Top 100 Work Failure Quotes
#1. There is a difference between failing and failure. Failing is trying something that you learn doesn't work. Failure is throwing in the towel and giving up.
Jay Samit
#2. There is a huge difference between failing and failure. Failing is trying something that you learn doesn't work. Failure is throwing in the towel and giving up. True success comes from failing repeatedly and as quickly as possible, before your cash or your willpower runs out.
Jay Samit
#3. Procrastination and excuses are sour spices that spoil the sweet taste of an effective work. They must hence, not be prompted under desire, partly because they are strictly time-stripping and also because they have no known essence.
Israelmore Ayivor
#4. Stress is not necessarily something bad it all depends on how you take it. The stress of exhilarating, creative successful work is beneficial, while that of failure, humiliation or infection is detrimental.
Hans Selye
#5. I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.
George Orwell
#6. Exercise, from a public health perspective, is an unmitigated failure. The world's longest-lived people live in environments that nudge them into more movement. They don't use power tools, they do their own yard work, they grow a garden.
Dan Buettner
#7. 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
#8. At the heart of the failure of most plays is the inability to carry on a thoughtful conversation about your work with yourself.
Marsha Norman
#9. 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.
Phil McGraw
#10. Beside every great success are the seeds of enormous failure. In every failure, there's the opportunity seeds of great success. They're not miles apart. So if they're that close together, and if you're really working, you're always gonna have that likelihood that something's not going to work.
Peter Guber
#11. I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.
Thomas A. Edison
#12. I think we both need to work on our communication skills. (Kiara) I tried that once. (Nykyrian) And? (Kiara) Darling told me that I could never hold a job as a suicide counselor or hostage negotiator. He said my failure rate would become the stuff of legends. (Nykyrian)
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#13. If it doesn't work, get better, and try again.
Daniel Vlcek
#16. The conviction of tragedy that rises out of his [John Dos Passos's] work is the steady protest of a sensitive democratic conscience against the tyranny and the ugliness of society, against the failure of a complete human development under industrial capitalism.
Alfred Kazin
#17. The successes in the entertainment business are like one percent of the iceberg that you see, and the other ninety-nine percent, which is the rejection and the failure and the work and the toil and the sacrifice, is the rest of the iceberg that's below the water.
Jonathan Tucker
#18. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.
Bruce Mau
#19. I feel like every time I take on a movie, it's important that the possibility of failure exists, and of the unknown, because it's a challenge to do something I haven't done before and something I have to try to work out.
Marc Forster
#20. Gaining control over your health and well-being is one of those times in your life that you get to be completely selfish and not feel bad about it. If you want to meet your goals, you have to make it about you. You have to make it work for you and you alone. Anything less is a setup for failure.
Jennifer Hudson
#21. Unemployment, with its injustice for the man who seeks and thirsts for employment, who begs for labour and cannot get it, and who is punished for failure he is not responsible for by the starvation of his children
that torture is something that private enterprise ought to remedy for its own sake.
David Lloyd George
#22. Bear it in mind that tomorrow must also have its own brand of assignments. Shifting today's work to tomorrow is an inevitable step towards massing up difficult tasks for yourself, whose risk of leading into failure is high.
Israelmore Ayivor
#23. Then why?"
"Because you expect me to fail. You expect me to do wrong. To be reckless. To ruin myself."
"Why not work to prove me wrong?"
"But don't you see? I am proving you wrong. If I choose recklessness, where is the failure? If I choose it for myself, you cannot force it upon me.
Sarah MacLean
#25. People with a distinctly displayed fear of failure are prone to do their work well and with good coordination only in a case when their task require simple skills
Sunday Adelaja
#26. Avoidance therapy does not work. One major reason for that is because Avoidance Therapy (diversion, think yourself happy, positive affirmations) is predicated on the validity of 'Failure of Will.' Depression is not a choice.
Northern Adams
#27. You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you're forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality.
Fred Brooks
#28. How soon will Ford blow up? Nobody knows how many thousand times it has been asked since. It is asked only because of the failure to grasp that a principle rather than an individual is at work, and the principle is so simple that it seems mysterious.
Henry Ford
#29. You can't be afraid of failure and you can't be afraid of success, because either one gets in the way of your work.
Dave Van Ronk
#30. Having the positive belief that it will all be O.K. just means that you hustle and make it work because failure is not even an option in your own mind.
Natalie Massenet
#31. Our educational system is not preparing people for the 21st Century. Failure is an essential part of entrepreneurship. If you work hard, you can get an 'A' pretty much guaranteed, but in entrepreneurship, that's not how it works.
Eric Ries
#32. What matters is the success or failure of your will. Your will to overcome human weakness. Your will to work. To learn. I will have no shirkers here, boy.
Jim Butcher
#33. People deal with all sorts of obstacles at work. There is the fear of failure, plus confrontations with mindless bureaucracy, with other people's egos, with your own ego, with unethical practices, with incompetence, and a wide variety of issues related to race, gender, and sexual orientation
Lodro Rinzler
#34. In God's world, for those who are in earnest, there is no failure. No work truly done, no word earnestly spoken, no sacrifice freely made, was ever made in vain.
