Motivational Quotes

Mistakes

I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice.

- W. Somerset Maugham

Best Quotes about Mistakes

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

Henry James

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.

King, Florence

I love fools experiments. I am always making them.

Darwin, Charles R.

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

Jones, Franklin P.

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

Bankhead, Tallulah

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.

Gillies, Jerry

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

Bennett, James Gordon

Things could be worse. Suppose your errors were counted and published every day, like those of a baseball player.

It's very easy to forgive others their mistakes, it takes more gut and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.

West, Jessamyn

10.

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

Rumsfeld, Donald

11.

The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be.

Walter Bagehot

12.

Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.

Soros, George

13.

I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off one's own bat than by doing the right thing on somebody's else advice.

W. Somerset Maugham

14.

We can afford almost any mistake once.

Lehr, Lewis

15.

There is no original truth, only original error.

Bachelard, Gaston

16.

We must not say every mistake is a foolish one.

Cicero

17.

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

Burnett, Leo

18.

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.

Franklin, Benjamin

19.

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.

Daumal, Rene

20.

I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones.

21.

A man's errors are his portals of discovery.

Joyce, James

22.

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

Pareto, Vilfredo

23.

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

Morita, Akio

24.

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.

Pope, Alexander

25.

A clever man commits no minor blunders.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

26.

Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise.

Cato the Elder

27.

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.

Aragon, Louis

28.

Mistakes are stepping stones to success.

Popplestone, Charles E.

29.

We don't make mistakes, we only have happy accidents.

30.

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

Giovanni, Nikki

31.

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

Pomfret

32.

The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.

Elbert Hubbard

33.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

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

35.

It is said that only a fool learns from his own mistakes, a wise man from the mistakes of others.

36.

Mistakes, obviously, show us what needs improving. Without mistakes, how would we know what we had to work on?

Peter McWilliams

37.

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.

Rostand, Jean

38.

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.

Hugo, Victor

39.

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

Oppenheimer, Julius Robert

40.

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

Gingrich, Newt

41.

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.

Augsburger, David

42.

There is nothing wrong with making mistakes. Just don't respond with errors.

43.

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

Mayo, William James

44.

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

Pfeiffer, Jane Cahill

45.

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

Fuller, Buckminster

46.

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

Nicolaides, Kimon

47.

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.

Keyes Jr., Ken

48.

It's always helpful to learn from your mistakes because then your mistakes seem worthwhile.

Garry Marshall

49.

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

Daly, Chuck

50.

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