Error Quotes

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.

No one ever became great except through many and great mistakes.

Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn't.

It is better to be approximately right than to be precisely wrong.

You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination.

I did donate to Nixon. The biggest damn fool mistake I ever made.

[The devil] al­ways sends er­rors into the world in pairs—pairs of op­posites. And he al­ways en­cour­ages us to spend a lot of time think­ing about which is the worse.... He re­lies on your ex­tra dis­like of the one er­ror to draw you grad­u­ally into the op­po­site one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through be­tween both er­rors. We have no other con­cern than that with ei­ther of them.

The day is committed to error and floundering; success and achievement are matters of long range.

Failure is just another way to learn how to do something right.

I make plenty of mistakes and I'll make plenty more mistakes, too. That's part of the game. You've just got to make sure that the right things overcome the wrong ones.

The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.

There's no learning without trying lots of ideas and failing lots of times.

If you are not successful, that means you're not making enough mistakes.

The person who has no opinion will seldom be wrong.

A stupid person can make only certain, limited types of errors; the mistakes open to a clever fellow are far broader. But to the one who knows how smart he is compared to everyone else, the possibilities for true idiocy are boundless.

Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack for being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as often as the right ones. We get along in life this way.

There’s a bit of hidden magic in every mistake. The magic is called learning.

With every mistake, we must surely be learning.

With improvisation, I just do it. It might be a total failure but then you just throw the dice again.

The cautious seldom err.

I haven't failed, I've found 10,000 ways that don't work.

Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

Temperate, sincere, and intelligent inquiry and discussion are only to be dreaded by the advocates of error. The truth need not fear them...