Quotes about success and failure

So you think that you're a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.

Those who were never defeated seem happy and superior, masters of a truth they never had to lift a finger to achieve. They are always on the side of the strong. They’re like hyenas, who only eat the leavings of lions.

Defeat is for those who, despite their fears, live with enthusiasm and faith. Defeat is for the valiant. Only they will know the honour of losing and the joy of winning.

If victory is not theirs this time, it will be the next time. And if not the next time, then the time after that... The important thing is to get back on your feet. Only he who gives up is defeated. Everyone else is victorious.

Others, even though they were defeated and feel humiliated by the things the winners are saying about them, will allow themselves to shed a few tears but will never succumb to self-pity. They know that this is a merely a pause in the fighting and that, for the moment, they are at a disadvantage. They try to work out what they did wrong and what they did right. They take advantage of this moment of defeat to rest, heal their wounds, devise new strategies and equip themselves better. Then the day dawns when a new battle knocks on their door. They are still afraid, but they have to act, either that or remain for ever lying on the ground. They get up and face their opponent, remembering the suffering they have endured and which they no longer wish to endure...

The defeated are those who never fail. Defeat means that we lose a particular battle or war. Failure does not allow us to go on fighting.

I ask myself: are defeats necessary?

Well, necessary or not, they happen. When we first begin fighting for a dream, we have no experience and make mistakes. The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.

Society functions in a way much more interesting than the multiple-choice pattern we have been rewarded for succeeding at in school. Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more difficult and painfully acquired ability to formulate the questions. Page 28

Your true task has just begun, and you may not know in your life if you have succeeded in it, but only if you fail.

Don't aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run — in the long run, I say — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

“When I act,” he sputtered, “it’s with the idea of winning.”

I confessed I lacked his military experience, but told him I had found that in some situations winning consisted of disentangling oneself.

The captain is different too, Cyana. Before, the Roc flew under half a man, a man who’d only known victory. Now I’m a whole man. I know defeat as well.