Frederick William Robertson
#35. It is a common mistake to think of failure as the enemy of success. Failure is a teacher-a harsh one, but the best. Pull your failures to pieces looking for the reason. Put your failure to work for you.
Thomas J. Watson
#36. Change is powerful, but change always comes with the possibility of failure as its partner. "This might not work" isn't merely something to be tolerated; it's something you must seek out.
Seth Godin
#37. You have control over doing your respective duty, but no control or claim over the result. Fear of failure, from being emotionally attached to the fruit of work, is the greatest impediment to success because it robs efficiency by constantly disturbing the equanimity of mind.
Ramananda Prasad
#38. This world is not for cowards. Do not try to fly. Look not for success or failure. Join yourself to the perfectly unselfish will and work on.
Swami Vivekananda
#39. I think it's only failure if you put the word failure on it. I think it's part of the process of learning where you're going to go and what doesn't work.
Daymond John
#40. Self esteem is not the same as being self centered, self absorbed or selfish. Self esteem is also not complacency or overconfidence, both of which and set us up for failure. Self esteem is a strong motivator to work hard. Self esteem is related to mental health and happiness.
Glenn R. Schiraldi
#41. To be a programmer is to develop a carefully managed relationship with error. There's no getting around it. You either make your accomodations with failure, or the work will become intolerable.
Ellen Ullman
#42. What looks like a failure teaches us what not to do, what does not work. We have lessons to learn from our experiences.
Iyanla Vanzant
#43. Success or failure in your work and relationships is dependent on how you manage your feelings.
Deborah Sandella
#44. You make it sound as if I hit her. I did nothing to Edie!'
'Oh? You did nothing? The woman I found in your wake, stripped of all self-repsect, convinced that she was a failure as a mother and a lover: that wasn't your work? Because I think it was!
Eloisa James
#45. 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
#46. Success steps: Think big. Act small. Then scale.
Failure steps: Act big. Think small. Then shrink.
Consider your next big thing a project. Get one. Get it right. No sense growing a broken system.
Richie Norton
#47. The only reason my work seems to be eclectic up to a certain period is because I was a failure as an actor.
Hugh Grant
#48. Once you have created some great technology, there remains the problem of effectively transferring it to the development organization," Myhrvold wrote. "Failure to do this effectively is a primary reason that research work is ineffective at many companies.
Anonymous
#49. I later discovered that in order to be a good athlete one must care intensely what is happening with a ball, even if one doesn't have possession of it. This was ultimately my failure: my inability to work up a passion for the location of balls.
Haven Kimmel
#50. There must be a bad chromosome somewhere in man that urges him to wound that which he can't conquer, deface that which is more beautiful, misunderstand and befoul the work of another.
Bill Murray
#51. I know when I'm bad, I know when I'm good, and I know when I'm everything in between. I don't have any delusions of grandeur or delusions of failure. In terms of my work, I've got a pretty cold honest eye.
Bebe Neuwirth
#52. Knowing failure is part of our process, and leads to new ideas, stronger work, and more honest questions, liberates us to peer, a little less frightened, into the unknown.
David DuChemin
#54. Hard work does not guarantee success, but no work guarantees failure.
Cesc Fabregas
#55. I will commit not the terrible crime of aiming too low. I will do the work that a failure will not do. I will always let my reach exceed my grasp.
Og Mandino
#56. There were times in 'Adaptation' during the editing where I really thought, 'Okay, well, this was a noble failure. I tried to do something good, but this is not going to work.'
Spike Jonze
#57. When we make choices, we open ourselves up to hard work and failure and heartbreak, so sometimes it feels easier not to know, not to choose, and not to do. But it isn't.
Meg Jay
#58. People are afraid of failure - they don't like to work so hard and have people keep saying, 'No.' I think that's what people fear most.
Russell Simmons
#59. I liked drawing and painting, because the only failure would be to listen to the doubters who wanted me to stop drawing and painting because 'you aren't going to make a living doing that.' I liked looking in art books at the work of painters.
Billy Childish
#60. Shoddy work is not just shoddy work. It's a failure of love.
Matt Perman
#61. I looked long and carefully at the picture of a stag painted by Landseer - the style was good, and the brush was handled with fine effect; but he fails in copying Nature, without which the best work will be a failure.
John James Audubon
#62. 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!
Betty White
#63. Usually, with the work I've done, by the end, I usually feel like it's a failure. It doesn't matter how it's received.
James Marsh
#64. When we fail to assist people responding to the gospel at church, we train our people to repeat that failure at home and at work.
