This one is genuinely his. It belongs to Ziglar’s first book, See You at the Top (Pelican Publishing, first published 1975), where Wikiquote documents the fuller form “failure is an event, it is not a person — yesterday ended last night” in the revised 2000 edition; the tightened one-liner everyone shares is also his, printed verbatim in books he wrote himself.
“Failure is an event, not a person” Zig Ziglar, See You at the Top (Pelican Publishing; sentence documented in the revised 25th-anniversary edition, 2000). The shorter form "Failure is an event, not a person" is also Ziglar's, printed in his own later books. Verified via Quotle.info · Verbatim: “Failure is an event, it is not a person — yesterday ended last night.”
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In context
Evoking the world of Zig Ziglar — American salesman, motivational speaker and author of See You at the Top. Theme: "Failure is an event, not a person". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Failure is an event, not a person". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Revised 25th-anniversary edition, Pelican, 2000 — the edition Wikiquote cites
Originally titled
Biscuits, Fleas, and Pump Handles
Author
Zig Ziglar (1926–2012)
The usual devastating put-downs imply that a person is basically bad, rather than that he is a person who sometimes does bad things. Obviously, there is a vast difference between a “bad” person and a person who does something bad. Besides, failure is an event, it is not a person — yesterday ended last night.
From the chapter on self-image · revised 2000 edition
Both forms are Ziglar’s, and the printed record does not settle which came first. Wikiquote documents this fuller wording in the revised 2000 edition; the tightened “failure is an event, not a person” appears word for word in his own Success for Dummies, You Can Reach the Top, Born to Win and Inspiration: 365 Days a Year. The digitized 1977, 1979 and 1991 Pelican printings carry the put-downs paragraph but not the failure sentence.
Wikiquote’s sourced section ↗ files the sentence under See You at the Top — specifically under its heading for the revised 2000 edition — in the full form “failure is an event, it is not a person — yesterday ended last night,” listing the short popular wording as a variant.
See You at the Top was first published in 1975 and has been reprinted by Pelican Publishing ever since, so the text is well inside US copyright — nothing here is public domain. The sentence is quoted above as a short excerpt for identification and commentary; the book itself remains the property of Ziglar’s estate and its publisher.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What goes wrong with this one
The attribution is right — unusually, for a motivational one-liner. What goes wrong is the wording, the missing source, and a near-twin credited to somebody else entirely.
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Rival creditWilliam D. Brown Near-identical variant
Quotation collections routinely print “Failure is an event, never a person” over the name William D. Brown, with no book or page attached. Full-text search finds that wording in anthologies crediting him and in Ziglar’s own books ↗ — it runs “failure is an event, never a person; an attitude, not an outcome” in You Can Reach the Top, What I Learned on the Way to the Top and Zig Ziglar’s Little Instruction Book — but never in a book Brown wrote. Brown’s Welcome Stress! was published in 1983 — after Ziglar’s book was already in print.
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WordingZig Ziglar Trimmed
In the book the clause does not stand alone: it reads “failure is an event, it is not a person — yesterday ended last night,” as Wikiquote’s sourced entry records ↗. The share-card version keeps the slogan and drops the clause that explains it.
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Missing sourceZig Ziglar Uncited
Aggregators carry “Remember that failure is an event, not a person” with no work named at all. That prefixed form is also authentically Ziglar’s — it turns up in Born to Win and Raising Positive Kids in a Negative World ↗ — but the quote sites cannot tell you that, because they never checked.
✓The thought and the words are both Ziglar’s. Wikiquote’s sourced section ↗ places the sentence in See You at the Top, citing the revised 2000 edition; the surrounding paragraph is present in the digitized Pelican printings ↗ of the book.
Context
Why the sentence was built this way
Ziglar spent his career selling to people who had just been told no, and the line does a very specific job: it moves “failure” out of the identity column and into the events column. In the See You at the Top text Wikiquote quotes — the revised 2000 edition — it arrives at the end of a paragraph about put-downs, the argument being that a person who does something bad is not the same thing as a bad person. The failure sentence is the punchline of that argument, not a standalone aphorism.
That is also why the tail matters. In the book the clause is followed immediately by “yesterday ended last night,” which supplies the reason the first half is true: an event is bounded in time, and a person is not. Strip the tail, as most quote cards do, and you keep the slogan but lose the argument.
Failure is an event, it is not a person — yesterday ended last night.
He kept reusing the line for the rest of his life. Full-text search turns it up in Raising Positive Kids in a Negative World, Something Else to Smile About, You Can Reach the Top, Success for Dummies, Zig Ziglar’s Little Instruction Book and Born to Win — sometimes as “failure is an event, not a person,” sometimes with the “Remember that…” prefix that quote sites now print.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1926–2012 · American salesman, motivational speaker and author of See You at the Top
Hilary Hinton “Zig” Ziglar was born in Coffee County, Alabama, and started selling WearEver cookware door to door in 1947 — a job that became the raw material for four decades of speaking. He co-founded American Salesmasters in 1963 and established Ziglar, Inc. in 1977, writing more than thirty books along the way. His signature move was rhetorical rather than tactical: separating what a person did from what a person is, which is exactly the work this sentence does.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Zig Ziglar, See You at the Top (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, first published 1975). Surrounding paragraph confirmed by full-text search of the digitized Pelican printings (1977, 1979 and 1991) held by the Internet Archive; the quoted sentence is cited to See You at the Top, revised 25th-anniversary edition (Pelican, 2000), per Wikiquote. The book was originally issued under the title Biscuits, Fleas, and Pump Handles.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Failure is an event, not a person’?” Last verified 25 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/failure-is-an-event-not-a-person/