Failure Before Success Quotes

The boys just wanted to light the oven, but they ended up burning down the whole business and the family home. The children were saved, but the Ole Kirk Kristiansen's future looked bleak.

Ole Kirk was a religious man; his optimism and sense of humour were well-known far beyond the local boundaries. Where others would have folded their hands in their laps and accepted their fate, he did not give up. With the courage born of desperation, he rebuilt his business on a larger and more expensive scale than it had been previously - and more so than he could afford: Many rooms had to be sublet, and the Kristiansens themselves only used a small part of the building. Apprentices were no longer paid, but received board and lodging instead. Life continued, somehow. ~ Christian Humberg

5. Unfair to Animals 6. Unfair to Muledom THE HALF-PENNANT PORCH Finley was obsessed with the Yankees and attributed their success to the short distance to the right field fence in Yankee Stadium. He believed sluggers who batted left-handed, like Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, and Roger Maris, had an unfair advantage. The fence was the sole reason the Yankees were winners. Before the 1964 season, Finley sought to create his own advantage. He moved his right field fence so that it was 296 feet from home plate and called it his "Pennant Porch." The commissioner forced Finley to change it to 325 feet. ~ Josh Ostergaard

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. ~ Natalie Cole

The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job. ~ Michael Lewis

People say, 'Grimm, you've been shot like 50.
So why don't you just rhyme like 50?
Then, you could get the money like 50,
Otherwise, before you see success ... you'll be 50.' ~ MF Grimm

But as I've said, failure is a feeling long before it's an actual result. And for me, it felt like that's exactly what she was planting - a suggestion of failure long before I'd even tried to succeed. She was telling me to lower my sights, which was the absolute reverse of every last thing my parents had ever told me. ~ Michelle Obama

Before you can really start setting financial goals, you need to determine where you stand financially. ~ David Bach

For example, in 2012 researchers at Kaspersky Lab in Moscow uncovered a highly complex piece of malware known as Flame that had been pilfering data from information systems around the world for more than five years before it was detected. Mikko Hypponen, the well-respected chief research officer at the computer security firm F-Secure, called Flame a failure for the antivirus industry and noted he and his colleagues may be "out of their leagues in their own game." Though millions around the world rely on these tools, it's pretty clear the antivirus era is over. ~ Marc Goodman

The mania for collecting can easily turn simply into accumulating. All one has to do is develop one collecting interest after another, and so on. But collectors of a particular category of articles almost always lose interest once they have reached their goal. When the collection is complete, what else is there to do? ... Failure makes it possible to avoid the effort: he simply carries on as before. (pp. 25-26) ~ Jacques Bonnet

Vanity of vanities… all is vanity.' You kill yourself to get to the grave. Especially you kill yourself to get to the grave before you die; and the name of the grave is 'success', the name of that grave is hullabullo boom boom horseshit. ~ Jack Kerouac

Every soldier must know, before he goes into battle, how the little battle he is to fight fits into the larger picture, and how the success of his fighting will influence the battle as a whole. ~ Bernard Law Montgomery

We are living in the world of pandemic.
Life is not the same as it was before.
We have to choose new ways of living.
Being ignorance or in denial won't make you immune to the virus.
Choose to be responsible and always be careful. Watch what you do, where you go and what you touch. You can practice your freedom by choosing to be safe. ~ De Philosopher DJ Kyos

The only place success comes before is in the dictionary ~ Milton Berle

Lately, it had been an endless procession of long, black nights and gray mornings, when her sense of failure swept over her like a five-hundred-pound wave; and she was scared. But it wasn't death that she feared. She had looked down into that black pit of death and had wanted to jump in, once too often. As a matter of fact, the thought began to appeal to her more and more.

She even knew how she would kill herself. It would be with a silver bullet. As round and as smooth as an ice-cold blue martini. She would place the gun in the freezer for a few hours before she did it, so it would feel frosty and cold against her head. She could almost feel the ice-cold bullet shooting through her hot, troubled brain, freezing the pain for good. The sound of the gun blast would be the last sound she would ever hear. And then... nothing. Maybe just the silent sound that a bird might hear, flying in the clean, cool air, high above the earth. The sweet, pure air of freedom.

