Famous Failure Quotes

• Trump, stop congratulating yourself! You’re a failure & you’ve mishandled this COVID-19 disaster.
  —Rep. Maxine Waters of California, March 30, 2020

• If you are waiting, fear is growing. If you are acting, fear is getting less. You can fail. It is all the same. You cannot survive. The art of adventuring is not dying.
  —Reinhold Messner, the first mountaineer to solo climb Mount Everest

• You cannot have the intensity of the joy of success without tasting the bitterness of failure a few times.
  —Gary Cantrell, founder of the Barkley Marathons, March 2018

• Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
  —Winston Churchill

• I'm the master of low expectations.
  —President George W. Bush (June 4, 2003, aboard Air Force One)

• Failure is impossible.
  —Susan B. Anthony

• A man can fail many times in life but he’s never a failure if he tries to get up.
  —Found on stuntman Evel Knievel’s headstone

• Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
  —Thomas Alva Edison

• Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.
  —Eleanor Roosevelt

• If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
  —Thomas H. Palmer

• I hope he fails.
  —Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, referring to incoming president Barack Obama, January 16, 2009.

• Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
  —Robert F. Kennedy, former U.S. Attorney General

• There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
  —Ken Olson, Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

• If at first you don’t succeed, try reading the instructions.
  —Evan Esar

• I’m sure some people voted for Barack Obama because of me.
  —George W. Bush, December 1, 2008

• If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
  —John Kenneth Galbraith

• If you want to succeed, you should strike out on new paths rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.
  —John D. Rockefeller

• If you’re willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.
  —Edward Albee

• There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurements.
  —Lord Kelvin, 1900

• People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.
  —Darryl F. Zanuck, Hollywood studio executive, 1946