Henry Rollins Quotes

Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not optional.

There's no learning without trying lots of ideas and failing lots of times.

That's the way it is with entrepreneurial people. You try one thing, it doesn't work, you try another.

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail

When a picture isn't realized, you pitch it in the fire and start another one!

The value of experimentation is not the trying. It's the trying again after the experiment fails.

I enjoy the fun of failure. It's fun to fail, I kept repeating. It's part of being ambitious; it's part of being creative. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing badly

You do stuff that gets a reaction and you think 'that's a winner' and then it never sees the light of day. But the thing with improvisation is that 90% of what you come up with won't be used and for good reason. But you keep going for the occasional gem that you might come up with. You do a scene and a lot of the time. We wouldn't cut. So, you come up with something that might be funny and then you go, 'alright, what else'? So, you kind of throw stuff against the wall and see what happens. But you've got to be prepared to make a fool of yourself.

When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. They seemed to go on the assumption that there is no failure greater than the failure of not trying, and so they continued to try in the face of repeated failures.

Founders: there is no shame in failing, take pride in that you have the guts to try something new.

When you are failing, you are forced to be creative, to dig deep and think, night and day.

If failure is not an option, neither is success. Innovation is just repeated failure till you come up with something that works.

Part of being in a band, being a painter, or starting a nonprofit is that you're going to make horrible mistakes and look like a total idiot, but you're never going to create that thing that really connects with people if you don't fail over and over and over again.

One reason people who spend a lot of time thinking about and working on a problem or a craft seem to find breakthroughs more often than everyone else is that they've failed more often than everyone else.

I made 5,127 prototypes of my vaccum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure.

If everything you try works, you aren't trying hard enough.

We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee to fail intelligently... to experiment over and over again and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.

It takes 10 million failures to find the right stuff.

Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn't mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease.

Every time you find something that doesn't work, you're a step closer to what does work.

Everyone should be commended for allowing people to make disasters, to make failures - you've just got to be sure that it's a magnificent failure and that, by creating a magnificent failure, you plant the seed.

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

To be successful at anything, you need the right to fail, not just occasionally.