Mistakes

• It is easier to do a job right than to explain why you didn't. — Martin Van Buren
• "Did you sleep well?" "No, I made a couple of mistakes." — Steven Wright
• A computer isn't smart enough to make a mistake. Computers are dumb. Fast and efficient and dumb. No computer ever had an idea. — Anonymous
• A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation for the editor. — Ring Lardner
• A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. — George Bernard Shaw
• A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience. — Doug Larson
• A mistake is simply another way of doing things. — Katharine Graham
• A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. — James Joyce
• Allowing an unimportant mistake to pass without comment is a wonderful social grace. — Judith Martin
• The invention of the teenager was a mistake. Once you identify a period of life in which people get to stay out late but don't have to pay taxes — naturally, nobody wants to live any other way. — Judith Martin
• All men make mistakes, but married men find out about them sooner. — Red Skelton
• Anyone can make a mistake. A fool insists on repeating it. — Robertine Maynard
• An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field. — Niels Bohr
• Be cautious, but not too cautious; do not be too much afraid of making a mistake; a man who never makes a mistake will make nothing. — John Lubbock
• Don't be afraid to make a mistake, your readers might like it. — William Randolph Hearst
• Half our mistakes in life arise from feeling where we ought to think, and thinking where we ought to feel. — John Churton Collins
• Experience enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. — Franklin P. Jones
• I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge. — Igor Stravinsky
• I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850. — Henry Kissinger
• I must tell you I take terrible risks. Because my playing is very clear, when I make a mistake you hear it. Never be afraid to dare. — Vladimir Horowitz
• I don't want to make the wrong mistake. — "Yogi" Berra
• If I had my life to live over, I would try to make more mistakes. I would relax. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would pick more daisies. I would have more actual troubles and fewer imaginary ones. — Don Herold
• I never made a mistake in my life; at least, never one that I couldn't explain away afterwards. — Rudyard Kipling
• If it is a mistake of the head and not the heart don't worry about it; that's the way we learn. — Earl Warren
• I really cannot know whether I am or am not the Genius you are pleased to call me, but I am very willing to put up with the mistake, if it be one. — George Gordon Byron
• If only we could have two lives: the first in which to make one's mistakes, which seem as if they have to be made; and the second in which to profit by them. — D. H. Lawrence
• If you can't make a mistake, you can't make anything. — Marva Collins
• Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good. — Bertolt Brecht
• In a few minutes a computer can make a mistake so great that it would take many men many months to equal it. — Merle Meacham
• It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done. — Samuel Smiles
• We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery. — Samuel Smiles
• Lord, deliver me from the man who never makes a mistake, and also from the man who makes the same mistake twice. — William Mayo
• It is easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit to forgive them for having witnessed your own. — Jessamyn West
• Never mistake endurance for hospitality. — Anonymous
• It is just as damaging to think you are superior as it is to think you are inferior. People who think they are superior often find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn from others or to profit from their own mistakes. — Allen Fay
• One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake. — Anton Chekhov
• It is only those who never do anything who never make mistakes. — A. Favre
• People who don't take risks generally make about 2 big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about 2 big mistakes a year. — Peter Drucker
• It isn't making mistakes that's critical; it's correcting them and getting on with the principal task. — Donald Rumsfeld
• He had an unequaled gift...of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities. — Henry James, Jr.
• Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself. — Martin Vanbee
• That little white ball is always staring back at you, daring you to make a mistake. — Sam Snead
• Make sure you generate a reasonable number of mistakes. — Fletcher Byrom
• The doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines. — Frank Lloyd Wright
• Many times the best way, in fact the only way, to learn is through mistakes. A fear of making mistakes can bring individuals to a standstill, to a dead center. Fear is the wicked wand that transforms human beings into vegetables. — George Brown
• The fellow who never makes a mistake takes his orders from one who does. — Herbert Prochnow
• Never mistake motion for action. — Ernest Hemingway
• The greatest mistake I made was not to die in office. — Dean Acheson
• The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one. — Elbert Hubbard
• The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it's considered to be your style. — Fred Astaire
• The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything. — Edward John Phelps
• There is glory in a great mistake. — Nathalia Crane
• There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth — not going all the way, and not starting. — Buddha
• To make mistakes is human; to stumble is commonplace; to be able to laugh at yourself is maturity. — William A. Ward
• Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake. — Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower
• When a bureaucrat makes a mistake and continues to make it, it usually becomes the new policy. — James H. Boren
• When I was young I was sure of everything; in a few years, having been mistaken a thousand times, I was not half so sure of most things as I was before; at present, I am hardly sure of anything but what God has revealed to me. — John Wesley
• He is always right who suspects that he makes mistakes. — Spanish Proverb
• It is the true nature of mankind to learn from mistakes, not from example. — Fred Hoyle
• When I make a mistake, it's a beaut! — Fiorello La Guardia
• Mistakes live in the neighborhood of truth and therefore delude us. — Rabindranath Tagore