First Failure Quotes

#1. Learning starts with failure; the first failure is the beginning of education.

John Hersey

#2. My first failure was to be born a child not wanted by his father or mother, as they parted shortly after I was born.

Jeremy Lloyd

#3. Childhood is like a mirror, which reflects in afterlife the images first presented to it. The first thing continues forever with the child. The first joy, the first sorrow, the first success, the first failure, the first achievement, the first misadventure, paint the foreground of his life.

Samuel Smiles

#4. Plan and execute your first failure so that you no longer have to fear it.

John C. Maxwell

#5. The average person would have quit at the first failure. That's why there have been many average men and only one Edison.

Napoleon Hill

#6. To me, the main weakness of EDA is its failure to enquire why the data were collected in the first place and its consequent tendency to apply ingenious methods largely because they are so attractively ingenious.

Michael Healy

#7. Failure is so much more interesting because you learn from it. That's what we should be teaching children at school, that being successful the first time, there's nothing in it. There's no interest, you learn nothing actually.

James Dyson

#8. I'm not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth.

Ed Catmull

#9. There are twelve good reasons for failure. The first one is the avowed intention of doing no more than one is paid to do, and the person who makes this avowal may see the other eleven by stepping before a looking glass.

Napoleon Hill

#10. In any restaurant, my eyes alight first, as if by an atavistic pull, on the meat dishes on the menu. In any dinner party I throw, I think of the non-vegetarian dish as central. I view this as a combination of weakness, greed and moral failure. Someone please help.

Neel Mukherjee

#11. My generation is the first in my species to have put fitness next to godliness on the scale of things. Keeping in shape has become the imperative of our middle age. The heaviest burden of guilt we carry into our forties is flab. Our sense of failure is measured by the grade on a stress test.

Ellen Goodman

#12. I wouldn't have been what you'd call a champion if I had accepted failure when it first came, if I had looked at it and said, 'Well, that's it.'

Shirley Strickland

#13. it is not an exaggeration to state that any company designed for success in the twentieth century is doomed to failure in the twenty-first.

David S. Rose

#14. Start with the stuff (as most people are inclined to do when they try to conquer their clutter) and you are pretty much guaranteed failure. Start with the vision you have for the life you want and you have taken the first real step to long-term and remarkable change. The

Peter Walsh

#15. Never give up! Failure and rejection are only the first step to succeeding.

Jim Valvano

#16. LEARN FROM FAILURE. If you are an entrepreneur and your first venture wasn't a success, welcome to the club.

Richard Branson

#17. You have no reason to give up if you haven't tried all steps in the world yet! Try again if at first you don't succeed; Try no other option; Just try again with a better approach!

Israelmore Ayivor

#18. J. K. Rowling was on welfare when she wrote the first Harry Potter book and has stated that she considered herself "the biggest failure I knew," but this didn't stop her.

Bob Proctor

#19. Trying is the first step towards failure

Homer Simpson

#20. A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.

Charles Baudelaire

#21. Second novels are bears. As are other people's expectations for them. I think taking the time you need with the second book is key. Writers spend years and years on their first novels and then are often expected to turn out a second at warp speed, a recipe for failure.

Jandy Nelson

#22. The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement.

Anna Garlin Spencer

#23. Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone - adults promising us their own failed future.

Jacqueline Woodson

#24. To fall is not to fail. To fail is to never fall because I never got up in the first place.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#25. We can't change our results without first changing our beliefs. When we reverse this logic, our efforts result in failure.

Robin Sacredfire

#26. Your brilliant first flop was a raging success! Come on, let's get busy and on to the next!" She handed a notebook to Rosie Revere, who smiled at her aunt as it all became clear. Life might have its failures, but this was not it. The only true failure can come if you quit.

Andrea Beaty

#27. At first I wasn't sure that I had the talent, but I did know I had a fear of failure, and that fear compelled me to fight off anything that might abet it.

Gordon Parks

#28. Subjugation requires vigilance; if you relax your brutality even for a moment, the people you're oppressing will revolt at the first sign of weakness. That's why dictatorial regimes are always a slippery slope of cruelty doomed to end in failure.

Nenia Campbell

#29. To interest is the first duty of art; no other excellences will ever begin to compensate for failure in this.

C.S. Lewis

#30. Most of us spend the first six days of each week sowing wild oats; then we go to church on Sunday and pray for a crop failure.

Fred Allen

#31. Why is failure the first thing I think of when I find myself in this sort of situation? Why can't I just enjoy myself? But if you have to ask the question, then you know you're lost: self-consciousness is a man's worst enemy. Already I'm wondering whether she's as aware of my erection as I am ...

