17 Quotes About Failure & Mistakes
The kintsugi bowl is more beautiful for having broken. These quotes reframe failure not as the opposite of success but as its raw material.
“In victory, you deserve champagne. In defeat, you need it.”
“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
“Established in yoga, perform action, having abandoned attachment. Evenness of mind, in success and failure, is called yoga.”
“The Gita does not require us to give up the world; it requires us to give up the wrong relation with the world.”
“We have spent forty years studying burnout. The data is clear: burnout is a sign that something in the organisation has broken, not that something is wrong with the person.”
“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”
“Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.”
“Sleep is the foundation on which everything else stands. Lose sleep, lose health, lose years.”
“Good. Whatever happens — your plan failed, your team is short — say good. Now I know. Now I can adjust. The word is a tool.”
“I can predict, with 94% accuracy, whether a marriage will succeed or fail, by watching one fifteen-minute conversation.”
“When we fail to set boundaries and hold people accountable, we feel used and mistreated.”
“Music begins where words fail. It is not that music is too vague for words — it is that words are too clumsy for music.”
“When the heart grieves for what it has lost, the spirit rejoices over what it has found.”
“When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the spirit laughs for what it has found.”
“When you are sad and depressed, when life seems to have lost its meaning, that is the moment when bodhicitta is most needed.”
“The mistakes of beauty are dearer to us than the flawlessness of the machine.”
“If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us!”