Quotes about mistakes

There exists a black kingdom which the eyes of man avoid because its landscape fails signally to flatter them. This darkness, which he imagines he can dispense with in describing the light, is error with its unknown characteristics. Error is certainty's constant companion. Error is the corollary of evidence. And anything said about truth may equally well be said about error: the delusion will be no greater.

— Louis Aragon

Since nothing we intend is ever faultless, and nothing we attempt ever without error, and nothing we achieve without some measure of finitude and fallibility we call humanness, we are saved by forgiveness.

— David Augsburger

There is no original truth, only original error.

— Gaston Bachelard

I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right.

— Tallulah Bankhead

If I had my life to live again. I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.

— Tallulah Bankhead

An error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.

— Orlando A. Battista

All wrong doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best thing to do.

— Arnold Bennett

I have made mistakes, but I never made the mistake of claiming that I never made one.

— James Gordon Bennett

I made a wrong mistake

— Yogi Berra

The difference between greatness and mediocrity is often how an individual views a mistake...

— Nelson Boswell

It's okay to make mistakes. Mistakes are our teachers -- they help us to learn.

— John Bradshaw

The person interested in success has to learn to view failure as a healthy, inevitable part of the process of getting to the top.

— Dr. Joyce Brothers

To swear off making mistakes is very easy. All you have to do is to swear off having ideas.

— Leo Burnett

The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.

— Dale Carnegie

Error is discipline through which we advance.

— William Ellery Channing

All men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes.

— Winston Churchill

It is the nature of every person to error, but only the fool perseveres in error.

— Marcus T. Cicero

To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.

— Confucius

Don't argue for other people's weaknesses. Don't argue for your own. When you make a mistake, admit it, correct it, and learn from it -- immediately.

— Stephen R. Covey

There is a wheel on the affairs of men revolve and its mechanism is such that it prevents any man from being always fortunate.

— Croesus

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.

— Oliver Cromwell

Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.

— Salvador Dali

It's discouraging to make a mistake, but it's humiliating when you find out you're so unimportant that nobody noticed it.

— Chuck Daly

I love fools experiments. I am always making them.

— Charles R. Darwin

Truth is one, but error proliferates. Man tracks it down and cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth. But the ultimate atom will always essentially be an error, a miscalculation.

— Rene Daumal

Do not fear mistakes -- there are none.

— Miles Davis

I have learned more from my mistakes than from my successes.

— Sir Humphrey Davy

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The better a man is the more mistakes he will make for the more things he will try.

— Peter F. Drucker

Error is a supposition that pleasure and pain, that intelligence, substance, life, are existent in matter. Error is neither Mind nor one of Mind's faculties. Error is the contradiction of Truth. Error is a belief without understanding. Error is unreal because untrue. It is that which stemma to be and is not. If error were true, its truth would be error, and we should have a self-evident absurdity --namely, erroneous truth. Thus we should continue to lose the standard of Truth.

— Mary Baker Eddy

Truth is immortal; error is mortal.

— Mary Baker Eddy

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.

— Albert Einstein

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means --one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.

— George Eliot

Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement.

— Henry Ford

It is worse than a crime: it is a mistake.

— Joseph Fouche

When I reflect, as I frequently do, upon the felicity I have enjoyed, I sometimes say to myself, that were the offer made me, I would engage to run again, from beginning to end, the same career of life. All I would ask, should be the privilege of an author, to correct in a second edition, certain errors of the first.

— Benjamin Franklin

Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn't.

— Buckminster Fuller

There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed

— Bill Gates

People who make money often make mistakes, and even have major setbacks, but they believe they will eventually prosper, and they see every setback as a lesson to be applied in their move towards success.

— Jerry Gillies

I have made decisions that turned out to be wrong, and went back and did it another way, and still took less time than many who procrastinated over the original decision. Your brain is capable of handling 140, 000 million bits of information in one second, and if you take hours or days or weeks to reach a vital decision, you are short-circuiting your most valuable property.

— Jerry Gillies

We're all human and we all goof. Do things that may be wrong, but do something!

— Newt Gingrich

Mistakes are a fact of life it is the response to error that counts.

— Nikki Giovanni

A clever man commits no minor blunders.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The best fortune that can fall to a man is that which corrects his defects and makes up for his failings.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain and simple to express: Errand err again but less and less and less.

— Piet Hein

No man ever achieved worth-while success who did not, at one time or other, find himself with at least one foot hanging well over the brink of failure.

— Napoleon Hill

No mans error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it.

— Thomas Hobbes

The greatest mistake a man can make is to be afraid of making one.

— Elbert Hubbard

The greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, That is all there was! But twist them all together and you have something tremendous.

