Mastering Failure and Rejection (Part 3 of 3)

Ageless Wisdom on Failure and Rejection

By way of "consummating" this three-part post, this final segment will present a series of famous--and frequently eloquent--quotations on how best to understand, and respond to, failure and rejection. Call this, if you will, a kind of appendix for (or even SparkNotes review of) parts 1 and 2. Actually, toward the end of writing this extended post, I decided to check out a few web sites for well-known quotations on the subject. And by the time I'd completed my research, I realized that I'd hardly covered new ground at all--that virtually everything I had to say had already, though piecemeal, been said (and generally in small, appetite-whetting chunks that would fit nicely into Twitter). . . . So much for being original.

Anyhow, here are some of my favorites. If you're concerned that you may be overly reactive to failure and rejection, you might want to pick out those utterances that "speak" to you the most--and adopt them as your personal mantras:

"Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." (Confucius)

"You can fail so very often. But you are not a failure until you give up." (Anonymous)

"Failure is the path of least persistence." (Anonymous)

"The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by my failures." (Humphrey Davy)

"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." (Denis Waitley)

"A rejection [cf. failure] is nothing more than a necessary step in the pursuit of success." (Bo Bennett)

"We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery." (Samuel Smiles)

"Psychoanalysis shows the human infant as the passive recipient of love, unable to bear hostility. Development is the learning to love actively and to bear rejection." (Karl Stern)

"There's nothing like rejection to make you do an inventory of yourself." (James Lee Burke)

"I take rejection as someone blowing a bugle in my ear to wake me up and get going, rather than retreat." (Sylvester Stallone)

"You need to develop, somehow, a huge amount of faith and confidence in yourself, because there's a lot of rejection throughout an actor's life and you have to believe in yourself more than anyone else." (Stephen Collins)

"Having harvested all the knowledge and wisdom we can from our mistakes and failures, we should put them behind us and go ahead." (Edith Johnson)

"The man who has done his level best . . . is a success, even though the world may write him down a failure." (B. C. Forbes)

"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." (Maxwell Maltz)

"We seem to gain wisdom more readily through our failures than through our successes. We always think of failure as the antithesis of success, but it isn't. Success often lies just the other side of failure." (Leo F. Buscaglia)

"He who risks and fails can be forgiven. He who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole being." (Paul Tillich)

"The only real failure in life is the failure to try." (Source Unknown)

"Success is never final, failure is never fatal. It's courage that counts." (John Wooden)

"Failure is success if we learn from it." (Malcolm S. Forbes)

"There is no failure except in no longer trying." (Elbert Hubbard)

"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." (Elbert Hubbard)

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"Remember the two benefits of failure. First, if you do fail, you learn what doesn't work, and second, the failure gives you the opportunity to try a new approach." (Roger Von Oech)

"Failure is the tuition you pay for success." (Walter Brunell)

"The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure" (Sven Goran Eriksson)

"Try and fail, but don't fail to try." (Stephen Kaggwa)

And, finally,

"There are no failures-just experiences and your reactions to them." (Tom Krause)

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