Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.

Being human means you will make mistakes. And you will make mistakes, because failure is God's way of moving you in another direction.

Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure.

Failure is central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

Don't be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed.

Indecision and delays are the parents of failure.

Poverty is about people lacking the tools they need to get on in life. And solving it is about tackling educational failure, antisocial behaviour, debt problems and addiction, and of course it's about work.

I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.

There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

Cheerfully fessing up to our failures turns crazy mind off, humility and compassion on. I learned this in a karate dojo that had a strange tradition. Everyone there loved recounting failure stories, and after an evening of smacking one another, we'd sit and have a beer while the students swapped tales of martial arts disaster.

If you try to do your best there is no failure.

Lead yourself whenever your boss' leadership deteriorates. When your boss doesn't praise what you do, praise yourself. When your boss doesn't make you big, make yourself big. Remember, if you have done your best, failure does not count.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

Don't fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have.

The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.

I fell off my pink cloud with a thud.

Once you start a working on something, don't be afraid of failure and don't abandon it. People who work sincerely are the happiest.

The entrepreneurial life is one of challenge, work, dedication, perseverance, exhilaration, agony, accomplishment, failure, sacrifice, control, powerlessness... but ultimately, extraordinary satisfaction.

If something's important enough, you should try. Even if you - the probable outcome is failure.

It's best to have failure happen early in life. It wakes up the Phoenix bird in you so you rise from the ashes.

Inability to make decisions is one of the principal reasons executives fail. Deficiency in decision-making ranks much higher than lack of specific knowledge or technical know-how as an indicator of leadership failure.

Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.

Man is not made for defeat.

One's only rival is one's own potentialities. One's only failure is failing to live up to one's own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.

Laziness is a secret ingredient that goes into failure. But it's only kept a secret from the person who fails.

I don't believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process.

Discipline is based on pride, on meticulous attention to details, and on mutual respect and confidence. Discipline must be a habit so ingrained that it is stronger than the excitement of the goal or the fear of failure.

Some teachers feel that if they ask for emotional help, they're a failure. But teaching is a team sport.

Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street.

Tragedy in life normally comes with betrayal and compromise, and trading on your integrity and not having dignity in life. That's really where failure comes.

Your ability to adapt to failure, and navigate your way out of it, absolutely 100 percent makes you who you are.

Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure.

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.

He who risks and fails can be forgiven. He who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole being.

Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one's better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk, and to act.

Progress requires setbacks; the only sure way to avoid failure is not to try.

If you fall during your life, it doesn't matter. You're never a failure as long as you try to get up.

Failure is good. It's fertilizer. Everything I've learned about coaching, I've learned from making mistakes.

Right from my childhood, I have believed in a Supreme Power. I don't know whether it has form, or it is formless. I am a high school dropout. How come life has given me so much? It's not my intelligence, it's not my abilities. This understanding makes me scared even in success. I don't own my success. Neither do I own my failure.

If you're the type of person who has to fulfill your dreams, you've gotta be resourceful to make sure you can do it. I came out to California when I was 21, thinking my New York credentials would take me all the way. I came back home a year later all dejected and a failure.

The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.

An open-minded and diverse population that readily shares information, encourages experimentation, accepts failure and dispenses with formality and hierarchy is what makes Silicon Valley the successful hub that it is.

Too often we just look at these glistening successes. Behind them in many, many cases is failure along the way, and that doesn't get put into the Wikipedia story or the bio. Yet those failures teach you every bit as much as the successes.

Since the global financial crisis and recession of 2007-2009, criticism of the economics profession has intensified. The failure of all but a few professional economists to forecast the episode - the aftereffects of which still linger - has led many to question whether the economics profession contributes anything significant to society.

Love is such a powerful subject matter because it comes in so many different shapes and sizes. It's about timing, fate, failure, redemption.

If you look at great human civilizations, from the Roman Empire to the Soviet Union, you will see that most do not fail simply due to external threats but because of internal weakness, corruption, or a failure to manifest the values and ideals they espouse.

You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down.

Most organizations don't fall apart as a result of one big blow. Most relationships don't end because of one grand argument. Most lives don't fall to pieces due to one sad event. No, I suggest to you that sustained failure happens as the consequence of small, daily acts of neglect that stack up over time to lead to a blow up - and break down.

Successful people have a bigger fear of failure than people who've never done anything because if you haven't been successful, then you don't know how it feels to lose it all.