Famous Failure Quotes

• If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then give up. There’s no use being a damn fool about it.
  —W.C. Fields

• If at first you do succeed, try, try not to be insufferable.
  —Franklin P. Jones

• The probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search, the probability of success is zero.
  —Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison in “Searching for Interstellar Communications” (1959)

• If you are not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re playing it safe.
  —Woody Allen

• Most success springs from an obstacle or failure. I became a cartoonist largely because I failed in my goal of becoming a successful executive.
  —Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip

• The war in Vietnam is going very well and will succeed.
  —Robert McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense, January 1963

• 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

• Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
  —Winston S. Churchill

• I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
  —Thomas A. Edison