An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he's in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots.

An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn't take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates form college he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails maybe a thousand times. It he succeeds once then he's in. These two things are diametrically opposite. We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.

Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards.

Any time you wish to demonstrate something, the number of faults is proportional to the number of viewers.

Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.

Every great improvement has come after repeated failures. Virtually nothing comes out right the first time. Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

I still take failure very seriously, but I've found that the only way I could overcome the feeling is to keep on working, and trying to benefit from failures or disappointments. There are always some lessons to be learned. So I keep on working.

I tried and failed. I tried again and again and succeeded.

If the experiment works, you must be using the wrong experiment. An experiment has a tendency to fail

It doesn't matter if you try and try and try again, and fail. It does matter if you try and fail, and fail to try again.

It is not a disgrace to fail. Failing is one of the greatest arts in the world.

No experiment is ever a complete failure. It can always be used as a bad example.

The only time you mustn't fail is the last time you try.

We need to teach the highly educated man that it is not a disgrace to fail and that he must analyze every failure to find its cause. He must learn how to fail intelligently, for failing is one of the greatest arts in the world.

When I examine the conclusion [on experiments with the electric light bulb experiments published in the Herald] which everyone acquainted with the subject will recognize as a conspicuous failure, trumpeted as a wonderful success, I [conclude]... that the writer ... must either be very ignorant, and the victim of deceit, or a conscious accomplice in what is nothing less than a fraud upon the public.