— Victor Hugo

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

— Aldous Huxley

She had an unequalled gift... of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.

— Henry James

To err is human, but when the eraser wears out ahead of the pencil, you're overdoing it.

— Josh Jenkins

I have a theory that the only original things we ever do are mistakes.

— Billy Joel

That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one.

— Samuel Johnson

Experience enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

— Franklin P. Jones

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

— James Joyce

A man's errors are his portals of discovery.

— James Joyce

Don't be afraid to fail. Don't waste energy trying to cover up failure. Learn from your failures and go on to the next challenge. It's OK to fail. If you're not failing, you're not growing.

— H. Stanley Judd

No one that ever lived has ever had enough power, prestige, or knowledge to overcome the basic condition of all life -- you win some and you lose some.

— Ken Keyes Jr.

People are so busy dreaming the American Dream, fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be, that they're all asleep at the switch. Consequently we are living in the Age of Human Error.

— Florence King

The trouble in America is not that we are making too many mistakes, but that we are making too few.

— Philip Knight

The freedom to fail is vital if you're going to succeed, most successful men fail time and time again, and it is a measure of their strength that failure merely propels them into some new attempt at success.

— Michael Korda

To err is human; to admit it, superhuman.

— Doug Larson

We can afford almost any mistake once.

— Lewis Lehr

You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can't possibly live long enough to make them all yourself.

— Samuel Levenson

To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, another is busy making mistakes and becoming superior.

— Henry C. Link

The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.

— Walter Lippmann

Sometimes we may learn more from a man's errors, than from his virtues.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.

— Sophia Loren

A man who cannot make mistakes cannot do anything.

— Bernard Magazine

Remember you will not always win. Some days, the most resourceful individual will taste defeat. But there is, in this case, always tomorrow -- after you have done your best to achieve success today.

— Maxwell Maltz

Whenever you make a mistake or get knocked down by life, don't look back at it too long. Mistakes are life's way of teaching you. Your capacity for occasional blunders is inseparable from your capacity to reach your goals. No one wins them all, and your failures, when they happen, are just part of your growth. Shake off your blunders. How will you know your limits without an occasional failure? Never quit. Your turn will come.

— Og Mandino

No man is beaten until his hope is annihilated, his confidence gone, As long as a man faces life hopefully, confidently, triumphantly, he is not a failure; he is not beaten until he turns his back on life.

— Orison Swett Marden

No man fails who does his best...

— Orison Swett Marden

There can be no failure to a man who has not lost his courage, his character, his self respect, or his self-confidence. He is still a King.

— Orison Swett Marden

Lord, deliver me from the person who never makes a mistake, and also from the person who makes the same mistake twice.

— William James Mayo

The value of action is that we make mistakes; mistakes show us what we need to learn.

— Peter Mcwilliams

Mistakes are merely steps up the ladder.

— Paul J. Meyer

Consider every mistake you do make as an asset.

— Paul J. Meyer

Don't be afraid to make a mistake. But make sure you don't make the same mistake twice.

— Akio Morita

The sooner you make your first five thousand mistakes the sooner you will be able to correct them.

— Kimon Nicolaides

What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

A man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.

— Julius Robert Oppenheimer

Give me a fruitful error anytime, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections.

— Vilfredo Pareto

I do not fear failure. I only fear the slowing up of the engine inside of me which is pounding, saying, Keep going, someone must be on top, why not you?

— George S. Patton

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

— Joseph Chilton Pearce

It is not easy, but you have to be willing to make mistakes. And the earlier you make those mistakes, the better.

— Jane Cahill Pfeiffer

If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down but the staying down.

— Mary Pickford

The best may slip, and even the most cautious fall; but he is more than human who errors not at all.

— Pomfret

A man should never be ashamed to own that he is wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

— Alexander Pope

Mistakes are stepping stones to success.

— Charles E. Popplestone

An old error is always more popular than a new truth.

— German Proverb

It is necessary for you to learn from others' mistakes. You will not live long enough to make them all yourself.

— Hyman G. Rickover

We'll do all right if we can capitalize on our mistakes.

— Mickey Rivers

The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything

— Theodore Roosevelt

It is sometimes well for a blatant error to draw attention to overmodest truths.

— Jean Rostand

Falsity cannot keep an idea from being beautiful; there are certain errors of such ingenuity that one could regret their not ranking among the achievements of the human mind.

— Jean Rostand

It isn't making mistakes that's critical; it's correcting them and getting on with the principal task.

— Donald Rumsfeld

I have found that I always learn more from my mistakes than from my successes. If you aren't making some mistakes, you aren't taking enough chances.

— John Sculley