These unsuccessful quotes will inspire you. Unsuccessful, not successful: not meeting with or producing success.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging unsuccessful quotes, unsuccessful sayings, and unsuccessful proverbs.
Best Unsuccessful Quotes
- “Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, What’s in it for me?” ~ Brian Tracy
- “The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.” ~ Erich Fromm
- “Behind every successful man there’s a lot of unsuccessful years.” ~ Bob Brown
- “Successful and unsuccessful people do not vary greatly in their abilities. They vary in their desires to reach their potential.” ~ John C. Maxwell
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“The only difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is extraordinary determination.” ~ Mary Kay Ash
- “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” ~ Calvin Coolidge
- “If you are a genius and unsuccessful, everybody treats you as if you were a genius, but when you come to be successful, when you commence to earn money, when you are really successful, then your family and everybody no longer treats you like a genius, they treat you like a man who has become successful.” ~ Pablo Picasso
- “Successful people don’t have any fewer problems than unsuccessful people; they just have a different mindset in dealing with them.” ~ John C. Maxwell
- “Successful people do all the things that unsuccessful people don’t want to do.” ~ John Paul DeJoria
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“The Llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat, with an indolent expression and an undulating throat; like an unsuccessful literary man.” ~ Hilaire Belloc
- “Those who attempt nothing themselves think every thing easily performed, and consider the unsuccessful always as criminal.” ~ Samuel Johnson
- “Envy is the consuming desire to have everybody else as unsuccessful as you are.” ~ Frederick Buechner
- “Behind every successful man, there is a woman – And behind every unsuccessful man, there are two.” ~ Mark Twain
- “Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better.” ~ Jim Rohn
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“Nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent.” ~ Calvin Coolidge
- “A successful man cannot realize how hard an unsuccessful man finds life.” ~ E. W. Howe
- “There is nothing more common than unsuccessful men with talent.” ~ Joe Strummer
- “Successful people make decisions quickly (as soon as all the facts are available) and change them very slowly (if ever). Unsuccessful people make decisions very slowly, and change them often and quickly.” ~ Napoleon Hill
- “The world is full of educated derelicts.” ~ Calvin Coolidge
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“The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” ~ Calvin Coolidge
- “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.” ~ Calvin Coolidge
- “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.” ~ Calvin Coolidge
- “The world must be filled with unsuccessful musical careers like mine, and it’s probably a good thing. We don’t need a lot of bad musicians filling the air with unnecessary sounds. Some of the professionals are bad enough.” ~ Andy Rooney
- “I don’t want to be a Michael Moore-style artist, which is not to disparage Michael Moore. But he seems rather unsuccessful at winning people over who don’t already agree with him.” ~ Mohsin Hamid
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“Insurrection. An unsuccessful revolution; disaffection’s failure to substitute misrule for bad government.” ~ Ambrose Bierce
- “I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
- “The crushing, pitiful, and frequently just plain risible pathos of an unsuccessful actor/performer’s life is well charted.” ~ Arabella Weir
- “I think my dad is the only Arabic descendent who is an unsuccessful businessman.” ~ Shakira
- “Being unemployed is not good for an actor. No, it isn’t, no matter how unsuccessful you are. Because you always remember getting fired from all the restaurants. You remember that stuff very, very strongly.” ~ Philip Seymour Hoffman
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“To judge between good or bad, between successful and unsuccessful would take the eye of a God.” ~ Anton Chekhov
- “Although raised on the farm – my grandfather was an unsuccessful fundamentalist preacher turned farmer – my father and his brother both became professors.” ~ Philip Warren Anderson
- “If they are unsuccessful in married life, who suffers more the bitter consequences of poverty than the wife? But if successful, she has not a dollar to call her own.” ~ Ernestine Rose , Unsuccessful quotes marriage
- “The fact that I’m going to be unsuccessful at times is pretty well-balanced by the fact that I’m going to be successful at others.” ~ Rod Taylor
- “WALL STREET, n. A symbol for sin for every devil to rebuke. That Wall Street is a den of thieves is a belief that serves every unsuccessful thief in place of a hope in Heaven.” ~ Ambrose Bierce
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“Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” ~ Calvin Coolidge
- “SELF-DISCIPLINE, more than any other personal quality I can think of, is the one thing that separates successful people from the unsuccessful. Think of all it encompasses: honoring commitments, promises and deadlines, keeping your life on schedule, being willing to go the extra mile… Self-discipline is essential to success. The alternative is a life ruled by emotions, and none of us can afford that if we’re going to fulfill our purpose and realize our potential.” ~ John C. Maxwell , Unsuccessful quotes life
- “Man will always remain an unsuccessful creature till he stops being a mortal being!” ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan
- “I was blessed to be part of a commercial, pushing for this energy bill, but we’ve been unsuccessful.” ~ Cornel West
- “Unsuccessful people get up whenever they feel like it and the first thing they do is watch television, read the paper, or check email. The rest of the day is pretty much 50% below maximum performance.” ~ Brian Tracy
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“Most unsuccessful people let their fears and doubts have the final say in how they live their lives.” ~ Hal Elrod
