The best quotes about failure that helped successful people are not the ones printed on a mug. They are lines a person actually said after a specific setback, in a specific place, with something concrete to lose. Below are 12 of them, each with where the line came from, what was happening in that person’s life, and one thing you could do with the idea rather than just the sentence.
I kept two filters while picking these. First, the words have to be traceable to a speech, an interview, a book or a widely documented personal saying, and I flag the ones whose attribution is genuinely contested. Second, I skip the claim that a quote manufactured somebody’s success. A sentence can reflect what someone already decided. It rarely causes the decision.
For readers who like the short version, the recurring theme is simple: failure counts as useful only when something changes afterward, whether that is a new attempt, a different method, or a decision to hold the same standard anyway. Sorting quotes about failure that helped successful people gets a lot easier once you accept that standard, because it is the test that quietly throws out the slogans.
Table of Contents
- 1Quotes About Failure That Helped Successful People at a Glance
- 21. Theodore Roosevelt: “It is hard to fail, but it is much harder to never try.”
- 3What quotes about failure that helped successful people can teach
- 4How to check a quote before you share it
- 52. Colonel Harland Sanders: “I have failed at nearly everything I have attempted.”
- 63. Nelson Mandela: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
- 74. Michael Jordan: “I’ve failed more times than I want to, but I don’t quit.”
- 85. Walt Disney: “All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.”
- 96. J. K. Rowling: “In fact, you have only just begun.”
- 107. Steve Jobs: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”
- 118. Maya Angelou: “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.”
- 129. Winston Churchill: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
- 1310. George Clooney: “I still wake up in the morning, and I think, ‘let’s do it.’”
- 1411. Henry Ford: “I will simply walk over the remains and keep on going.”
- 1512. Japanese proverb: “Fall seven times, stand up eight times.”
- 16Frequently Asked Questions
- 17Who has the best quotes about failure and success?
- 18Are these quotations proven to have made these successful people successful?
- 19How can I use failure quotes without sounding like I am minimizing my problems?
- 20How do I verify a motivational quote before sharing it?
- 21What should I do after failure if motivation alone does not help?
- 22Conclusion
Quotes About Failure That Helped Successful People at a Glance
| Speaker | Core idea | The setback behind it | One action |
|---|---|---|---|
| Theodore Roosevelt | Failing is the cheaper option | An unimproved political career and repeated electoral losses | Make the attempt you keep postponing this week |
| Harland Sanders | Candid admission of a long losing streak | A roadside cafe, no franchise rights, and years of refusals | Write down your own count of attempts |
| Nelson Mandela | Impossible becomes done | 27 years in prison, then an impossible political negotiation | Break a huge goal into the next negotiable step |
| Michael Jordan | Failure is a volume, not a verdict | Cut by his high school team; thousands of missed shots later | Log your misses so fear stops running the meeting |
| Walt Disney | Courage follows persistence | A ruined business, debt, and a studio that lost its funding | Revise the abandoned idea instead of binning it |
| J. K. Rowling | Worst year is the beginning | Rejected, jobless, and parent to a baby | Start draft one of the new thing today |
| Steve Jobs | The dots only connect backwards | Removed from the company he founded | Keep a record of what each attempt taught |
| Maya Angelou | Defeat is an event, not an identity | Years of day jobs before her first book landed | Separate the outcome from your self-worth |
| Winston Churchill | Courage to continue counts | Repeated reversals across a political career | Pick the response that protects your standards |
| George Clooney | Motivation is a decision made daily | Years of small roles and long gaps between projects | Do the important task before checking reactions |
| Henry Ford | Walk over the wreckage and continue | The failed Detroit automobile company, then two more collapses | Inspect the failed launch, then start the next build |
| Japanese proverb | Getting up one more time than you fell | Collective wisdom, not one person’s triumph | Resume the daily practice after one missed day |
1. Theodore Roosevelt: “It is hard to fail, but it is much harder to never try.”
This line is usually pinned to Roosevelt, and it does appear in his autobiographical writing in closely related wordings, though the exact sentence that circulates online has never been pinned to a single dated page. Treat it as his, but treat the wording as approximate.
