At first I wasn't sure that I had the talent, but I did know I had a fear of failure, and that fear compelled me to fight off anything that might abet it.

I bought my first camera in Seattle, Washington. Only paid about seven dollars and fifty cents for it.

Washington, D.C. in 1942 was not the easiest place in the world for a Negro to get along.

And I think that after nearly 85 years upon this planet that I have a right after working so hard at showing the desolation and the poverty, to show something beautiful for somebody as well.

You know, the camera is not meant just to show misery.

But I was very disappointed that I didn't get a chance to go overseas with that group, might not have gotten back but I wanted very much to go because there's not much of a record of the exploits of the first Negro fighter group.

There's another horizon out there, one more horizon that you have to make for yourself and let other people discover it, and someone else will take it further on, you know.

The man at Kodak told me the shots were very good and if I kept it up, they would give me an exhibition. Later, Kodak gave me my first exhibition.

I've been with Life now for seventeen years and I have written several articles for them and will be doing more writing and do at least two assignments a year besides my writing.

So I went to Chicago in 1940, I think, '41, and the photographs that I made there, aside from fashion, were things that I was trying to express in a social conscious way.

The subject matter is so much more important than the photographer.

People in millenniums ahead will know what we were like in the 1930's and the thing that, the important major things that shaped our history at that time. This is as important for historic reasons as any other.

I suffered evils, but without allowing them to rob me of the freedom to expand.

I was there less than a year before I was assigned to the Paris bureau. I spent two years there and, in fact, before I even went on the staff I was sent to Europe to do assignments which they wouldn't normally do for a young photographer just starting out.

The photographer begins to feel big and bloated and so big he can't walk through one of these doors because he gets a good byline; he gets notices all over the world and so forth; but they're really - the important people are the people he photographs.

I think maybe the rural influence in my life helped me in a sense, of knowing how to get close to people and talk to them and get my work done.

But I do feel a little teeny right now that I'm just about ready to start, and winter is entering. Half past autumn has arrived.

And now, I feel at 85, I really feel that I'm just ready to start.

At first I wasn't sure that I had the talent, but I did know I had a fear of failure, and that fear compelled me to fight off anything that might abet it.

I'd become sort of involved in things that were happening to people. No matter what color they be, whether they be Indians, or Negroes, the poor white person or anyone who was I thought more or less getting a bad shake.

Enthusiasm is the electricity of life. How do you get it? You act enthusiastic until you make it a habit.

You know the camera is not meant just to show misery.

The camera could be a very powerful instrument against discrimination against poverty against racism.

Enthusiasm is the electricity of life. How do you get it You act enthusiastic until you make it a habit.

Achievement is not always success, while reputed failure often is. It is honest endeavor, persistent effort to do the best possible under any and all circumstances.

A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.

I hate failure and that divorce was a Number One failure in my eyes. It was the worst period of my life. Neither Desi nor I have been the same since, physically or mentally.

Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.

It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.

The key to accepting responsibility for your life is to accept the fact that your choices, every one of them, are leading you inexorably to either success or failure, however you define those terms.

If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.

I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.

With failure, you just try again.

In God's world, for those who are in earnest, there is no failure. No work truly done, no word earnestly spoken, no sacrifice freely made, was ever made in vain.

The moral turpitude of the boys of today appears to center in their failure to concentrate on any particular objective long enough to obtain their maximum results.

Success and failure are greatly overrated. But failure gives you a whole lot more to talk about.

The failure of Socialism since 1945 is that whilst encouraging us all, the creators of wealth, to produce less through strikes, it has caused us all to demand a higher level of our own product.

The assertion of failure coming from such persons does not mean that Mr. Mill failed to promote the practical success of those objects the advocacy of which forms the chief feature of his political writings.

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.

Failure is not our only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others.

Don't come home a failure.

However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure.

Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

It is Basic Management 101 that if you reward failure you are going to get more failure, and if you want success you should reward success. But if you look at the way this administration has approached national security, they have kind of got that principle backwards.

A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.

Spend enough time around success and failure, and you learn a reverence for possibility.

Success breeds success, and failure leads to a sort of fallow period.

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

You must accept that you might fail; then, if you do your best and still don't win, at least you can be satisfied that you've tried. If you don't accept failure as a possibility, you don't set high goals, you don't branch out, you don't try - you don't take the risk.