68 Failure Quotes To Inspire

Failure is often seen as a setback, but it can also be a powerful catalyst for growth and inspiration. From successful entrepreneurs to influential thought leaders, many have shared words of wisdom on turning failures into stepping stones toward success. In this post, we've curated a collection of the top 68 failure quotes that will inspire you to embrace mistakes, learn from them, and keep pushing forward. Whether you're facing a challenge in your personal life or striving to overcome professional obstacles, these quotes offer a refreshing perspective on the transformative power of failure.

1. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” - Winston S. Churchill

2. “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” - Robert F. Kennedy

3. “I am not concerned that you have fallen -- I am concerned that you arise.” - Abraham Lincoln

4. “Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.” - Salvador Dali

5. “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

6. “Rwanda will never ever leave me. It's in the pores of my body. My soul is in those hills, my spirit is with the spirits of all those people who were slaughtered and killed that I know of, and many that I didn't know. … Fifty to sixty thousand people walking in the rain and the mud to escape being killed, and seeing a person there beside the road dying. We saw lots of them dying. And lots of those eyes still haunt me, angry eyes or innocent eyes, no laughing eyes. But the worst eyes that haunt me are the eyes of those people who were totally bewildered. They're looking at me with my blue beret and they're saying, "What in the hell happened? We were moving towards peace. You were there as the guarantor" -- their interpretation -- "of the mandate. How come I'm dying here?" Those eyes dominated and they're absolutely right. How come I failed? How come my mission failed? How come as the commander who has the total responsibility-- We learn that, it's ingrained in us, because when we take responsibility it means the responsibility of life and death, of humans that we love.” - Romeo Dallaire

7. “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

8. “Why did the Articles [of Confederation] fail so completely? Most historians believe the founding fathers spent a great deal of their first constitutional convention drafting the delaration of independence and only realized on July 3rd the Articles were also due.” - Jon Stewart

9. “Don't spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door. ” - Coco Chanel

10. “Know that tomorrow will bring clarity where before was only fog. In the final summation, it is not other's expectations that slay us, but our over compensatory reactions in regard” - CB Smith

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

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

13. “All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.” - William Faulkner

14. “When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. They seemed to go on the assumption that there is no failure greater than the failure of not trying, and so they continued to try in the face of repeated failures.” - John Joseph Powell

15. “There is no failure except in no longer trying.” - Chris Bradford

16. “The sorrow of God lies in our fear of Him, our fear of life, and our fear of ourselves. He anguishes over our self-absorption and self-sufficiency... God's sorrow lies in our refusal to approach Him when we sinned and failed.” - Brennan Manning

17. “Together, they would watch everything that was so carefully planned collapse, and they would smile at the beauty of destruction.” - Markus Zusak

18. “If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.” - Steven Wright

19. “But we fall only that we might rise, Alfred. All of us fall; all of us, as you say, screw up. Falling is not important. It is how we get up after the fall that's important.” - Rick Yancey

20. “Life is full of screwups. You're supposed to fail sometimes. It's a required part of the human existance.” - Sarah Dessen

21. “I think perfection is ugly. Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion.” - Yohji Yamamoto

22. “NOTHING goes exactly as planned.Make your OWN destiny” - Tate Hallaway

23. “If my attitude be on of fear, not faith, about the one who has disappointed me; if I say “Just what I expected,” if a fall occurs, then I know nothing of Calvary Love.” - Amy Carmichael

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

25. “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

26. “No human ever became interesting by not failing. The more you fail and recover and improve, the better you are as a person. Ever meet someone who’s ALWAYS had EVERYTHING work out for them with ZERO struggle? They usually have the depth of a puddle. Or they don’t exist.” - Chris Hardwick

27. “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

28. “No one can travel so far that he does not make some progess each day. So let us never give up. Then we shall move forward daily in the Lord's way. And let us never despair because of our limited success. Even though it is so much less than we would like, our labour is not wasted when today is better than yesterday!” - John Calvin

29. “Human beings are the only creatures who are allowed to fail. If an ant fails, it's dead. But we're allowed to learn from our mistakes and from our failures. And that's how I learn, by falling flat on my face and picking myself up and starting all over again.” - Madeleine L'Engle

