Jim Lovell Quotes

My biggest emotion on Apollo 13 after the oxygen tank explosion was disappointment that we had lost the landing.

We got to the moon.

It feels bad when a film doesn't work; everyone puts in a lot of effort to make a movie. The positive side to failure - they make me work harder.

Some defeats are only installments to victory.

You have to be able to bounce back and deal with disappointment, failure and weaknesses, and a lot of that happens behind the scenes for teams that are very successful.

In my mind, the men and women of NASA are history's modern pioneers. They attempt the impossible, accept failure, and then back to the drawing board while the rest of us stand back and criticize.

Failure is a trickster with a keen sense of irony and cunning. It takes great delight in tripping one when success is almost within reach.

Nothing more aggravates ill success than the near approach of good.

I think that when NASA works on a moon shot, they know too well that all of the people working on it must do their job at 110 percent. Sometimes they probably put in 18 hour days, but they're aiming for the moon, and that's what counts.

I had five years of failure, really, before I had the first initial sign of success.

Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon. July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.

We're not done. We're just going to continue playing and hoping to put some wins together again.

Having in my life been bitten by the jaws of both victory and defeat, I must rush to add that success is to failure as butter pecan ice cream is to death.

I've done a lot of shows that didn't do well. You have to go in with a 50-50 take on it. If it goes well, fantastic. Hope for the best and plan for the worst.

I just assume that I'll fail at something for several years - that I'll try my hardest and still fail for several years. With writing, that turned out to be wrong. I tried my hardest and failed for about fifteen years.

I wonder how many times people give up just before a breakthrough - when they are on the very brink of success.

Sending a couple of guys to the Moon and bringing them back safely? That's a stunt! That's not historic.

If you read about the astronauts who went to the moon - the 12 who walked on it, and the others who orbited - all suffered serious mental trauma of one kind or another.

Like success, failure is many things to many people. With Positive Mental Attitude, failure is a learning experience, a rung on the ladder, a plateau at which to get your thoughts in order and prepare to try again.

Without failure there is no sweetness in success. There's no understanding of it.

I lucked out when I started to sing. I'd already experienced failing at everything else.

Our best successes often come after our greatest disappointments.

I have the LIFE magazine of the men walking on the moon.

Avoid problems, and you'll never be the one who overcame them.

It sucks to be the runner-up because I've been the runner-up for a long time in my career. I would get so close and then lose a huge movie and sometimes it's one kid who beats you out for three different movies. It's so frustrating at the time, but what's so great is the lesson you take from that, which is, 'I've got to get better.'