Nick Hornby

#32. The experiment, so far as its original projectors were concerned, proved, long ago, a failure; first lapsing into Fourierism, and dying, as it well deserved, for this infidelity to its own higher spirit. Where

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#33. When I was growing up, Brandy was TV star, reality star, a pop star, a Cover girl, Grammy winner, had her own Brandy doll, and was the first African American to play Disney princess Cinderella. Most importantly, she is a survivor. Many only judge and remember a person's most recent failure.

Niecy Nash

#34. Yes, I believe the greatest blessing any one can have is to be a failure, this is the first step towards the success,

Mary Ann Templeton

#35. If you want a recipe for relationship failure, just wait for the other person to change first.

Harriet Lerner

#36. I was once young and now I am old, but not once have I been witness to God's failure to supply my need when first I had given for the furtherance of His work. He has never failed in His promise, so I cannot fail in my service to Him.

William Carey

#37. I must have no fear of failure. It was my fear of failure that first kept me from attempting the Master Work.

Paulo Coelho

#38. I've learnt something from every failure. The products I helped design at the first two companies I worked for were utter failures. But now I know why.

Tony Fadell

#39. God manifests himself to us in the first degree through the life of the universe, and in the second degree through the thought of man. The second manifestation is not less holy than the first. The first is named Nature, the second is named Art.

Victor Hugo

#40. Whether we like it or not, each of us is constrained by limits on what we can do and feel. To ignore these limits leads to denial and eventually to failure. To achieve excellence, we must first understand the reality of the everyday, with all its demands

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

#41. I was pretty bad. When I first was diagnosed with kidney failure, my function - the function of my kidney was less than 8 percent.

Natalie Cole

#42. The greatest challenge to most innovation centers around the world is many nations' punitive attitudes towards failure. In most of the world, if your first business fails, no one will work with you again. But, trial and error is the genesis of innovation.

Jay Samit

#43. Well, I think first of all there was a failure to have real, clear information at our disposal. There was a real lack of situational awareness. We didn't have the capabilities on the ground to give us real-time, accurate assessments of the physical condition of the city.

Michael Chertoff

#44. That a viewer does not see what the artist intended does not make the composition a failure ... In reality all artists speak first to themselves and then to an audience.

Mike Svob

#45. ...[H]uman reason in its pure use, so long as it was not critically examined, has first tried all possible wrong ways before it succeeded in finding the one true way.

Immanuel Kant

#46. By the end of the first decade of writing, I considered myself a confirmed failure in the eyes of the world.

Ben Fountain

#47. Her whole life they have thought her a failure, yet at the first hint of hope, they move to follow her, as if it is what they wanted all along.
Perhaps it was.

Kendare Blake

#48. If you gone come in second, you're just the first loser!

Tiger Woods

#49. Solving large, difficult problems may earn you a reputation for skillful negotiation, but Sun Tzu asserts that this supposed achievement is actually a form of failure, and having true wisdom means preventing difficult problems from arising in the first place. Ironically,

Sun Tzu

#50. My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.

Laurence Housman

#51. Sooner or later, the man who learnt lessons from his failures will be the one to be sought first for guidance, counsel and formula on how to be successful in life's endeavours.

Ogwo David Emenike

#52. Don't have any meetings about your web strategy. Just do stuff. First you have to fail, then you can improve.

Seth Godin

#53. A quota for women always amounts to a failure of politics. For me, economics is first and foremost the ability to act freely without state rules. That's why I believe quotas should only be used as a last resort.

Kristina Schroder

#54. Why do eight out of ten new consumer products fail? Sometimes because they are too new. The first cold cereals were rejected by consumers. More often new products fail because they are not new enough.

David Ogilvy

#55. At first I thought it was a fear of failure. Now I think you're afraid to succeed.

Jaci Burton

#56. The options are limitless, but each path begins with the same first step: replacing assumptions.

Timothy Ferriss

#57. The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

Audre Lorde

#58. Any customer that walks away, disrespected and defeated, represents tens of thousands of dollars out the door, in addition to the failure of a promise the brand made in the first place. You can't see it but it's happening, daily.

Seth Godin

#59. The success doesn't define you. The success isn't what gave you the edge in the first place. The failure didn't give me the edge, either.

Richard Sherman

#60. The first important step in weathering failure is learning not to personalize it.

John C. Maxwell

#61. But whatever my failure, I have this thing to remember - that I was a pioneer in my profession, just as my grandfathers were in theirs, in that I was the first man in this section to earn his living as a writer.

Robert E. Howard

#62. A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.

Alexandre Dumas

#63. Success and failure, ultimately, have little to do with living the gospel. Jesus just stood with the outcasts until they were welcomed or until he was crucified - whichever came first.