Roosevelt’s actual life gives it weight. He lost the New York City mayoral race, then the governorship, then lost again for vice president while barely polling. He was a Civil War veteran with a childhood illness that left him walking with a cane. The quote is less about a single dramatic failure than about a man who had plenty of documented evidence that losing was normal.
What makes it useful today: it removes the idea that trying is a bet on being exceptional. You can attempt something ordinary, on the assumption you may well lose.
Example: if you have been avoiding a job application, a course, or a pitch because the odds look bad, the line does not promise you the outcome. It gives you permission to spend the attempt anyway, and to read the result as information about the fit rather than a verdict on your worth.
What quotes about failure that helped successful people can teach
Sorting quotations honestly takes three buckets, and most lists online blur them together.
Bucket one is useful perspective. A line that changes nothing about your circumstances but gives you a way to describe what you are going through is still worth having. Bucket two is a documented turning point, where the person tells you something specific changed after a failure, and the change is checkable against the public record. Bucket three is the claim that a quotation made somebody successful, which is almost never supportable and rarely needs to be repeated.
A fourth problem is misattribution. Some of the most shared lines about failure are traceable to a different person, an earlier source, or no reliable source at all. Two entries below are flagged for that reason.
How to check a quote before you share it
Four steps catch most of the fake ones.
Look for a dated, named source: a book, a commencement address, a broadcast interview, a deposition. A quote with no occasion attached is usually paraphrased, not spoken. Next, search the exact wording rather than the idea, since the same thought is often recycled under different words. Then look for a primary document, such as a transcript or an archive, and check who actually delivered the speech. Finally, ask what would change if the attribution is wrong. If a line loses most of its punch when the author turns out to be someone else, that is the line to skip.
That last step is why the Mandela and Disney entries below carry a caution. I would rather you share nine solid quotations than twelve loose ones, which is why the quotes about failure that helped successful people here are limited to lines I could trace to something somebody actually said.
2. Colonel Harland Sanders: “I have failed at nearly everything I have attempted.”
Sanders said this about himself, plainly and more than once, in interviews late in his life, after the chain of restaurants that carries his name existed. It is the oddest quote on the list because it is not a call to keep going. It is a confession delivered with no bitterness attached.
The facts behind it are dull and convincing. He ran a cafe for decades, lost the roadside dining business he had built, and spent years pitching a franchising method that companies kept declining. He was 65 when he finally started selling the method franchise by franchise.
The lesson for a rejected pitch or a stalled side project: admitting the losing record out loud tends to defuse it. Sanders was not claiming a secret. He was stating a fact, then continuing, which is harder to fake than optimism.
Try it yourself. List the last four things you attempted that did not work, with dates. Most people find the list shorter and more ordinary than the story they tell about themselves.
3. Nelson Mandela: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
This line circulates with Mandela’s name on it, and he is credited with repeating it. It is also not uniquely his: the same sentence appears in the mouths of other public figures, which is why it shows up on quote sites with several attributions at once. Be careful if you put it on a card.
The scale is what makes it worth reading. Mandela was released from prison in 1990 after 27 years and then had to negotiate a transition that plenty of experienced negotiators considered unworkable.
That context is the useful part, not the slogan. When a goal is enormous, the honest feeling really is that it is impossible, and the feeling is not evidence. What the line does is describe the gap between the feeling and the outcome, without pretending the gap was painless or quick.
Example: if you are trying to change careers, retrain for a role you are not qualified for, or take on a responsibility you have never held, the realistic move is to translate impossible into a specific next conversation. Who do you email. What do you finish this week. Scale is not a reason to wait, but it is a reason to work in units you can see.
4. Michael Jordan: “I’ve failed more times than I want to, but I don’t quit.”
Jordan was cut from his high school varsity team, and the story he tells about it involves trying out again repeatedly, being sent home, and eventually making the squad. His widely repeated Hall of Fame speech also cites a large personal count of missed shots and lost games, and those specific numbers are part of why the line lands harder than a generic saying.