James MacDonald
#65. You will make mistakes. I promise. Get used to that idea. Don't think of them as mistakes. Just file them away as methods that didn't work. Learn your lesson and move on. -- from Homegrown and Handmade
Deborah Niemann
#66. I knew I was putting you under immense pressure when I rejected your work the other day. I set an impossible deadline - yet you have met it with work that I can only call outstanding. As your teacher, I had to push you to your limits so that you could recognize your own true potential.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
#67. The miracle, upside-down work of God is that our failure isn't an obstacle, it's an opportunity to remember to sink into God. Not having what it takes is not a liability, it's a prerequisite. Maybe there is hope for us after all.
Emily P. Freeman
#68. If you look to artists who've managed to achieve lifelong careers, you detect the same pattern: They all have been able to persevere, regardless of success or failure.
Austin Kleon
#69. 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
#70. I must have no fear of failure. It was my fear of failure that first kept me from attempting the Master Work.
Paulo Coelho
#71. Victory is not possible, if one doesn't learn from the past and mistakes made.
Auliq Ice
#72. Failure is information-we label it failure, but it's more like, 'This didn't work, I'm a problem solver, and I'll try something else.'
Carol S. Dweck
#73. The saddest object in civilization, and to my mind the greatest confession of its failure, is the man who can work, who wants work, and who is not allowed to work.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#74. Rust is the failure of the work of man. The project, the venture, the experiment: failed, given up on, and not cleaned up after.
Martin Amis
#75. My big philosophy is: Try and work with good people, because the process is your life. That's going to be really, really hard. I'm glad I learned the lesson, 'Failure is OK.'
Dana Fox
#76. You're saying she doesn't do her work? So take care of your business! Fail her like a normal kid. The failure will be between me and my daughter, then. You won't like it if her failure is between me and you.
Esme Raji Codell
#77. I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.
Andrew Vachss
#78. Most people fail in leadership b/c they think when they should be working and work when they should be thinking.
Orrin Woodward
#79. Failure is really a matter of conceit. People don't work hard because, in their conceit, they imagine they'll succeed without ever making an effort. Most people believe that they'll wake up some day and find themselves rich. Actually, they've got it half right, because eventually they do wake up.
Thomas A. Edison
#80. It's good to remember that success may be just beyond the next failure, and you'll get there, not because you're destined to, but because you're determined to.
Steve Goodier
#81. The nature of process, to one degree or another, involves failure. You have at it. It doesn't work. You keep pushing. It gets better. But it's not good. It gets worse. You got at it again. Then you desperately stab at it, believing "this isn't going to work." And it does!
Saul Bass
#83. Fear of failure is the fuel of achievement. If you weren't afraid to fail, you probably wouldn't be highly motivated to work at the level that most of us have to work at to do well.
Ruth Simmons
#84. The failure to work out sensible budgets makes it impossible for government agencies to make long-term plans, and instead leaves them scrambling to spend money in the short term.
Matt Taibbi
#85. I was interested in political failure here in the U.S. The way we're failing to work together to solve even our smallest problems, let alone the complex ones.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#86. Most of the problems that plague our society - addiction, overeating, crime, domestic violence, prejudice, debt, unwanted pregnancy, educational failure, underperformance at school and work, lack of savings, failure to exercise - are in some degree a failure of self-control.
Roy Baumeister
#87. I don't know many people, if any, who have had some straight line toward success. I mean, they start here, they work hard, they've got what it takes, and they just go straight to the top over some number of years. Most people get a little failure.
Sam Donaldson
#88. I know success or failure in my life or ministry does not depend on my own skill or even on external circumstances, it depends only on my faithfulness. God will give me the gifts necessary to do whatever He calls me to do, and He will not be hindered in His work by circumstances.
Lester Sumrall
#89. 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
#90. Play is kids' work in that it is a form of experiential learning that contributes directly to a person's ability to handle failure, to work in teams, and to take risks.
Jill Vialet
#91. I think everyone shares a fear of failure - that you're only as good as your most recent collection. That's definitely a fear, but it's a fear that fuels me, that makes me want to work harder, that makes me take on more challenges.
Alexander Wang
#92. The Fed's policies have been an unqualified success for financiers and an abject failure for the bottom 99.5% who have to work for a living.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
#93. I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.
Tennessee Williams
#94. I don't think you can create anything interesting from a comfort zone. You have to work from a place of fear and failure.
Charlize Theron
#95. No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man's front embraces the whole universe.
Henry Miller
#96. The forces of determination and hard-work are forces that failure can not stand against.
Bien Sufficient
#97. I'm kind of a failure. I mean, I'll be honest. I'm successful in that I'm getting to work on great stuff, but I think I'm a failure in all the personal stuff that is most important to me.
Paul Feig
#98. I was a loser, most concerned with making a living. It took me 30 years to understand ... I had to reinvent a system, find a way out, and set some rules that could work for me and a few others. I guess in the end that's what we all are trying to do.
Maurizio Cattelan
#99. Failure of your company is not failure in life. Failure in your relationships is.
Evan Williams
#100. The joy of art is particularly sweet, though, because it carries with it the threat of rejection, of failure, and of missed connections. It's precisely the high-wire act of "this might not work" that makes original art worth doing.
Seth Godin
