The dream is real, my friends. The failure to realize it is the only unreality.

In truth, in the fairy-tale version of bailing out Lehman, the next domino, A.I.G., would have fallen even harder. If the politics of bailing out Lehman were bad, the politics of bailing out A.I.G. would have been worse. And the systemic risk that a failure of A.I.G. posed was orders of magnitude greater than Lehman's collapse.

I constantly experience failure in that my work is never as good as I want it to be. So I live with failure.

The surest way to fail is not to determine to succeed.

Failure is inherent in the game. So if you don't respond well to adversity, you're probably not going to have a long career.

The Bay of Pigs became a metaphor for feckless folly and failure.

I get this thing where people are like, 'Man, you got to tell me what to do' - like I have a cheat code to being successful. It's hard work; it's trial and error. I failed, but I never let failure get to my head or to my heart.

Social media can help or hurt you. People are more into other people's lives than their own. Everyone sees everyone else's success online, and we allow it to magnify our own failure.

Failure and its accompanying misery is for the artist his most vital source of creative energy.

Exercise, from a public health perspective, is an unmitigated failure. The world's longest-lived people live in environments that nudge them into more movement. They don't use power tools, they do their own yard work, they grow a garden.

Defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.

You get so afraid of failure and so afraid of losing and so afraid of not being the best that it's not a natural drive - it's born out of fear of failure. Which helps in Hollywood.

None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind; witness what's going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature.

Modesty means admitting the possibility of error, subsuming the self for the good of the whole, remaining open to surprise and the gifts that only failure can bring. There are many ways to practice it. Try taking up golf. Or making your own bagels. Or raising a teenager.

In our tabulation of psychoanalytic results, we have classed those who stopped treatment together with those not improved. This appears to be reasonable; a patient who fails to finish his treatment, and is not improved, is surely a therapeutic failure.

At the heart of the failure of most plays is the inability to carry on a thoughtful conversation about your work with yourself.

Our failings sometimes bind us to one another as closely as could virtue itself.

We do not know, in most cases, how far social failure and success are due to heredity, and how far to environment. But environment is the easier of the two to improve.

With improvisation, I just do it. It might be a total failure but then you just throw the dice again.

We are feeble, weak and impoverished because of our failure to pray. God is restrained in doing because we are restrained by reason of our non-praying. All failures in securing heaven are traceable to lack of prayer or misdirected petition.

To harmonize the One with the Many, this is indeed a difficult adjustment, perhaps the most difficult of all, and so important, withal, that nations have perished from their failure to achieve it.

As might be supposed, my parents were quite poor, but we somehow never seemed to lack anything we needed, and I never saw a trace of discontent or a failure in cheerfulness over their lot in life, as indeed over anything.

Our failure as a society to properly acknowledge and confront the psychological, social, and political effects of white privilege has perpetuated racial inequality and race-based political resentments.

Beside every great success are the seeds of enormous failure. In every failure, there's the opportunity seeds of great success. They're not miles apart. So if they're that close together, and if you're really working, you're always gonna have that likelihood that something's not going to work.

Failure is a great learning tool.

Whether in success or in failure, I'm proud of every single movie I've ever directed.

I even get inspired by movies that aren't very good, because there's always something good in movies that are collectively thought of as a failure. There's good in everything, I find.

The album 'Cheers to the Fall' is really kind of me breaking out and being like, 'Listen, I don't care about criticism, and I don't care about possibility of failure. I'm going to do it. And if I do fail, well then, here's to it.'

His advice to me is basically to just love what you do and don't let the fear of failure stop you.

George Orwell's science-fiction classic 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' wasn't a failure because the future it predicted failed to come to pass. Rather, it was a resounding success because it helped us prevent that future.

I'd like to see much more understanding of emotional issues around hurt, abandonment, disappointment, longing, failure and shame, where they stem from and how they drive people and policies brought into public discourse.

When we set up our kids for failure, we set up our workforce for failure, and we set up our economy for failure. I can't emphasize enough the importance, the absolute importance, of education in achieving long-term economic growth.

Escapism, we are led to believe, is evidence of a deficiency in character, a certain failure of temperament, and like so many -isms, it is to be strenuously avoided. 'How do you expect to get ahead?,' people ask. But the question altogether misses the point. The escapist doesn't want to get ahead. He simply wants to get away.

I met Ashley two weeks before I married him. It was a joke-the most ridiculous thing I've ever done. Once I was married, I didn't want to be a failure, so I stuck it out for six months, which was about six months too long.

My friend was on dialysis for six years before he got a new kidney. I was on dialysis for eight months. I'm almost not even the typical person who has kidney failure.

The world is divided into two categories: failures and unknowns.

What you find when you live in the United States, you live in the West, is that when somebody fails, it's never their fault. They always like to blame somebody other than themselves for a failure.

Every individual suffers from the fear of failure, but you can change your destiny only when you overcome it.

Federal regulations forbid delaying inspections for fracture-critical bridges like the fallen Minneapolis bridge - the kind with a lack of redundancy in design, so that a single failure in a load-bearing part can cause the entire bridge to collapse.

So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.

The difference between a beautifully made failure and a beautifully made hit is who you've got playing the leads.

If you get into a Broadway show and it doesn't work, you're a failure. And if it does work, you may be stuck for who knows how long. It just doesn't sound great to me!

All work is a process of failure. Every single thing I write, I look at it and go, 'Do better. That's not good enough. Do better.' And so, that keeps me up at night.

Yes, I've heard of the 'Mad Men' comparisons, but I like to think 'The Hour' has its own distinctive voice. Although it is set in 1956, I have tried to give it a contemporary edge, and its themes of love, passion, romance, fury, professional jealousy, and personal failure are universal, I think.

You can't be afraid of the problem. Don't be afraid of failure; don't be afraid to make mistakes. Make sure you learn from each step; iterate, and stay as efficient as possible without being paralyzed by a difficult situation.

Before I was married, I didn't consider my failure to manage even basic hand tools a feminist inadequacy. I thought it had more to do with being Jewish. The Jews I knew growing up didn't do 'do-it-yourself.' When my father needed to hammer something he generally used his shoe, and the only real tool he owned was a pair of needle-nose pliers.

If you're afraid of failure or getting it wrong, you'll never truly innovate or disrupt the market.

Most people don't really do too many things because they're afraid they'll fail. There are people failing all the time, all around you. And nobody is going to notice your failure. Your failure is not going to be so spectacular that people write news stories about it. Your failure will be boring.

I often find myself quoting from Victor Hugo after one of my theatrical ventures. 'Now that my play is a failure,' he once said, 'I find I love it all the more.' I first quoted that after 'Square Rounds' at the Olivier in 1992.

The biggest lesson I had in my life was failure.