No, it wasn't death she was afraid of. It was this life of hers that was beginning to remind her of that gray intensive care waiting room. ~ Fannie Flagg

He could no longer deny that for the rest of his life, he would measure every other woman against her, and find them all lacking. Her smile, her sharp tongue, her temper, her infectious laugh, her body and spirit, everything about her struck a pleasurable chord in him. She was independent, willful, stubborn… qualities that most men did not desire in a wife. The fact that he did was as undeniable as it was unexpected.
There were only two ways to manage the situation. He could either continue trying to avoid her, which had been a spectacular failure so far, or he could simply give in. Give in… knowing that she would never be the placid, proper wife he had always envisioned having. In marrying her, he would defy a fate that had been scripted for him before he had even been born.
He would never be entirely certain what to expect from Lillian. She would behave in ways that he would not always understand, and she would bite back like a half-tamed creature whenever he tried to control her. She was a creature possessed of strong emotions and an even stronger will. They would quarrel. She would never allow him to become too comfortable, too settled.
Dear God, was that truly the future he wanted?
Yes. Yes. Yes.

-Marcus' thoughts ~ Lisa Kleypas

The main thing we should be focused on is the strategy to destroy ISIS. And I laid out a plan that the Reagan Library before the tragedy of Paris, and before San Bernardino to do just that. It requires leadership, it's not filing an amendment and call it a success. ~ Jeb Bush

I was always afraid of things that worked the first time. Long experience proved that there were great drawbacks found generally before they could be got commercial; but here was something there was no doubt of. ~ Thomas A. Edison

Life works this way – when you become successful, everyone begins to admire you, while before you attain success everyone will try to put their foot on your path so you would trip and fall down. Only one or two clever people might be able to spot you. ~ Tamuna Tsertsvadze

Service to many leads to greatness-great respect, great satisfaction. Success is not having to wait until someone goes to Hong Kong before you get a camera. ~ Jim Rohn

My dear friend, do not imagine that I am vain enough to ascribe our success [Revolution] to any superiority ... If it had not been for the justice of our cause, and the consequent interposition of Providence, in which we had faith, we must have been ruined. If I had ever before been an atheist, I should now have been convinced of the being and government of a Deity! ~ Benjamin Franklin

The only time 'success' comes before the 'work' is in the dictionary. ~ Harvey Specter Suits

To place your dreams before the crowd is to risk ridicule. To go forward in the face of overwhelming odds is to risk failure. But risks must be taken because the greatest hazard of life is to risk nothing. ~ Rene Carayol

I look up from my work, and see before me, less than a block away, the great mysterious "Broadway," the "Graveyard of Dead Hopes," and the "Front Porch of Opportunity." From all over the world people have come to Broadway, seeking fame, fortune, power, love, or whatever it is that human beings call success. ~ Napoleon Hill

Of course, if one does not fully trust the promise of God's Kingdom, he will have a hard time taking risks and making sacrifices in this life. A gospel centered around the temporal self - fleeting happiness, earthly success, vain prosperity, things such as these - is the primary ambition of the half-hearted Christian; the one who somewhat believes he is subject to an eternal death; the one who just might believe in men before God, who morbidly fears seeming less than anyone else. The man of this school feels deeply that he has but one life to live, that this must be his only chance, and therefore must have it all in his favor - from glory to comfort to riches - and have it right this instant. He is but hinting that he is overcome because he insists always that he must overcome, that his judgment comes now and by the persons around him. The point is, however, in this sense, that by grace the Christian is indeed free, but only for as long as he wants to be free - the practicality of true freedom: that of God which offers not so much freedom to be like the world as it does freedom from the pressures of having to be like the world. For Divine Law is based solely on love and freedom; whereas secular law, pressure and imitation. ~ Criss Jami

Humility is the only soil in which the graces root; the lack of humility is the sufficient explanation of every defect and failure. Humility is not so much a grace or virtue along with others; it is the root of all, because it alone takes the right attitude before God, and allows Him as God to do all. ~ Andrew Murray

Before we received Christ, we were slaves to sin. But because of Christ's work on the cross, sin's power over us has been broken. Satan has no right of ownership or authority over us. He is a defeated foe, but he is committed to keeping us from realizing that. He knows he can block your effectiveness as a Christian if he can deceive you into believing that you are nothing but a product of your past, subject to sin, prone to failure, and controlled by your habits. ~ Neil T. Anderson

