Quotes About Mistakes

The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.

— Elbert Hubbard

If I wasn’t making mistakes, I wasn’t making decisions.

— Robert W. Johnson (founder of Johnson & Johnson)

The first undertakers in all great attempts commonly miscarry, and leave the advantages of their losses to those that come after them.

— Samuel Butler

Murder is always a mistake — one should never do anything one cannot talk about after dinner.

— Oscar Wilde

To err is human, to forgive, divine.

— Alexander Pope

I never made a mistake in my life, at least, no one that I could not explain away afterward.

— Rudyard Kipling

Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

— Robert Frost

No one is more liable to make mistakes than the man who acts only on reflection.

— Luc de Clapiers de Vauvenargues

It is the true nature of mankind to learn from mistakes, not from example.

— Fred Hoyle

10

If you shut your doors to all errors, truth will be shut out.

— Rabindranath Tagore

The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when no longer doubtful is the cause of half their errors.

— John Stuart Mill

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

— Oscar Wilde

If only one could have two lives: the first in which to make one’s mistakes, which seem as if they have to be made; and the second in which to profit by them.

— D. H. Lawrence

The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.

— Edward John Phelps

If we had no faults, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing them in others.

— Francois de La Rochefoucauld

When the defects of others are perceived with so much clarity, it is because one possesses them oneself.

— Jules Renard

Xerox: a trademark for a photocopying device that can make rapid reproductions of human error, perfectly.

— Merle L. Meacham

When you make a mistake, admit it.  If you don’t, you only make matters worse.

— Ward Cleaver

I don’t want to make the wrong mistake.

— Yogi Berra