Quotessence
Home / Topics / Mistakes Quotes

Mistakes Quotes

Browse 1610 quotes about Mistakes.

Mistakes Quotes

“The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It’s the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. The problem is not slipping up; the problem is thinking that if you can not do something perfectly, then you shouldn’t do it at all...”

PerfectionMistakesTryShow UpGet Back UpSlip UpsPerfection Is A Lie
Book:Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
Create image

“The notion that a vast gulf exists between "criminals" and those of us who have never served time in prison is a fiction created by the racial ideology that birthed mass incarceration, namely that there is something fundamentally wrong and morally inferior about "them." The reality, though, is that all of us have done wrong. As noted earlier, studies suggest that most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime. Indeed, most of us break the law not once but repeatedly throughout our lives. Yet only some of us will be arrested, charged, convicted of a crime, branded a criminal or a felon, and ushered into a permanent undercaste. Who becomes a social pariah and excommunicated from civil society and who trots off to college bears scant relationship to the morality of the crimes committed. Who is more blameworthy: the young black kid who hustles on the street corner, selling weed to help his momma pay rent? Or the college kid who deals drugs out of his dorm room so that he'll have cash to finance his spring break? Who should we fear? The kid in the 'hood who joined a gang and now carries a gun for security, because his neighborhood is frightening and unsafe? Or the suburban high school student who has a drinking problem but keeps getting behind the wheel? Our racially biased system of mass incarceration exploits the fact that all people break the law and make mistakes at various points in their lives with varying degrees of justification. Screwing up-failing to live by one's highest ideals and values-is part of what makes us human.”

RaceMistakesBeing HumanIncarcerationCriminal
Author:Michelle Alexander
Create image

“How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn't someone want to talk about it! We've started and won two atomic wars since 2022! Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumors; the world is starving, but we're well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much? I've heard the rumors about hate too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don't, that's sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes!”

WarHateFunPoorHistoryRichIgnoranceBooksForgottenMistakesBombsStarvingClassismUncaringCaveHistory Repeating ItselfAtomic
Book:Fahrenheit 451
Create image

“The world needs people who have survived mistakes, tragedies, and trials to help the rest of us through. Where would we be if Victor Frankl had never experienced what he did during the war? He wouldn’t have used his experiences to benefit millions of people around the world. The world needs you to let go of self-pity and shame regarding your life experiences, too. The world needs you to use the things you have learned for good. Stop letting your past mistakes define you and affect your value. Let go of separation and victimhood and find meaning in what you have been through.”

ShameVictimMistakes
Book:Choosing Clarity: The Path to Fearlessness
Create image

“We will bring humanity across the vast Saharas of emptiness between the stars and create a dynamic, perpetually advancing empire that spans galaxies, universes, and realities. Just as our ancestors wove fabric from organic matter, our descendants will weave the fabric of reality. Humanity’s descendants will be entities beyond our wildest conceptions of the divine. Omnipotence and the ability to create universes will be the least of their powers. Whether they are good or evil—whether they even come to be at all—is up to us. In that sense, we have even more power than they do.”

LifeIdeasLearningAtheismMistakesAgnosticismRebuildingFortifyingTraditional CulturesCultural Reactor
Book:The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion: A playbook for sculpting cultures that overcome demographic collapse & facilitate long-term human flourishing
Create image

“...No one ever told her it was okay to make mistakes. No one told her there was nothing wrong with needing help. No one told her it was normal to feel upset, or angry, or overwhelmed now and then. Everyone in her life took her perfectionism for granted and didn't realize how suffocating it was. And because no one gave the young woman permission to be human, she thought she was a failure for being one.”

MistakesVulnerabilityOverwhelmedPerfectionismSelf ImagePermissions
Book:Worlds Collide
Create image

“Jules could have sworn there was a devilish glint in the shopkeepers eye. 'I find today I am in need of a bonnet.' Mr. Postlethwaite was silent. And then his eyes crept toward the marquess's hairline. 'It will be a gift for a woman, Mr. Postlethwaite.' 'Of course, sir.' The marquess wished the 'of course' sounded a bit more sincere. He'd scarcely been in the shop for more than three minutes and already his dignity was fraying.”

SillyMistakesHilarious
Book:How the Marquess Was Won
Create image

“And I think I’ve found the real benefit of digital memory. The point is not to prove you were right; the point is to admit you were wrong. Because all of us have been wrong on various occasions, engaged in cruelty and hypocrisy, and we’ve forgotten most of those occasions. And that means we don’t really know ourselves. How much personal insight can I claim if I can’t trust my memory? How much can you? You’re probably thinking that, while your memory isn’t perfect, you’ve never engaged in revisionism of the magnitude I’m guilty of. But I was just as certain as you, and I was wrong. You may say, "I know I'm not perfect. I've made mistakes." I am here to tell you that you have made more than you think, that some of the core assumptions on which your self-image is built are actually lies.”

MemoryMistakesSci FiSfExhalation
Book:The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling
Create image

“Overcoming the blame tendency is a defining issue in the corporate world. Ben Dattner, a psychologist and organizational consultant, tells of an experience when he was working at the Republic National Bank of New York. He noticed a piece of paper that a co-worker had stapled to his cubicle wall. It read: 'The six phases of a project: 1. Enthusiasm 2. Disillusionment 3. Panic 4. Search for the guilty 5. Punishment of the innocent 6. Rewards for the uninvolved' Dattner writes: 'I have yet to come across a more accurate description of how most dramas play out in our working lives.”

LearningMistakesOrganizational Culture
Book:Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do
Create image

“Why had he done it? Why couldn't it just not have happened? Why didn't they have time-travel, why couldn't he go back and stop it happening? Ships that could circumnavigate the galaxy in a few years, and count every cell in your body from light-years off, but he wasn't able to go back one miserable day and alter one tiny, stupid, idiotic, shameful decision...”

RegretShameStupidityMistakesCheatingTime TravelGalaxiesJernau Morat Gurgeh
Book:The Player of Games
Create image

“The Duke would not pay for the works. He says that the Castle can never be taken. That is called hubris, Giacomo, the belief that you are never wrong. Believing you are never wrong is an error that afflicts great men. I have learned that to be right you must first be wrong many times. Without making errors--and learning from them--a man cannot find the truth.”

TruthErrorsMistakesHubris
Book:Leonardo's Shadow: Or, My Astonishing Life as Leonardo da Vinci's Servant
Create image