Room 0012 — permanent collection

Failure

Q: Where does “fail again, fail better” come from?

Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho (1983). It is usually quoted as motivation, though in context Beckett is offering better failure rather than eventual success.

Nobody here is claiming failure is pleasant or secretly good. They are making a narrower point: that it is information, and that most people stop reading it too early.

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Acc. 404·Q·0012·01
“I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”

Attributed to Michael Jordan
What it means. The distinction is between an outcome and a choice. One is partly out of your hands and survivable; the other is entirely yours and leaves nothing to learn from.

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Acc. 404·Q·0012·02
“When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”

Attributed to Henry Ford
What it means. A physical fact used as an argument. Resistance is not merely tolerable in that example — it is the mechanism, and removing it removes the lift as well.

HI जब सब कुछ आपके विरुद्ध जाता दिखे, तब याद रखें कि हवाई जहाज़ हवा के साथ नहीं, बल्कि हवा के विरुद्ध उड़ान भरता है।ZH 当一切似乎都与你作对时，请记住：飞机是逆风起飞的，而非顺风。

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Acc. 404·Q·0012·03
“Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough.”

Attributed to A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
What it means. Note “overtake”. Kalam does not claim failure will not happen; he claims it will not get ahead of you, which is a claim about direction rather than about avoiding setbacks.

HI असफलता मुझे कभी पछाड़ नहीं सकती, यदि सफल होने का मेरा संकल्प पर्याप्त रूप से दृढ़ हो।ZH 只要我成功的决心足够坚定，失败就永远无法将我击垮。

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Acc. 404·Q·0012·04
“Once you start working on something, don’t be afraid of failure and don’t abandon it.”

Attributed to Chanakya
What it means. Two instructions from an ancient Indian strategist, and the second is harder. Fear can be tolerated; the temptation to quit arrives dressed as good judgment.

HI एक बार जब आप किसी काम को शुरू कर दें, तो असफलता से मत डरिए और उसे मत छोड़िए।ZH 一旦着手去做一件事，就不要害怕失败，也不要半途而废。

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Acc. 404·Q·0012·05
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Samuel Beckett
What it means. Routinely misread as motivational. Beckett is not promising eventual success — he offers only a better quality of failure, which is bleaker and considerably more useful.

Worstward Ho, 1983

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Acc. 404·Q·0012·06
“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”

Attributed to Albert Einstein
What it means. It makes an error rate diagnostic. A clean record is not evidence of skill; it is evidence about the difficulty of what was attempted.

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Acc. 404·Q·0012·07
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”

Henry Ford
What it means. The qualifier carries it. Beginning again is not automatically valuable — repeating the attempt unchanged is the thing that makes failure permanent.

My Life and Work, 1922

Ford wrote it the other way round: “Failure is only the opportunity to more intelligently begin again.” The smoother version in circulation is not his sentence.

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Acc. 404·Q·0012·08
“I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.”

Thomas Edison
What it means. A reclassification of the same events, and not merely a cheerful one: an eliminated option is genuine information, and a search with ten thousand fewer places to look is a shorter search.

Edison said something like it, but this exact wording is first recorded in a 1967 magazine profile — thirty-six years after his death. His own documented version counts the failures differently each time he told it.

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Acc. 404·Q·0012·09
“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

Robert F. Kennedy
What it means. Ties the ceiling of what can be achieved to the size of the risk accepted, which makes a cautious record evidence of a small attempt rather than a safe one.

“Day of Affirmation” address, Cape Town, 6 June 1966

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Acc. 404·Q·0012·10
“A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.”

James Joyce
What it means. An error is treated as information available no other way. The word is portals rather than lessons — an opening, not a punishment.

Ulysses, 1922

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Acc. 404·Q·0012·11
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

Attributed to Winston Churchill
What it means. Success is described as a temperament rather than a record. The variable is not how often you fall but what survives the falling.

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Acc. 404·Q·0012·12
“There is no failure except in no longer trying.”

Attributed to Elbert Hubbard
What it means. Failure is redefined as a decision rather than an outcome, which reclassifies every other result as an interruption.

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Acc. 404·Q·0012·13
“Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”

Attributed to Truman Capote
What it means. Failure is given a function in the finished thing rather than being the part that got removed from it.

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Acc. 404·Q·0012·14
“There is no such thing as failure. There are only results.”

Attributed to Tony Robbins
What it means. A vocabulary argument: that calling an outcome a failure adds a judgement to it which was not in the data.

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Acc. 404·Q·0012·15
“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”

Oscar Wilde
What it means. A relabelling rather than a consolation. Nothing about the mistakes changes; only what they are called afterwards.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890

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Beckett is not saying what people think

“Fail again. Fail better” has been printed on posters and tech-office walls for years as an encouragement, which would have surprised its author. It comes from Worstward Ho, a late and extremely bleak Beckett text, and the promise it makes is not that persistence pays. It is that failure can be done with more skill. Oddly, that is the more useful version. It sets a target you can actually hit on a bad week, and it does not require believing that the next attempt will work.

Wilde to Beckett, and the joke keeps doing the work

The oldest line here is Oscar Wilde's from 1890 and the most famous is Beckett's from 1983, and a striking number of the lines between them are funny. That is not a curation choice. Straight-faced writing about failure does not circulate, because a sentence that takes failure seriously reads as either consolation or lecture. The joke is what makes the subject repeatable, which is why the best-known lines about it are all slightly cruel.

What is the best quote about failure?

Michael Jordan’s — “I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.” It separates the part that is partly luck from the part that is entirely a decision.

Where does “fail again, fail better” come from?

Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho (1983). It is usually quoted as motivation, though in context Beckett is offering better failure rather than eventual success.

What is the full version of “I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.”?

Edison said something like it, but this exact wording is first recorded in a 1967 magazine profile — thirty-six years after his death. His own documented version counts the failures differently each time he told it.

What is the full version of “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intellige…”?

Ford wrote it the other way round: “Failure is only the opportunity to more intelligently begin again.” The smoother version in circulation is not his sentence. The collection cites it to My Life and Work, 1922.

Next door, in the dictionary

zugzwang

the chess position where you must move and every legal move makes it worse.

Read the full entry →