A Toast to Failure

Here's to failure, one of our greatest teachers.

 

Barack Obama:

Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it's not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won't. It's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.

George Bernard Shaw:

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

Havelock Ellis:

It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.

Herbert B. Swope:

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: which is: Try to please everybody.

It's a Wonderful Life:

Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.

John Dewey:

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

Mary Pickford:

If you have made mistakes, there is always another chance for you. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down.

 

Michael Jordan:

I've missed more than 9,000 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.

Oscar Wilde:

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

Ralph Ellison:

Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

Robert F. Kennedy:

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

Samuel Smiles:

It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.

Thomas Alva Edison:

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

William Saroyan:

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

Winston Churchill:

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

And finally, from a Chinese fortune cookie I received last week:

You may fail many times, but you are not a failure until you give up.