- “It’s imperative to realize that it is not necessary to try to get rid of fear in order to succeed. Rich and successful people have fear, rich and successful people have doubts, rich and successful people have worries. They just don’t let these feelings stop them. Unsuccessful people have fears, doubts, and worries, then let those feelings stop them.” ~ T. Harv Eker
- “Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.” ~ Alain de Botton
- “Try to remember that being unsuccessful in school doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be unsuccessful in life. Lots of people who didn’t excel in school still went on to have successful lives.” ~ Dav Pilkey
- “President [Barack] Obama – he was unsuccessful in his efforts to raise the federal minimum wage, but he still used the Labor Department in other ways to try to boost paychecks for American workers.” ~ Rachel Martin
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“What do you call those things at the bottom of rivers? Frogs? Stones? Unsuccessful gangsters?” ~ Terry Pratchett
- “The first person I met in the business was David Heyman, who was a producer on Daytrippers and who went on to produce the highly-unsuccessful Harry Potter series.” ~ Greg Mottola
- “An unsuccessful manager blames failure on his obligations; the effective manager turns them to his own advantage. A speech is a chance to lobby…a visit to an important customer a chance to extract trade information.” ~ Henry Mintzberg
- “If one insists on calling all unsuccessful efforts failures the meaning of failure is really quite benign. When trying anything new or taking on any challenge, unsuccessful efforts are an essential aspect of skill building.” ~ Michael Josephson
- “As much as we disliked the Yankees, fans and players alike, they were good for baseball. They consistently unsuccessful teams like the Browns, Senators, and A’s paid a lot of their bills with those big crowds that poured through the gates when the Yankees came to town.” ~ Bob Feller
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“Unsuccessful candidates for the Presidency should be quietly hanged as a matter of public sanitation and decorum.” ~ H. L. Mencken
- “Successful people are willing to do things unsuccessful people will not do.” ~ John C. Maxwell
- “It is better to be unsuccessful pursuing a significant goal that being successful attaining an insignificant one.” ~ Michael Josephson
- “The opposite of success is not failure. Unsuccessful efforts are not failures unless they so discourage you that you abandon further efforts to achieve your goal. Even then, the venture or effort may be a failure but you are not. Failure is an event not a character trait.” ~ Michael Josephson
- “One would think that an unsuccessful volume was like a degree in the school of reviewing. One unread work makes the judge bitter enough; but a second failure, and he is quite desperate in his damnation. I do believe one half of the injustice – the severity of ‘the ungentle craft’ originates in its own want of success: they cannot forgive the popularity which has passed them over.” ~ Letitia Elizabeth Landon
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“Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.” ~ H. L. Mencken
- “I was so unsuccessful for so long. I was used to the word no. I was used to you’re not good enough or not quite there or you need to fix this about you. So I am honestly walking in faith every single day that I am going to be able to handle whatever God has for me. I am not used to being in a place where people appreciate my work and understand my work and want to be a part of my work and getting something out of my work because for so long it was so misunderstood. The success part for me is the hardest part and everyday I’m still battling.” ~ Tamar Braxton
- “Unsuccessful people think about what they don’t want most of the time. They talk about problems, listen to news & gossip, & spend their time blaming circumstances, situations & others. Successful people think about what they want & how they will get it. They are intensely focused on their goals & the information needed to help obtain them. Which person are YOU?” ~ Darren Hardy
- “Is this so-called [Republican Party] hate wing that is so angry at all the things that have – all the changes that have happened in America, this is what they respond to.And I think it`s dangerous for the country, I also think it`s going to be incredibly unsuccessful in the general election.” ~ Howard Dean
- “Beating is the worst, and therefore the last means to be us’d in the correction of children, and that only in the cases of extremity, after all gently ways have been try’d, and proved unsuccessful; which, if well observ’d, there will very seldom be any need of blows.” ~ John Locke
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“The #1 reasons are unsuccessful is their inability to lead themselves.” ~ Johnny Hunt
- “I wrote a number of poems about Kah Tai lagoon, when Safeway was building that huge, ugly store down there where I used to love to watch the birds nest. That political poem, or environmental poem, was unsuccessful because Safeway built there anyway. And yet the poem has something to say today, as it did then. And I speak here only of my own poems. The agenda for every poet has to be different because most of us write from direct human experience in the world.” ~ Sam Hamill
- “The words It’s not my fault! should never again come from your mouth. The words It’s not my fault! have been symbolically written on the gravestones of unsuccessful people ever since Eve took her first bite of the apple.” ~ Andy Andrews
- “You must have to want it so badly, if there is any way you can live without it, get out of it. Being an unsuccessful actor is like having a skin disease. Make sure your passion is not misplaced.” ~ Tom Sizemore
- “When will we get done with the fool idea that the way to make a party grow is to scare away everybody who has an extra dollar in his pocket? God forbid that the Democratic Party should become a mere gathering of the unsuccessful!” ~ John W. Davis
- “There are, basically, three kinds of people: the unsuccessful, the temporarily successful, and those who become and remain successful. The difference is character.” ~ Brian Tracy
