Quotes about Mistakes

I'll never be a non-stumbler. I'll be a forgiven stumbler, but never a non-stumbler.

Guilt starts as a feeling of failure.

I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.

Sometimes you find out what you are supposed to be doing by doing the things you are not supposed to do.

As a manager, you have to accept the fact that people will make mistakes, but not intentionally, and that mistakes are the price of learning and self-sufficiency.

Another common misconception: You need to learn from your mistakes. What do you really learn from mistakes? You might learn what not to do again, but how valuable is that? You still don't know what you should do next. Contrast that with learning from your successes.

Sometimes life seems like a match between oneself and one's gaolors. The gaolers, of course, are one's mistakes; and the question is, who'll hold out longest? When I think of that, life instead of being too long, seems as short as a winter day....

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

I've fallen on my face. I've made mistakes. I've got plenty of records where I listen back, and I think, 'I wouldn't've done that.'

We all remain who we are. But on the way to healing or liberation we have to do what the Romans called agere contra: we have to act against the grain of our natural compulsions. This requires clear decisions. Because it does not happen by itself, it is in a way unnatural or supernatural . . . (we) simply have to cut loose now and then, and in the process . . . make mistakes.

One of the great surprises is that humans come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing their own contradictions, and making friends with their own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting. We tend to endure them more than communicate with them, because they have little to communicate.

The great and merciful surprise is that we come to God not by doing it right but by doing it wrong!