Mistake quotes
6.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside mistake — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"George McGovern, for all his mistakes... understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon."
"Time passes unhindered. When we make mistakes, we cannot turn the clock back and try again. All we can do is use the present well."
"And above all, children need our unconditional love - whether they succeed or make mistakes; when life is easy and when life is tough."
"Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it's no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing."
"The two worst strategic mistakes to make are acting prematurely and letting an opportunity slip."
"The biggest mistake of the man is that he thinks he doesn't deserve the good and the bad things from his life."
"It is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer (two people who don't know something are no better than one), will tend to slow down progress, and will make the task incredibly expensive."
"The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal."
"A person can't brood over one mistake, or waste time feeling sorry for himself, or take on any sort of persecution complex. Today I realize that once you have made a mistake, you must accept it, profit by it, and then totally dismiss it from your mind."
"A blunder at the right moment is better than cleverness at the wrong time."
"It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes."
"Where you have complexity, by nature you can have fraud and mistakes. You'll have more of that than in a company that shovels sand from a river and sells it. This will always be true of financial companies, including ones run by governments. If you want accurate numbers from financial companies, you're in the wrong world."
"Forgetting your mistakes is a terrible error if you are trying to improve your cognition."
"If the gentleman is not serious, he will not be respected, and his learning will not be on a firm foundation. He considers loyalty and faithfulness to be fundamental, has no friends who are not like him, and when he has made mistakes, he is not afraid of correcting them."
"It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry."
"Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships."
"Part of making good decisions in business is recognizing the poor decisions you've made and why they were poor. I've made lots of mistakes. I'm going to make more. It's the name of the game. You don't want to expect perfection in yourself. You want to strive to do your best. It's too demanding to expect perfection in yourself."
"The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, 'How do you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?' We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake."
"You and your friends...always together, No time for the B-I-G, so I'm O-U-T. The sex was great, but the headaches I can't take. I think I made a very big mistake."
"It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes."