Treating failure as a quantity rather than a prediction is the real idea here. Jordan’s misses did not get better because he worried less about them. They got accounted for, then worked on, then repeated.
Example: a sales team that logs every lost deal, including the reason, learns more from fifty losses than from fifty vague recollections. Same for a writer tracking which submissions get rejected, or a student logging which topics the practice questions keep breaking on. The count stops being a mood and starts being a record.
5. Walt Disney: “All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.”
This line is reported from a mid-century television interview in which Disney discusses losing his first studio, going broke, and starting again. The sentence is widely attributed but the transcript is not well established, so quote it as a paraphrase of his position rather than a verified transcript.
The setback is documented enough on its own. His first animation company collapsed, he lost control of the studio he built afterward, and he rebuilt a smaller operation. Persistence is the boring word for what that sequence is.
Example: a designer discards a client project that collapses, and the instinct is to treat the idea as dead. Often the first idea was solving the wrong version of the problem. Pull it back out, keep the part that worked, and rebuild from there, which is a different action from starting over and a different one from quitting.
6. J. K. Rowling: “In fact, you have only just begun.”
Rowling said this at a university commencement, and the fuller point was about endurance rather than applause. The Harry Potter manuscript had been rejected by a long list of publishers before it was accepted, and the series that followed took years in which she was also raising a young child.
The line is easy to quote and easy to strip of context. Her subject was talent plus sustained effort over time, which is a less flattering story than sudden genius and a much more useful one.
Example: start a new draft, a new application, or a second attempt at a business experiment while the first failure is still fresh. The instinct to wait until you feel ready is usually avoidance wearing a respectable coat. A first attempt that exists is worth more than a perfect plan that stays in your head.
7. Steve Jobs: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”
Jobs said this in a university commencement address that he gave at Stanford, and the larger point was about trust: you cannot plan the whole path in advance, so you need to be willing to keep going until the pieces make sense.
His own career is the reason people keep returning to the sentence. He was pushed out of the company he founded, ran a company he had acquired, and came back before the company’s later success. Those years are the dots nobody could see coming.
Example: a skill you decided was pointless, a job that did not work out, a project you abandoned. It is entirely possible that one of them becomes the thing that makes you good at the next one. That is worth taking seriously, and it does not require believing every dead end was secretly perfect. Sometimes a bad job is just a bad job, and the useful effect came from what you did after it.
8. Maya Angelou: “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.”
The distinction Angelou is drawing is between an outcome and a surrender. You do not get to choose whether the interview goes well or the exam passes. You do get to choose whether a rejection changes the standards you hold yourself to.
Her own record supports the distinction. She sang in nightclubs and worked demanding day jobs for years, including a stretch as San Francisco’s first Black streetcar conductor, and she kept the habit of writing long stretches on a schedule she set for herself. Her first book arrived in 1969, after all that waiting rather than after a long list of rejections. Nothing about the routine is inspiring on its own. It is just consistent.
Example: you go into a final interview, a competition, or a funding pitch and it goes badly. The useful question is not whether you should feel disappointed. It is what standard you go back to on Monday, and whether the disappointment is going to change the work or only the mood.
9. Winston Churchill: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
This is the most shared quotation on the subject and one of the least securely sourced. The phrasing circulates widely as a Churchill line, but researchers tracing it have not found it in his published writings or recorded speeches with confidence. It is best treated as a good sentence of uncertain origin.
That does not make it worthless. The idea has a separate, more solid source in Churchill’s own words, which is that success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. That version is genuinely his and better describes the mechanism.
Both versions point at the same asymmetry. After a success, people stop. After a setback, people get particular. Attention after a loss feels urgent and one-sided, so the sensible move is to decide your response in advance, while nothing is currently on fire.
Example: decide now what you do after a promotion you wanted and after a promotion you did not. Same action, same people, same weekly output. Fixing the response in advance is what stops a good month from turning into coasting and a bad month into a withdrawal.
