Quotes about success and failure

To fail spectacularly is a loser’s paradise.

Failure concentrates the mind wonderfully. If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough.

But his hits were greater than the sum of his misses, and such is the way with greatness.

I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time.

“The source of my name,” the vehicle had replied, “The Hundredth Idiot, is a quotation: ’One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he’s a genius.’ It is an old proverb.”

We always want more, he thought, we always take our past successes for granted and assume they point the way to future triumphs. But the universe does not have our own best interests at heart, and to assume for a moment that it does, ever did or ever might is to make the most calamitous and hubristic of mistakes.

"Nobody at twenty-eight is a success or a failure. It's too early to figure out which way the tide's moving (Malkah, fifteen: THE SAME AS ME)

If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.

If no mistake you have made, yet losing you are... a different game you should play.

Straddling the top of the world, one foot in China and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently down at the vastness of Tibet. I understood on some dim, detached level that the sweep of earth beneath my feet was a spectacular sight. I'd been fantasizing about this moment, and the release of emotion that would accompany it, for many months. But now that I was finally here, actually standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn't summon the energy to care.

Not every success needs to be abandoned drastically, but every success needs to be questioned drastically.

[..] the values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs.