“Most great people have achieved their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure.”

-Napoleon Hill

“Failure is another stepping stone to greatness.”

-Oprah Winfrey

“The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. It’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.”

-Barack Obama

“Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”

-Nelson Mandela

“It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”

-Bill Gates

“In the real world, very smart people fail, and mediocre people rise. Part of what makes people fail or succeed are skills that have nothing to do with IQ. Also, the idea that intelligence can be gauged by an IQ test is erroneous.”

-Camille Paglia

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.”

-J.K. Rowling

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again. That is why I succeed.”

-Michael Jordan

“Courage allows the successful woman to fail and learn powerful lessons from the failure. So that in the end, she didn’t fail at all.”

-Maya Angelou

“Don’t fear failure—not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.”

-Bruce Lee

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

E. O. Wilson