Quotes by American Authors - Page 180

It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.
Flannery O'Connor
The sight of a cage is only frightening to the bird that has once been caught.
Rachel Field
The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy inevitable part of the process of getting to the top.
Dr. Joyce Brothers
In the past few women have tried and even fewer have succeeded.
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
Men must try and try again.
Lawson Purdy
If you risk nothing then you risk everything.
Geena Davis
Most people live and die with their music still unplayed. They never dare to try.
Mary Kay Ash
Men do not fail they stop trying.
Elihu Root
There are two kinds of failures: The man who will do nothing he is told and the man who will do nothing else.
Dr. Perle Thompson
Perhaps the only real failure is that implying waste a conscious and flagrant non-use or misuse of ability.
Joseph H. Odell
Not failure but low aim is a crime.
Ernest Holmes
If a man has a talent and cannot use it he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it he has gloriously succeeded and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know.
Thomas Wolfe
If you have made mistakes even serious ones there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down but the staying down.
Mary Pickford
It ain't no disgrace for a man to fall but to lie there and grunt is.
Josh Billings
Inside of a ring or out ain't nothing wrong with going down. It's staying down that's wrong.
Muhammad Ali
Never give a man up until he has failed at something he likes.
Lewis E. Lawes
He alone fails who gives up and lies down.
Ralph Waldo Trine
No man is a failure who is enjoying life.
William Feather
What we have most to fear is failure of the heart.
Sonia Johnson
Because a fellow has failed once or twice or a dozen times you don't want to set him down as a failure until he's dead or loses his courage - and that's the same thing.
George Horace Lorimer
Sometimes what you want to do has to fail so you won't.
Margueritte Harmon Bro
Some of the biggest failures I ever had were successes.
Pearl S. Buck
They say President Wilson has blundered. Perhaps he has but I notice he usually blunders forward.
Thomas A. Edison
What is to be got at to make the air sweet the ground good under the feet can only be got at by failure trial again and again and again failure.
Sherwood Anderson
Don't let a kick in the ass stop you. It's how you cope that says what you are.
George Cukor
Men's best successes come after their disappointments.
Henry Ward Beecher
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I don't accept defeat as final. Only death is final - and even then I hope for a reprieve.
Phil Gramm
I've been failing for like ten or eleven years. When it turns it'll turn. Right now I'm just tryin' to squeeze through a very tight financial period get the movie out and put my things in order.
Francis Ford Coppola
Entrepreneurs average 3.8 failures before final success. What sets the successful ones apart is their amazing persistence. There are a lot of people out there with good and marketable ideas but pure entrepreneurial types almost never accept defeat.
Lisa M. Amos
Failure is only postponed success as long as courage 'coaches' ambition. The habit of persistence is the habit of victory.
Herbert Kaufman
We learn courageous action by going forward whenever fear urges us back. A little boy was asked how he learned to skate. "By getting up every time I fell down " he answered.
David Seabury
Life is a series of relapses and recoveries.
George Ade
When it goes wrong you feel like cutting your throat but you go on. You don't let anything get you down so much that it beats you or stops you.
George Cukor
Take risks. You can't fall off the bottom.
Barbara Proctor
Take chances make mistakes. That's how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave.
Mary Tyler Moore
I think and think for months for years. Ninety-nine times the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.
Albert Einstein
It is better to be boldly decisive and risk being wrong than to agonize at length and be right too late.
Marilyn Moats Kennedy
Failure really isn't terrible if you can say to yourself hey I know I'm gonna be successful at what I want to do someday. Failure doesn't become a big hangup then because it's only temporary. If failure is absolute then it would be a disaster but as long as it's only temporary you can just go and achieve almost anything.
Jerry Delia Femina
When in doubt make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell leap.
Cynthia Heimel
Finite to fail but infinite to venture.
Emily Dickinson
Failure is delay but not defeat. It is a temporary detour not a dead-end street.
William A. Ward
Failure is a disappointment but not defeat.
Jeanne Robertson
Supposing you have tried and failed again and again. 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.
Mary Pickford
I've never met a person I don't care what his condition in whom I could not see possibilities. I don't care how much a man may consider himself a failure I believe in him for he can change the thing that is wrong in his life anytime he is prepared and ready to do it. Whenever he develops the desire he can take away from his life the thing that is defeating it. The capacity for reformation and change lies within.
Preston Bradley
Forget your mistakes but remember what they taught you.
Dorothy Galyean
There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you if you don't repeat it.
Pearl Bailey
Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day.
Will Durant
You must accept that you might fail then if you do your best and still don't win at least you can be satisfied that you've tried.
Rosalynn Carter
A man must learn to forgive himself.
Arthur Davison Ficke
If I lose I'll walk away and never feel bad.... Because I did all I could there was nothing more to do.
Joe Frazier
If you don't accept failure as a possibility you don't set high goals you don't branch out you don't try - you don't take the risk.
Rosalynn Carter
A peacefulness follows any decision even the wrong one.
Rita Mae Brown
The biggest quality in successful people I think is an impatience with negative thinking. ... How many opportunities come along? If you wait for the right one that's wrong because it may never be right and what have you got to lose? Even if it's a disaster you've tried you've learned something you've had an adventure. And that doesn't mean you can't do it again.
Edward McCabe
I made a mistake today I made a mistake yesterday. I think it's ... very important to ignore the negative.
Jerry Rubin
You can beat the Bear once but never the same way twice.
John McKay
There is no reason to repeat bad history.
Eleanor Holmes Norton
Do not be afraid of mistakes providing you do not make the same one twice.
Eleanor Roosevelt
I have made mistakes but I have never made the mistake of claiming that I never made one.
James Gordon Bennett
I have known men who could see through the motivations of others with the skill of a clairvoyant only to prove blind to their own mistakes. I have been one of those men.
Bernard M. Baruch