Dean Kamen Quotes

You have to experience and take defeat in any and all aspects of life so you can be better and stronger.

Literally falling on the ice and having to pick yourself up in front of thousands of people is not an easy thing to do. The thing that you learn is to pick yourself back up, to learn from your mistakes.

There is a lot of difference between failure and defeat. Failure is when you are defeated and neither learn nor contribute anything.

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.

Any personal crisis - you have to use it to get stronger.

Sometimes to go forward you've got to go to the depths of your own personal despair and claw yourself back. From that point, no matter what happens, you know you can do it.

I'm proud of the way I've dealt with setbacks. It's hard when you feel down and you think, 'Why is the world doing this to me?' But you have to pick yourself up again. That's what makes you a better athlete.

What used to drive me was the fact that I wanted to be better than everybody at something. One of my best qualities is that I used whatever other people found to be an adverse thing to be a positive thing for myself.

Failure and things of this sort - you can take it one of two ways. You can either let that hurt you and really affect the way that you live your life in the future, or you can use that as an opportunity for growth.

It makes one a better person to have had hardships and to have overcome hardships and not to blame anybody else for your mistakes.

Failure is an enigma. You worry about it, and it teaches you something.

I struggled to get through high school. I didn't get to go to college. But it made me realize you can do anything if you want to bad enough.

Failure's not a bad thing. It builds character. It makes you stronger.

You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path. Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure. Persist! The world needs all you can give.

Your ability to adapt to failure, and navigate your way out of it, absolutely 100 percent makes you who you are.

I think the personal stories that I tell in my life, I think, sort of do add up to say that you can fail and fail and fail again and continue to move forward.

It helps to know how to lose. You know it is not the end of the world, and you pick yourself up and move ahead.

When you are having a rough day... you think you are failing. But failure is a part of life. It's about building character and growing.

Losing will make me a better fighter.

When you have bad moments, you have to improve. You have to become stronger to deal with it, and I believe I have become stronger.

You're going to fail. It's how you respond to that failure that kind of defines you as a person, as an athlete.

Instead of letting things break you, look at failures as opportunities to get better. Become unbreakable.

I grew up at a park, and everybody was always for themselves. I was the smallest, so I had to find a way to get my own rebounds, and it always translated throughout my whole career.

I'm just grateful that I didn't give up on myself and I just kept plugging at it.

My hardest lesson has been my most fruitful, too: that when people don't believe in me, I can prove them wrong.