Failure Quotes

“God's grace does not come to people who morally outperform others, but to those who admit their failure to perform and who acknowledge their need for a Savior”

“Growing up, I felt like it was very dangerous to mess up in any way, both in front of men and in front of other girls. It was like you couldn't make mistakes. So having a female friend who's like, 'Get over yourself. You're driving me crazy!' - that's been one of my most important parts of becoming an adult.”

“I got sent off a few times in my life, but I never lost my head. I mistimed tackles, and I made mistakes.”

“The greatest mistake I made was not to die in office.”

“Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers the globe, through poetry and philosophy and religion, through church and state, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, till we come to a hard bottom that rocks in place which we can call reality and say, "This is and no mistake.”

“Ego is certainly there in many of the greatest and most dizzying tales of success - but it's there in some of the greatest stories of failure and self-implosion as well.”

“If we can keep ourselves from interfering with the natural laws of life, mistakes can be our child's finest teachers.”

“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.”

“I'm a human being and I will make mistakes from time to time but what I will say is that any mistakes I make are very honest ones.”

“The first 'Wii Fit' games I tried were the slalom and ski jumping. I believe my spectacular failures here had more to do with the board resting on thick carpet than my shoddy balance.”

“A womans mistakes are different from a girls”

“All my mistakes, all my accomplishments, the good things I've done, the bad I've done, and the mistakes I've learned from, the mistakes I've never done before - all of that made me into what I am now.”

“Crying all the way to success is better than smiling all the way to failure.”

“Start in a small TV station so you can make all of your embarrassing mistakes early and in front of fewer people!”

“If we're unwilling to fail, then we're unwilling to succeed.”

“Now that his children had grown into their lives, their own children too, there was no one who needed more than the idea of him, and he thought maybe that was why he had this nagging feeling, this sense that there were things he had to know for himself, only for himself. He knew, of course he knew, that a life wasn't anything like one of those novels Jenny read, that it stumbled along, bouncing off one thing, then another, until it just stopped, nothing wrapped up neatly. He remembered his children's distress at different times, failing an exam or losing a race, a girlfriend. Knowing that they couldn't believe him but still trying to tell them that it would pass, that they would be amazed, looking back, to think it had mattered at all. He thought of himself, thought of things that had seemed so important, so full of meaning when he was twenty, or forty, and he thought maybe it was like Jenny's books after all. Red herrings and misdirection, all the characters and observations that seemed so central, so significant while the story was unfolding. But then at the end you realized that the crucial thing was really something else. Something buried in a conversation, a description - you realized that all along it had been a different answer, another person glimpsed but passed over, who was the key to everything. Whatever everything was. And if you went back, as Jenny sometimes did, they were there, the clues you'd missed while you were reading, caught up in the need to move forward. All quietly there.”

“I'm afraid that the act of writing is so scary and anxiety-filled that I never laugh at all. In fact, when people tell me that such and such a scene or story is comical, I tend to gape. I did not intend comedy - ever, as far as I know. It's probably all a mistake. I am essentially a lugubrious writer. Ha ha!”

“It is a crushing moment when you realize that your life has either been a series of huge mistakes, or worse; it hasn’t.”

“You may have made some mistakes, but just like a parent helps their child when they are learning to walk, God will help you get right back up anytime you fall.”

“We are not wise enough, pure enough, or strong enough to aim and sustain such a single motive over a lifetime. That way lies fanaticism or failure. But if the single motive is the master motivation of God's calling, the answer is yes. In any and all situations, both today and tomorrow's tomorrow, God's call to us is the unchanging and ultimate whence, what, why, and whither of our lives. Calling is a 'yes' to God that carries a 'no' to the chaos of modern demands. Calling is the key to tracing the story line of our lives and unriddling the meaning of our existence in a chaotic world.”