49 Overcoming Failure Quotes and Sayings

Fear and failure play hand in hand. Imaging your own path to success is just one way to get started. Here are some inspirational failure quotes and sayings that will help you to overcome your inability to take action.

“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.”

“A man may fail many times but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.”

“An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he’s in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots.”

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”

“Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of a greater or equal benefit.”

“Everything you want is on the other side of fear.”

“Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.”

“Failure is nature’s plan to prepare you for great responsibilities.”

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”

“Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be.”

“Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.”

“Giving up is the only sure way to fail.”

“I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I’d rather be partly great than entirely useless.”

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got.”

“If you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want.”

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.”

“It’s not how far you fall, but how high you bounce that counts.”

“Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure.”

“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.”

“No man ever achieved worth-while success who did not, at one time or other, find himself with at least one foot hanging well over the brink of failure.”

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

“Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fail.”

“Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.”

“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.”

“Remember that failure is an event, not a person.”

“Success builds character, failure reveals it.”

“Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.”

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

“Success isn’t permanent and failure isn’t fatal.”

“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.”

“The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.”

“The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.”

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”

“The phoenix must burn to emerge.”

“There are no failures – just experiences and your reactions to them.”

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”

“To be wrong is nothing unless you continue to remember it.”

“Try a thing you haven’t done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time to figure out whether you like it or not.”

“We are all failures – at least the best of us are.”

“When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.”

“When we give ourselves permission to fail, we, at the same time, give ourselves permission to excel.”

“Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.”

“You’ll always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

Sometimes you may encounter a failure in life. What you do afterwards is what really matters and counts in the end.