30. “I don't believe in failure. I'm perseverant - I believe in failing.” - Bauvard

31. “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

32. “I think it’s important to have a good hard failure when you're young. I learned a lot out of that. Because it makes you kind of aware of what can happen to you. Because of it I’ve never had any fear in my whole life when we’ve been near collapse and all of that. I’ve never been afraid. I’ve never had the feeling I couldn’t walk out and get a job doing something.” - Walt Disney

33. “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

34. “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

35. “Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shaped by how effectively you learn from and adapt to failure.” - David Brooks

36. “[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

37. “When I have tried and failed, I shall have failed.” - Sophocles

38. “Failure is not the end. In fact it is the beginning of a beautiful journey.” - Jade Youssef

39. “The true measure of a man is not what he dreams, but what he aspires to be; a dream is nothing without action. Whether one fails or succeeds is irrelevant; all that matters is that there was motion in his life. That alone affects the world.” - Mike Norton

40. “The reassuring smile was now useless. I was plastic. Everything was veiled. Objectivity, facts, hard information--these were things only in the outline stage. There was nothing tying anything together yet, so the mind built up a defense, and the evidence was restructured, and that was what I tried to do on that morning--to restructure the evidence so it made sense--and that is what I failed at.” - Bret Easton Ellis

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

42. “Let failure be your workshop. See it for what is is: the world walking you through a tough but necessary semester, free of tuition. (from Workbook)” - Steven Heighton

43. “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

44. “If you fall, you fall," Elodin shrugged. "Sometimes falling teaches us things too." In dreams you often fall before you wake.” - Patrick Rothfuss

45. “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

46. “I don't want to fail, of course. But even though I didn't know how bad things really were, I still had a lot to think about before I said yes. I had to consider the implications for Pixar, for my family, for my reputation. I decided that I didn't really care, because this is what I want to do. If I try my best and fail, well, I've tried my best.” - Steve Jobs

47. “I'm all alone,fuming at myself,waving a great flagof failure.” - Emma Cameron

48. “I believe that in a way, sadness is happiness for there can be no wrong without right, no light without dark, no success without failure, no relief without pain, no love without hatred and no Snow White without the evil queen.” - Lisa Cander

49. “Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.” - Rick Yancey

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

51. “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

52. “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

53. “No matter how loud the sirens or how numerous the hazard signs, we all touch the flames at least once to prove they're hot.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

54. “Growth comes in the aftermath of failure, not wild success.” - Mary DeMuth

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

56. “It is the hardest thing of all, the one thing that will show if you have the one true courage. To know that you have failed, that your best efforts have been defeated, to not be able to stand it, to not be able to go on and yet to go on nonetheless.” - Silvia Hartmann

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

58. “Failure = STOP of trials” - أحمد عمارة

59. “The enemy doesn't warn its target. Emergencies do not make appointments, and the greatest battles of life are often surprises.” - Wayde Goodall

60. “Sometimes stories get on my nerves--especially the ones where unfair things keep happening to the hero over and over, for no reason at all, and he valiantly overcomes it all.Life isn't like that.Not every hero can stay valiant. Sometimes, they can't even stay a hero, so what does that make them? A failure? A pussy? A total failure jerkwad with no hope on the horizon save finding a cemetery and digging rectangles in the ground for the town drunk?” - Susan Vaught

61. “What you perceive as a failure today may actually be a crucial step towards the success you seek. Never give up.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

62. “We need days of failure because they help humble us, and through them we can see how God's grace is poured out on the humble.” - Elyse Fitzpatrick

63. “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

64. “Both half success and half failure must be considered as a full failure!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

65. “Fail often and fail cheap.” - Paul Sloane

66. “I caught myself thinking about falling in love with someone who I hoped was out there right now thinking about the possibility of me, but I quickly banished the notion. It was that kind of thinking that landed me in this situation to begin with. Hope can ruin you.” - Perry Moore

67. “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

68. “Nothing is as empowering as real-world validation, even if it's for failure.” - Steven Pressfield