Top 200 Failure Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying. ”

— B. F. Skinner

102. “I cannot give you a formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is: try to please everybody.”

— Herbert Bayard Swope

103. “Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself.”

— Charlie Chaplin

104. “If it turns out that my best wasn’t good enough, at least I won’t look back and say that I was afraid to try; failure makes me work even harder.”

— Michael Jordan

105. “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

106. “That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

107. “The only guarantee for failure is to stop trying.”

— John C. Maxwell

108. “Failure is part of the process of success.”

— Robert T. Kiyosaki

109. “To me defeat in anything is merely temporary. Defeat simply tells me that something is wrong in my doing; it is a path leading to success and truth.”

— Bruce Lee

110. “Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.”

— Thomas A. Edison

111. “The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.”

— Dale Carnegie

112. “No matter what happens, no matter how far you seem to be away from where you want to be, never stop believing that you will somehow make it.”

— Les Brown

113. “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”

— Robert Burns

114. “It’s okay to fail; it’s not okay to quit.”

— Chris Gardner

115. “Every master was once a disaster.”

— T. Harv Eker

116. “Failure is an option. It’s what you do with the failure that makes you who you are. Our failures mold us. I have failed at several things in my life. What sets some of us apart, is that when we fail, we can’t sleep at night. It haunts us until we have our time at redemption.”

— David Goggins

117. “The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.”

— Paulo Coelho

118. “I failed my way to success.”

— Thomas A. Edison

119. “Do not fear mistakes. There are none.”

— Miles Davis

120. “No one likes to fail. But we mortals do not become champions without effort and discipline or without making mistakes.”

— Dieter F. Uchtdorf

121. “I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, you're doing something.”

— Neil Gaiman

122. “Make failure your teacher, not your undertaker.”

— Zig Ziglar

123. “The key to success is failure.”

— Michael Jordan

124. “The number one reason people fail in life is because they listen to their friends, family, and neighbors.”

— Napoleon Hill

125. “You fail only if you stop writing.”

— Ray Bradbury

126. “If I fail, I try again, and again, and again.”

— Nick Vujicic

127. “The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

128. “Failing forward is the ability to get back up after you’ve been knocked down, learn from your mistake, and move forward in a better direction.”

— John C. Maxwell

129. “The difference between a winner and a loser – they both failed, but the winner gets back up and does it again and again until it goes his way.”

— Greg Plitt

130. “There is no success without failure and losses.”

— John C. Maxwell

131. “You will face many defeats in your life, but never let yourself be defeated.”

— Maya Angelou

132. “Move fast, take risks. It’s okay to try big things. You’re better off trying something and having it not work, than not having done anything at all.”

— Mark Zuckerberg

133. “Most people don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan.”

— John J. Beckley

134. “Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.”

— Neil Gaiman

135. “Every time you quit, someone else gets your prize. Every time you make a mistake, you get closer to yours.”

— Robert T. Kiyosaki

136. “The true measure of success is how many times you can bounce back from failure.”

— Stephen Richards

137. “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.”

— Michael Jordan

138. “It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

139. “You’re never a loser until you quit trying.”

— Mike Ditka

140. “Lack of loyalty is one of the major causes of failure in every walk of life.”

— Napoleon Hill

141. “Successful people don’t fear failure, but understand that it’s necessary to learn and grow from it.”

— Robert T. Kiyosaki

142. “The test of success is not what you do when you are on top. Success is how high you bounce when you hit the bottom.”

— George S. Patton Jr.

143. “A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions – as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

144. “Never give up, because you never know if the next try is going to be the one that works.”

— Mary Kay Ash

145. “When we tackle obstacles, we find hidden reserves of courage and resilience we did not know we had. And it is only when we are faced with failure do we realise that these resources were always there within us. We only need to find them and move on with our lives.”

— Abdul Kalam

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

147. “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”

— Truman Capote

148. “Fail, fail again, fail better.”

— Samuel Beckett

149. “When we got Tesla going at the very beginning, if you asked me what I thought the odds of success were, I would have said less than 50%. I would have said that failure is the most likely outcome.”

— Elon Musk

150. “Why accept failure when success is free?”

— Kevin Gates