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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"We are, in a way, temporary ambulatory repositories for our nucleic acids. This does not deny our humanity; it does not prevent us from pursuing the good, the true and the beautiful. But it would be a great mistake to ignore where we have come from in our attempt to determine where we are going."
"The mistakes we make when we try to imagine our personal futures are also lawful, regular, and systematic. They, too, have a pattern that tells us about the powers and limits of foresight in much the same way that optical illusions tell us about the powers and limits of eyesight."
"You're living life in real time, man, and we' ve got a good amount of work to do for each other. Hiding is not an option and you're going to step out and you're going to make mistakes."
"People are considered as areas that resist light, mistakes in the air, collision sweet spots. At the time of this writing, the whole world is a crime scene: People eat space with their bodies; they are rain decayers; the wind is slaughtered when they move. A retaliation is probably coming. Should a person cease to move, she would cease to kill the sky, and the world might begin to recover."
"When people in government [make mistakes], they don't say, those people in the government. They say, we've got a problem to solve."
"If you live your life only following the path you think is approved or acceptable, or the one you think is expected of you, you’ll be making a huge mistake. Not a single successful person… has ever done great things because they played it safe. You’ve got to be true to yourself."
"When we are confronted by failure and mistakes, we can leave them behind and go on with our lives."
"Anyone who can't learn from other people's mistakes simply can't learn, and that;s all there is to it. There is value in the wrong way of doing things. The knowledge gained from errors contributes to our knowledge base."
"And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean."
"The forming of general maxims from particular observation is a very nice operation; and nothing is more usual, from haste or a narrowness of mind, which sees not on all sides, than to commit mistakes in this particular."
"I'm good at my job for a midwestern American. Maybe it's because people in fashion often mistake common sense for genius. I mean, some model walks down the runway in an impossible outfit, and I state the obvious ? no one is going to wear that ? and people are like, you're brilliant!."
"I don't know if I'll ever be a master at anything, but I think that's a mistake for me personally. I don't know how much it's about the journey, but it's more about the process."
"We must make a clear distinction between the nature of Chairman Mao's mistakes and the crimes of Lin Biao and the Gang of Four. For most of his life, Chairman Mao did very good things. Many times he saved the Party and the state from crisis. Without him the Chinese people would, at the very least, have spent much more time groping in the dark."
"Happiness is the ultimate goal...The mistake we make is not going for happiness first. If we did, everything else would follow."
"It's an intelligence. It's not - you know, that's the other mistake we make, is we tend to project how we think of ourselves onto divinity. So divinity being infinite, unbounded, eternal, beyond space and time, is not a he or a she, it's a field of intelligence."
"Most of us have made the mistake that after they crossed the Red Sea they spent 40 years in the wilderness fighting amongst each other."
"Being born was the worse and the first mistake I ever made. The doctor didn't spank me, he just slapped me in the face."
"My mistakes are no worse than yours."
"We talked about how easy it was to make the mistake of anthropomorphizing animals, and projecting our own feelings and perceptions on to them, where they were inappropriate and didn't fit. We simply had no idea what it was like being an extremely large lizard, and neither for that matter did the lizard, because it was not self-conscious about being an extremely large lizard, it just got on with the business of being one. To react with revulsion to its behavior was to make the mistake of applying criteria that are only appropriate to the business of being human."
"If both John McCain and Obama were given a sip of truth serum, both would admit they made serious mistakes in choosing running mates in 2008."