I judge myself by the shiny, pretty people I see at parent-teacher meetings, or on Facebook, or Pinterest, who seem to totally have their shit together and never have unwashed hair. They never wait until Thursday night to help their kid with the entire week's homework. They don't have piles of dusty boxes in corners waiting to be opened from the move before last. They have pretty, pastel lives, and they are happy, and they own picnic baskets and napkins and know how to recycle, and they never run out of toilet paper or get their electricity turned off. And it's not even that I want to be one of those people. I fucking hate picnics. If God wanted us to eat on the ground He wouldn't have invented couches. I just don't want to feel like a failure because my biggest accomplishment of the day was going to the bank. ~ Jenny Lawson

You have to see the good in yourself before expecting someone else to see the good in you. Be aware of who you are and what you can truly be. ~ Blaque Diamond

I see that both her parents are here. I'm pleased that they are, because I'd like to take the opportunity, early in what I fear will be a long and bitter battle, to tell them what I think of what they're doing to their child. I'm not spearking here about their fight for custody of her. I'm speaking here about their decision to get divorced. Let's not fool ourselves about what divorce is. Divorice is a failure of parenting. It does more damage to children than just About anything else that might happen to them in the years before they become adults. It takes from them the only things they hold dear. It breaks up their home. It destroys their sense of family. It removes them from the comfort of having one bed, in one safe, secure, familiar house, where they go to sleep every night of the week. It fills them with sadness and, probably, guilt. They can't help but think that they must somehow be to blame. It sets them up for a world in which nothing is certain and nobody can be trusted. ~ Caroline Overington

Failure is not an event, but rather a judgment about an event. Failure is not something that happens to us or a label we attach to things. It is a way we think about outcomes. Before Jonas Salk developed a vaccine for polio that finally worked, he tried two hundred unsuccessful ones. Somebody asked him, "How did it feel to fail two hundred times?" "I never failed two hundred times in my life," Salk replied. "I was taught not to use the word 'failure.' I just discovered two hundred ways how not to vaccinate for polio. ~ John Ortberg Jr.

The civil rights movement is evolving from a protest movement into a full-fledged social movement--an evolution calling its very name into question. It is now concerned not merely with removing the barriers to full opportunity but with achieving the fact of equality. From sit-ins and Freedom Rides we have gone into rent strikes, boycotts, community organization, and political action. As a consequence of this natural evolution, the Negro today finds himself stymied by obstacles of far greater magnitude than the legal barriers he was attacking before: automation, urban decay, de facto school segregation. These are problems which, while conditioned by Jim Crow, do not vanish upon its demise. They are more deeply rooted in our socioeconomic order; they are the result of the total society's failure to meet not only the Negro's needs but human needs generally. ~ Bayard Rustin

The work directed against mosquitoes carrying yellow fever had an equally good effect upon malaria, especially when anti-anopheles work was extended to the suburbs of the city. Before the year 1901 Havana had yearly from 300 to 500 deaths from malaria, rising as high in 1898 as 1,900 deaths. Since 1901 there has been a steady decrease in the malaria death rate until 1912, when there were only four deaths. Four deaths from malaria in a city in the tropics the size of Havana, about 300,000 population, means the extinction of malaria in that city. ~ William Crawford Gorgas

It is not true that nice guys finish last. Nice guys are winners before the game even starts. ~ Mort Walker

You the rich are no whit more attractive or capable than you who were poor and struggling a few years back. But when before you plodded lonely and unappreciated, now the glamour of the motor and the smart apartment surrounds you with a tangible glory. It is amazing how many friends look you up, call you by name, and extol you, who were once a little timid, or indifferent, or utterly neglectful in your time of dire poverty. One has true friends when one is poor and no riches can be greater than that. They are not so obvious when one is rich. ~ Alice Foote MacDougall

He nearly called you again last night. Can you imagine that, after all this time? He can. He imagines calling you or running into you by chance. Depending on the weather, he imagines you in one of those cotton dresses of yours with flowers on it or in faded blue jeans and a thick woollen button-up cardigan over a checkered shirt, drinking coffee from a mug, looking through your tortoiseshell glasses at a book of poetry while it rains. He thinks of you with your hair tied back and the characteristic sweet scent on your neck. He imagines you this way when he is on the train, in the supermarket, at his parents' house, at night, alone, and when he is with a woman.