Gregory J. Boyle

#64. The first stair to failure is ignorance. Keep learning by leaning on the lap of information and you'll take the lead!

Israelmore Ayivor

#65. Make no choice, and you have chosen. Failure to decide, because you lack the right, is itself a decision, First Councilor. In abstaining, you vote.

George R R Martin

#66. The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.

Walter Lippmann

#67. Until you take the first step forward, failure remains reassuringly impossible.

Chris Murray

#68. thinker sees in his own actions attempts and questionings to obtain information about something or other; success and failure are answers to him first and foremost.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#69. In taking stock of ourselves, we should not forget that fear plays a large part in the drama of failure. That is the first thing to be dropped. Fear is a mental deficiency susceptible of correction, if taken in hand before it gains an ascendency over us. Fear comes with the thought of failure.

Douglas Fairbanks

#70. Failure is part of success, an integral part. Everybody gets knocked down. Knowing it will happen and what you must do when it does is the first step back.

Bill Walsh

#71. Among all the tests President Obama faced in his first term, his biggest failure was climate change.

Jeff Goodell

#72. When love dies and a marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation.

Ian McEwan

#73. Money goes out first to pay expenses and then comes back as profits later - if at all. The high rate of failure of new businesses makes painfully clear that there is nothing inevitable about the money coming back.

Thomas Sowell

#74. I thank God that I live in a country where dreams can come true, where failure sometimes is the first step to success and where success is only another form of failure if we forget what our priorities should be.

Harry Hopkins

#75. You can't enjoy sipping of success without first enduring failure's fire

Phillip Gary Smith

#76. I can't let that happen again. The stakes are way too high. I know that, now more than ever. If there's anything good that came from my failure on First Earth, it's that I have now totally given myself over to being a Traveler.

D.J. MacHale

#77. Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.

James C. Collins

#78. The first requirement of civilisation is that men should be willing to repress their basest instincts and appetites: failure to do which makes them, on account of their intelligence, far worse than mere beasts.

Theodore Dalrymple

#79. Those who fly on the first attempt are the lucky, those succeed on the second or third attempt are truly blessed with determination and do not see their lack of success as failure.

Self quote

Patrick Meservier

#80. 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

#81. When I was about 15 ... I made my first attempt as a leading lady, and was, of course, a complete failure.

Maude Adams

#82. There are a lot of movies I would want to be a fly on the wall for. I would have loved to see the making of Jaws [1975], with all the fears and anxieties it was going to be a complete failure, and then to have it turn into the first blockbuster.

Cary Fukunaga

#83. As kids we're not taught how to deal with success; we're taught how to deal with failure. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. If at first you succeed, then what?

Charlie Sheen

#84. The Conservatives are a confusing lot. They first denied climate change was a serious issue and then suggested strengthening the nuclear industry as a solution to it. They oppose the European Union, but support joining North American Free Trade Agreement, despite its obvious failure.

Zac Goldsmith

#85. To leave the road of continual failure, a person must first utter the three most difficult words to say: 'I was wrong.

Dale Carnegie

#86. 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

#87. Witnessing at first-hand the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Conference and wondering what went wrong, Andrew Charlton realised the truth of a colleague's words: "The world is split between those who want to save the planet and those who want to save themselves.

Andrew Charlton

#88. While we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last.

John F. Kennedy

#89. You fall flat on your face, and it's not the first time you've done it, Never let your past press you down.

Auliq Ice

#90. If at first you don't succeed, tweak it before you toss it.

Todd Stocker

#91. 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

#92. Being boss is just the first person willing to do something.

Bethany Maines

#93. Exactly 5,126 attempts to make the first bagless vacuum cleaner were failures-some catastrophic disappointments, some minor defects. It took 15 years. Prototype 5,127 was the success ... Failure is painful, but it spurs on improvement like nothing else.

James Dyson

#94. I failed first grade, which is my biggest problem. You always feel like a failure, like you're stupid.

Amy Sedaris

#95. And it began when you first took a risk, failed and realized that you'd survived the failure. With that knowledge, you could risk anything. Marianne

Nina George

#96. 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

#97. In high school, in sport, I had a coach who told me I was much better than I thought I was, and would make me do more in a positive sense. He was the first person who taught me not to be afraid of failure.

Mike Krzyzewski

#98. The only paths you can't travel are the ones you block yourself--so don't let the fear of failure stop you from trying in the first place.

William Ritter

#99. Of course, Third World leaders love you. By ascribing third world ills to First World sins, you absolve them of blame for their countries' failure to advance.

John McCarthy

#100. Our fall is always first a failure to give thanks.

Ann Voskamp