Failure is a key ingredient in success. It’s what allows us to learn and grow, and it’s what leads to innovative ideas. In this article, we’ve collected 100 inspiring quotes on failure- each of which explains why it’s so important to fail often. We hope you’ll take some of these ideas to heart and that they’ll help you overcome your missteps with greater understanding and confidence.
1. “I thank God for my failures. Maybe not at the time, but after some reflection. I never feel like a failure just because something I tried has failed.”
—Dolly Parton
2. “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”
—Steve Jobs
3. Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be.”
—John Wooden
4. “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
—Thomas Edison
5. “It’s not how far you fall, but how high you bounce that counts.”
—Zig Ziglar
6. “Everything you want is on the other side of fear.”
—Jack Canfield
7. “Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.”
—Coco Chanel
8. “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
—Winston Churchill
9. “I’d rather be partly great than entirely useless.”
—Neal Shusterman
10. “We are all failures–at least the best of us are.”
—M. Barrie
11. “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
—Henry Ford
12. “I think you have to try and fail, because failure gets you closer to what you’re good at.”
—Louis C.K.
13. “Part of being a man is learning to take responsibility for your successes and for your failures. You can’t go blaming others or being jealous. Seeing somebody else’s success as your failure is a cancerous way to live.”
—Kevin Bacon
14. “I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”
—Michael Jordan
15. “Giving up is the only sure way to fail.”
—Gena Showalter
16. “If you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail…it takes backbone to lead the life you want”
—Richard Yates
17. “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
18. “Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.”
—S. Lewis
19. “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
20. “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”
—Ken Robinson
21. “An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he’s in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots.”
—Charles F. Kettering
22. “Our greatest glory is, not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
—Oliver Goldsmith
23. “Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.”
—George Eliot
24. “A man may fall many times, but he won’t be a failure until he says that someone pushed him.”
—Elmer G. Letterman
25. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
—Thomas Edison
26. “It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”
—Bill Gates
27. “Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.”
—Richard Branson
28. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.”
—Winston Churchill
29. “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
—Paulo Coelho
30. “You’ll always miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” —Wayne Gretzky
31. “A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.” —John C. Maxwell
32. “Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I’ve met people who don’t want to try for fear of failing.”
—K. Rowling
33. “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”
—Albert Einstein
34. “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
—Winston Churchill
35. “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
36. “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”
—Napoleon Hill
37. “You build on failure. You use it as a steppingstone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.”
—Johnny Cash
38. “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
—James Joyce
39. “Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself.”
—Charlie Chaplin
40. “Please know that I am aware of the hazards. 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 a challenge to others.”
—Amelia Earhart
41. “We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes–understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.”
—Arianna Huffington
42. “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” —Robert F. Kennedy
43. “The phoenix must burn to emerge.”
—Janet Fitch
44. “There are no failures–just experiences and your reactions to them.”
—Tom Krause
45. “A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.”
—George Bernard Shaw
46. “When you take risks, you learn that there will be times when you succeed, and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important.”
—Ellen DeGeneres
47. “It’s failure that gives you the proper perspective on success.” —Ellen DeGeneres
48. “There is no failure except in no longer trying.”
—Chris Bradford
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
—Thomas Edison
49. “It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”
—Bill Gates
50. “Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.”
—Richard Branson
51. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.”
—Winston Churchill
52. “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
—Paulo Coelho
53. “The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”
—Mark Zuckerberg
54. “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
55. “The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.” —Elbert Hubbard
56. “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got.”
—James P. Lewis
57. “Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.”
—Lance Armstrong
58. “The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.”
—Frederic William Farrar
59. “You have to be able to accept failure to get better.”
—LeBron James
60. “I don’t want the fear of failure to stop me from doing what I really care about.” —Emma Watson
61. “Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out.” —Benjamin Franklin
62. “When I was young, I observed that nine out of 10 things I did were failures. So I did 10 times more work.”
—George Bernard Shaw
63. “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” —Henry Ford
64. “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
65. “My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.”
—Abraham Lincoln
66. “Success is not built on success. It’s built on failure. It’s built on frustration. Sometimes its built on catastrophe.”
—Sumner Redstone
67. Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.”
—Mia Hamm
68. “When we give ourselves permission to fail, we, at the same time, give ourselves permission to excel.”
—Eloise Ristad
69. “What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?”
–John Green
70. “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
– Douglas Adams
71. “I’ve come to believe that all my past failure and frustrations were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy.”
– Anthony Robbins
72. “Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be.”
– John Wooden
73. “Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.”
– George Eliot
74. “A man may fall many times, but he won’t be a failure until he says that someone pushed him.”
– Elmer G. Letterman
76. “It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”
– Bill Gates
“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.”
– George Bernard
77. “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
78. “You build on failure. You use it as a steppingstone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.”
– Johnny Cash
79. “Failure is an attitude, not an outcome.”
– Harvey MacKay
80. “Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.”
– Suzy Kassem
81. “Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.”
– Richard Branson
82. “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”
– Robert F. Kennedy
83. “I don’t believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process.”
– Oprah Winfrey
84. “There is no such thing as failure, only results.”
– Tony Robbins
85. “Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so ‘safe,’ and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.”
– Malcolm X
86. “What do you first do when you learn to swim? You make mistakes, do you not? And what happens? You make other mistakes, and when you have made all the mistakes you possibly can without drowning – and some of them many times over – what do you find? That you can swim? Well – life is just the same as learning to swim! Do not be afraid of making mistakes, for there is no other way of learning how to live!”
– Alfred Adler
87. “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
88. “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
– Michael Jordan
89. “Failure is nature’s plan to prepare you for great responsibilities.”
– Napoleon Hill
90. “You’ll always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
– Wayne Gretzky
91. “A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.”
– John C. Maxwell
92. “It’s only when you risk failure that you discover things. When you play it safe, you’re not expressing the utmost of your human experience.”
– Lupita Nyong’o
93. “You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.”
– Barack Obama
94. “There are no failures – just experiences and your reactions to them.”
– Tom Krause
95. “Success isn’t permanent and failure isn’t fatal.”
– Mike Ditka
96. “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”
– Winston Churchill
97. “Life is full of screwups. You’re supposed to fail sometimes. It’s a required part of the human existance.”
– Sarah Dessen
98. “I can’t give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.”
– Herbert Bayard Swope
99. “The best way out is always through.”
– Robert Frost
100. “Just because you fail once doesn’t mean you’re gonna fail at everything.”
– Marilyn Monroe
CONCLUSION:
The saying goes that failure is the best teacher. And it’s definitely true when it comes to learning and growing as a person. We all experience failures in our lives, whether it’s in our personal relationships, professional goals, or academic pursuits.
The best thing about failure is that it’s the pathway to success. It’s the ladder we use to climb up the mountain of life. So, if you’re looking for some inspiring quotes on failure, be sure to check out this blog! We’ve included 100 quotes that will help you learn from your past failures, and take you one step closer to achieving your dreams!
