quotations about mistakes
Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Cambridge Thirty Years Ago
Mistakes are information about what works and what doesn't work. They have nothing to do with your worth or intelligence. They are merely steps to a goal.
JOHN BRADSHAW
Healing the Shame that Binds You
If you want to condemn yourself for the mistakes you've made, let's be fair, that means you've got to congratulate yourself for all the good things you've done. It's okay to say, "God, I wish I'd done this; yeah, but I did do that." Then it kind of balances out.
TIM ALLEN
Reader's Digest, October 2001
You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you won't discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and fearing yourself.
GENEEN ROTH
Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything
An error is not a mistake until you refuse to correct it.
GRENVILLE KLEISER
Dictionary of Proverbs
Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.
AL FRANKEN
Oh, the Things I Know
The noblest spirits are most sensible of the possibility of Error: and the weakest do most hardly lay down an Error.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake, as by never repeating it.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Our failures or mistakes give us important feedback on what we need to change or concentrate on in the future.
DANA LIGHTMAN
Power Optimism
She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.
HENRY JAMES
"Greville Fane", The Real Thing and Other Tales
I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being--forgive me--rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
The errors of a man are what make him really lovable.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
To err is human, but it feels divine.
MAE WEST
The Wit and Wisdom of Mae West
Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
When people once are in the wrong,
Each line they add is much too long;
Who fastest walks, but walks astray,
Is only furthest from his way.
MATTHEW PRIOR
Alma
Mistakes are the growing pains of wisdom, the assessments we pay on our stock of experience, the raw material of error to be transformed into higher living. Without them there would be no individual growth, no progress, no conquest.
WILLIAM GEORGE JORDAN
The Crown of Individuality
I never make the same mistake twice. I make it five or six times, you know, just to be sure.
ANONYMOUS
Life, like war, is a series of mistakes; and he is not the best Christian nor the best general who makes the fewest false steps. Poor mediocrity may secure that; but he is the best who wins the most splendid victories by the retrieval of mistakes. Forget mistakes; organize victory out of mistakes.
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON
attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers
Even honest men mistake oftener in their own favor than in other peoples.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters and Reflections
To go wrong in one's own way is better then to go right in someone else's.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
Crime and Punishment