “Our Heavenly Father did not put us on earth to fail but to succeed gloriously.” - Richard G. Scott

100. “If something you did causes failure, shouldn't the exact opposite of what you did bring success?” - Jessica Brody

101. “Disappointment is really just a term for our refusal to look on the bright side.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

102. “Sometimes… Sometimes doubt is the opposite of faith, but sometimes doubt can be a pathway to faith. Sometimes weakness is the opposite of strength, but sometimes weakness can be the pathway to strength. Sometimes addiction is the opposite of sobriety, but sometimes addiction can be the pathway to sobriety. Sometimes infidelity is the opposite of fidelity, but sometimes infidelity can be a pathway to fidelity. Sometimes failure is the opposite of success, but sometimes failure can be the pathway to success.” - David W. Jones

103. “Failure is becoming someone who needs others to fail.” - Alain De Botton

104. “Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires, but for that very reason ignored his attainable desires. By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by teaching him to trust in God’s help it took away his trust in his own powers; by giving him faith in a better life in heaven, it destroyed his faith in a better life on earth and his striving to attain such a life. Christianity gave man what his imagination desires, but for that very reason failed to give him what he really and truly desires.” - Ludwig Feuerbach

105. “What was meaningful? What was meaningless? What did it mean, to amount to something? What type of life, was worth living? Was it better, to make a ton of money, and have a fucking goddamn Mercedes, or whatever the fuck kind of car it was, to be a lawyer with a ‘serious’ job, and to have ‘amounted to something,’ or was it better to just be a waiter, and work the evening shift, and have your days free to goof off with your roommates, your friends, to go to meditation, to take some time to reflect, and enjoy life, and to not always be in such a big goddamn rush to get somewhere?” - T. Scott McLeod

106. “Success doesn't come to you; you go to it.” - T. Scott McLeod

107. “She leaves, carrying a biodegradable carrier bag that reads THE SUICIDE SHOP on one side, and on the other: HAS YOUR LIFE BEEN A FAILURE? LET’S MAKE YOUR DEATH A SUCCESS!” - Jean Teulé

108. “Failure is necessary to succeed and will become your biggest blessing.” - Lynn Bardowski

109. “Appeal. Guy's like you get all excited about the appeal. Don't you see that I view the very existence of an appeal as a disastrous failure? No much worse, a personal affront of the highest order for which I blame you.” - Sergio De La Pava

110. “Never having been able to succeed in the world, he took his revenge by speaking ill of it.” - Voltaire

111. “The best defense is great offense. . .We fight through our mistakes and failures by maximizing our forward motion.” - Wayde Goodall

112. “Mind your business" had been the motto of her childhood. But now that seemed like a failing in a friend.” - Anita Diamant

113. “There are few experiences in life as painful and brutal as the failure of a small business. For a small business conceived and nurtured by its owner is like a living, breathing child. Its loss is no less traumatic than losing a loved one.” - William Manchee

114. “لا وجود للفشل إنما هناك رأياً محدداً علي تجربة” - ابراهيم الفقى

115. “You want to be competent? she thought. You want to learn to be in control of what goes on around you, rather than just being pushed around? Then you’ll have to learn to deal with failure.” - Brandon Sanderson

116. “Failure is an opportunity.If you blame someone else,there is no end to the blame.Therefore the Masterfulfills her own obligationsand corrects her own mistakes.She does what she needs to doand demands nothing of others.” - Lao Tzu

117. “The moment you believe you will fail, you have already lost the battle.” - Bianca Frazier

118. “The real failure is not the one who falls down, it's the one who refuses to get up.” - Habeeb Akande

119. “Believe it; 25 years from now or less, you will be voted for or appointed by the actions you are taking today! Guess what the vote will mean. Will it be an election for you to occupy the edifice of failure or to be the administrator in the kingdom of success? Rise up and optimize your potentials!” - Israelmore Ayivor

120. “Failure is our greatest teacherBlame blinds us to her lessons” - Rick Julian

121. “The innovator's motto is this; I succeed or I learn but I never fail.” - Paul Sloane

122. “I saw Dad's eyes widen just a fraction when he heard my voice catch. He glanced at me but quickly turned away. He didn't want me to see his reaction, but I did, and I'll never forget it. In that brief glimpse, I could see what he was thinking behind that fixed stare. There would be no grandkids, there would be no more Creed family bloodline, nothing else to look forward to. From that point on I'd become the last, most devastating disappointment in what he thought his life had added up to--one overwhelming failure.” - Perry Moore

123. “A warm sunny evening, the plash and gurgle of the waves in the rock pools, the rush of the cold gin. I thought for the first time of my novel, abandoned, all these years, and I came up, unprompted, with the perfect title. Octet. Octet by Logan Mountstuart. Perhaps I will surprise them all, yet.” - William Boyd

124. “When you encounter obstacles, don’t turn your back on them. Face them, confront them and your will see them dissolving in front of your eyes.” - Roopleen

125. “Think in terms of opportunities and solutions instead of problems, disappointment, and failure.” - Lorii Myers

126. “If you are afraid to fail, your successes will be few, common, and unmemorable.” - Lorii Myers