Great Mistakes Quotes

It is the privilege of true genius, And especially genius who opens up a new path, To make great mistakes with impunity

I think Franklin Roosevelt was a lousy president. What he did- which is to impose this great nanny state on America- was a great mistake.

It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must be a little in love with death!

Laughing at our mistakes can lengthen our own life. Laughing at someone else's can shorten it.

It is a law of our humanity, that man must know both good and evil; he must know good through evil. There never was a principle but what triumphed through much evil; no man ever progressed to greatness and goodness but through great mistakes.

In my judgment, a great mistake has been made by well meaning and zealous men, through treating error and infidelity with altogether too much respect.

I've learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success.

I am always sorry to hear that such and such a person is going to school to be educated. This is a great mistake. If the person is to get the benefit of what we call education, he must educate himself, under the direction of the teacher.

It is a very easy thing to devise good laws; the difficulty is to make them effective. The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws; and consequently the greatest art of a politician is to render vices serviceable to the cause of virtue.

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

I thought for a change I would give up drinking, and it was a great mistake, and, although I reduced the size of my nose and improved my beauty, my stomach suffered.

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.

As long as the world is turning and spinning, we're gonna be dizzy and we're gonna make mistakes.

It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.

I think we all wish we could erase some dark times in our lives. But all of life's experiences, bad and good, make you who you are. Erasing any of life's experiences would be a great mistake.

Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has.

It is a very great mistake to suppose, as a few English cooks still do, that spaghetti and macaroni should be soaked in water before cooking.

There was a patient look on the old man's face, as if the world were a great mistake and he had nobody with whom to speak his own language or find companionship.

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.

We made a great mistake in the beginning of our struggle, and I fear, in spite of all we can do, it will prove to be a fatal mistake. We appointed all our worst generals to command our armies, and all our best generals to edit the newspapers

The great mistake made by most of the Lord’s people is in hoping to discover in themselves that which is to be found in Christ alone.

It is a great mistake for men to give up paying compliments, for when they give up saying what is charming, they give up thinking what is charming.

The thinker makes a great mistake when he asks after cause and effect. They both together make up the indivisible phenomenon.

There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.

Sometimes we think we are too busy to pray. That is a great mistake, for praying is a saving of time.

In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.

That is the great mistake about the affections. It is not the rise and fall of empires, the birth and death of kings, or the marching of armies that move them most. When they answer from their depths, it is to the domestic joys and tragedies of life.

I feel that all knowledge should be in the free-trade zone. Your knowledge, my knowledge, everybody's knowledge should be made use of. I think people who refuse to use other people's knowledge are making a big mistake. Those who refuse to share their knowledge with other people are making a great mistake, because we need it all. I don't have any problem about ideas I got from other people. If I find them useful, I'll just ease them right in and make them my own.

If you don't make mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems. And that's a big mistake.

It is a great mistake to think that the extremist is a better man than the moderate. Usually the difference is not that he is morally stronger, but that he is intellectually weaker. He is not more virtuous. He is simply more foolish.

Babe Ruth made a great mistake when he gave up pitching.

I made one great mistake in my life-when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made but there was some justification-the danger that the Germans would make them.

A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

A doctrine is something that pins you down to a given mode of conduct and dozens of situations which you cannot foresee, which is a great mistake in principle. When the word 'containment' was used in my 'X' article, it was used with relation to a certain situation then prevailing, and as a response to it.

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

Mistakes are the usual bridge between inexperience and wisdom.

It is a very great mistake to imagine that the object of loyalty is the authority and interest of one individual man, however dignified by the applause or enriched by the success of popular actions.

The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of the engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or defeat. Let nature take its course, and your tools will strike at the right moment.

Don't get upset with your imperfections. It's a great mistake because it leads nowhere - to get angry because you are angry, upset at being upset, depressed at being depressed, disappointed because you are disappointed. So don't fool yourself. Simply surrender to the Power of God's Love, which is always greater than our weakness.

This is what I like, sitting at a table and watching people go by. It does something to your outlook on life. The Anglo-Saxons make a great mistake not staring at people from a sidewalk table.

Ambitious men spend their youth in rendering themselves worthy of patronage; it is their great mistake. While the foolish creatures are laying in stores of knowledge and energy, so that they shall not sink under the weight of responsible posts that recede from them, schemers come and go who are wealthy in words and destitute of ideas, astonish the ignorant, and creep into the confidence of those who have a little knowledge.

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

Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy.

"Failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down.

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic.

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

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.

The fact that we did not give the demonstrators in Iran our moral support when a young woman named Neda bled to death in the streets of Iran will go down as one of the great mistakes of the 21st Century.