He is wrong, though. You didn't read poetry at all. He had wanted you to read poetry, but you didn't. If pressed, he confesses to an imprecise recollection of what it was you read and, anyway, it wasn't your reading that started this. It was the laughter, the carefree laughter, the three-dimensional Coca-Cola advertisement that you were, the try-anything-once friends, the imperviousness to all that came before you, the chain telephone calls, the in-jokes, the instant music, the sunlight you carried with you, the way he felt when you spoke to his parents, the introductory undergraduate courses, the inevitability of your success, the beach houses, ... ~ Elliot Perlman

Some people will never know how close they really were to success because they threw in the towel right before their big break. ~ Dawn Gluskin

Don't misunderstand me. The terrorist actions of Al-Qaeda were and are unmitigatedly evil. But the astonishing naivety which decreed that America as a whole was a pure, innocent victim, so that the world could be neatly divided up into evil people (particularly Arabs) and good people (particularly Americans and Israelis), and that the latter had a responsibility now to punish the former, is a large-scale example of what I'm talking about - just as it is immature and naive to suggest the mirror image of this view, namely that the western world is guilty in all respects and that all protestors and terrorists are therefore completely justified in what they do. In the same way, to suggest that all who possess guns should be locked up, or (the American mirror-image of this view) that everyone should carry guns so that good people can shoot bad ones before they can get up to their tricks, is simply a failure to think into the depths of what's going on. ~ N. T. Wright

Success starts with believing before you can achieve it. ~ Robert Moment

That's when America soars, when we look out for one another and we take care of each other, when we root for one another's success, when we strive to do better and to be better than the generation that came before us and try to build something better for generations to come, that's why we do what we do. That's the whole point of public service. ~ Barack Obama

Thomas rather thought Foley might ask what purpose was served by an economy whose success and protection depended on people living in ugly, sterile, unhealthy environments-he'd met that argument before and admittedly had had some difficulty refuting it-but the ex-pilot merely shrugged and said, There's more to trees than you think. I've run across some trees I'd sooner hug than a woman. ~ Tom Robbins

Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door.
His name, as I ought to have told you before,
Is really Asparagus. That's such a fuss
To pronounce, that we usually call him just Gus.
His coat's very shabby, he's thin as a rake,
And he suffers from palsy that makes his paw shake.
Yet he was, in his youth, quite the smartest of Cats -
But no longer a terror to mice or to rats.
For he isn't the Cat that he was in his prime;
Though his name was quite famous, he says, in his time.
And whenever he joins his friends at their club
(which takes place at the back of the neighbouring pub)
He loves to regale them, if someone else pays,
With anecdotes drawn from his palmiest days.
For he once was a Star of the highest degree -
He has acted with Irving, he's acted with Tree.
And he likes to relate his success on the Halls,
Where the Gallery once gave him seven cat-calls.
But his grandest creation, as he loves to tell,
Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell. ~ T.S. Eliot

I could see the meal was going to be a success even before anyone had taken a single mouthful: the mood was right, and mood, I am convinced, is the most essential ingredient for any taste to develop. Taste is not a product of the mouth; it lies entirely in the mind. ~ Romesh Gunesekera

The people who don't give you a standing ovation for the hurdles you cross are just afraid that you might win the race. They do not cheer you but they sit, lurking on the sidelines, biting their fingernails hoping you will stumble before the end. They secretly wish you will never win this race. But watch out for them, they will be the firstto stand and cheer you when you stand on that podium of success. ~ Crystal Evans

October 1976 was the penultimate performance of Bench's Hall of Fame career. All the early success and awards and accolades thrown in his direction had prepared him for this moment - when the Big Red Machine became a dynasty by defending it's World Championship from the season before. ~ Tucker Elliot

beyond their right - and now they would be made to pay for it. Envy was being acted out, as never before.'62 It led to the murder of six million Jews in the Second World War. Today, I find envy laced through the statements of European and Indian intellectuals about America. Arundhati Roy's essay after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington is an example. Like many anti-American intellectuals writing in the days after the attack, Roy claimed that it was the direct result of American foreign policy - the implication being that America somehow deserved what had happened. There is widespread anti-American sentiment in the world which regards the United States as arrogant, indifferent to human suffering, consumerist, and contemptuous of international law. Much of this is probably correct, but I find that some of it is inspired by envy of America's success. ~ Gurcharan Das