Many of life’s failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

The saying frames “failure” less as a definitive outcome than as a decision to stop too soon. It suggests that the distance between apparent defeat and genuine success is often unknowable from within the struggle, so perseverance becomes a rational strategy when progress is incremental and feedback is ambiguous. The line also functions as a moral lesson about grit: people may misread temporary setbacks as final verdicts, forfeiting results that would have arrived with one more attempt, revision, or experiment. Attributed to Edison, it resonates with popular narratives of invention as iterative trial-and-error, even if the attribution itself is uncertain.

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
“Many of life’s failures are those who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
“Many of life’s failures are people who didn’t realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”