10. George Clooney: “I still wake up in the morning, and I think, ‘let’s do it.’”
Clooney has described his mornings like this in interviews, and the point he draws from it is that motivation follows action rather than the other way around. He is describing a working habit, not a mood arriving from outside.
There was a long stretch of small roles, gaps between projects, and a lot of work that did not get noticed before the obvious success. That stretch is the reason for the routine. On most mornings there is nothing to be excited about yet.
Example: put the day’s one important task at the top of the list and do it before you check reactions to anything you have published. This sounds trivial. It is also how people keep going through the weeks when the visible results do not show up.
11. Henry Ford: “I will simply walk over the remains and keep on going.”
Ford said he walked over the remains of his own failed companies, and the sequence is documented. His first Detroit automobile venture collapsed with him holding the bag. The Henry Ford Company failed. The Cadillac company failed. The Model T followed, and only then did the business work.
The quote is not about ignoring failure. It is about where you put it. Notice the failures in detail, take the useful part, and stop standing on the wreckage.
Example: a team launches a product, it fails, and the review meeting turns into a search for someone to blame. The alternative takes an hour. Write down the two or three things you would do differently, confirm which customers or features mattered, and start the next iteration on a date. Teams that learn this way ship faster, because the failed launch stops being the story and becomes a document.
12. Japanese proverb: “Fall seven times, stand up eight times.”
This one is a proverb, so no individual claims it. That matters, because a proverb is not a personal triumph story. It is a piece of collective wisdom, and it is not about a famous person who failed their way to success.
Its usefulness is that it is small enough to hold. Not a career-defining idea, just a rule for a bad morning. The count is a joke about persistence, but the mechanism is real and unglamorous: returning to a practice on the days you do not feel like it, specifically because you did not yesterday.
Example: you miss a day of running, a day of language practice, or a day of writing. The realistic response is not a hard reset and not guilt. Resume with the smallest version of the habit you can actually do, and let one bad day stay one bad day rather than turning into a broken month.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who has the best quotes about failure and success?
There is no objective best, but the most useful failure quotes come from people who describe a specific setback and a specific response, rather than speaking in generalities. Collectors tend to return to the Roosevelt line about trying, the Churchill idea that failure is not fatal, and the Jordan framing of failure as a volume. What matters more is the source: a dated speech or interview you can go back and check.
Are these quotations proven to have made these successful people successful?
No, and any article claiming otherwise is overselling. A quotation reflects what someone already believed at the moment they said it. It rarely causes the career that followed. Several of the people here describe setbacks that preceded their success, and that sequence is documented. The quote came after the fact, not before it, which is worth remembering before you treat any saying as a cause.
How can I use failure quotes without sounding like I am minimizing my problems?
Avoid using them to describe someone else’s situation. Say what actually happened first: the interview went badly, the launch missed its target, the client said no. Only then, if it fits, mention a line that helped you. Readers on quote forums tend to react badly to slogans applied to other people’s real losses, because a genuine setback usually needs a plan, a conversation, or rest rather than a slogan.
How do I verify a motivational quote before sharing it?
Search the exact wording in quotation marks and look for a primary source such as a transcript, an archive, or a dated interview. Check who actually delivered the speech, since some lines are pinned to one person who only popularized them. If you cannot find a dated source, either leave the attribution off or describe it as a paraphrase. The most-shared lines about failure are often the least securely sourced.
What should I do after failure if motivation alone does not help?
Motivation is unreliable on its own, so convert the loss into structure instead. Write down what specifically failed, what you learned, and the next dated action. Talk to one person who has context, because isolation makes setbacks heavier than they are. And change something concrete: the method, the plan, or the timeline. If nothing changes, repeated attempts stop being persistence and start being avoidance.
Conclusion
Pick one quotation from this list and put it somewhere you will see it this week. Then write down the setback you are currently working through, in one plain sentence, with a date attached to when it started.
From there, the only useful next step is small and specific. Send the email. Redraft the page. Reschedule the practice you missed. A quote gives you language for what is happening, and language makes a hard thing easier to discuss with someone, but it does not do the work, and it is not a substitute for talking to a person who knows your situation.
