Blunder Quotes & Sayings

Never make the blunder of trying to forecast the way God is going to answer your prayer. — Oswald Chambers

In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk - they are all part of the curriculum. — Michel De Montaigne

Major actions by courageous and wise men will be necessary to avoid our continuing to blunder into the space age like unenlightened and selfish idiots. — Fritz Zwicky

I have never really got used to being on this earth. Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was made to contain us. — John Banville

There was no point in telling my father. He'd never let me quit after only one day. He couldn't help me and he'd make some terrible blunder if he tried. Parents are too innocent for the Boschian landscapes of middle school. — Karen Joy Fowler

Pain is a teacher, as I have told you before. Most people fear it. We do not. We would never stop a child from touching a burning piece of wood. We would warn, but never prevent. Wisdom comes through listening to those with more experience. Only fools blunder through unnecessary pain. — Jeff Wheeler

All that makes a writer is the ability to write strongly and directly from some unaccountable and almost invincible personal prejudice like Stevensons in favor of all being happy as kings no matter if consumptive, or Hardy against God for the blunder of sex, or Sinclair Lewis' against small American towns, or Shakespeare's mixed, at once against and in favor of life itself. I take it that everybody has the prejudice and spends some time feeling for it to speak and write from. But most people end as they begin by acting out the prejudices of other people. — Robert Frost

O, wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion. — Robert Burns

Here lies the body of my good horse, The General. For years he bore me around the circuit of my practice and all that time he never made a blunder. Would that his master could say the same. — John Tyler

Is man God's biggest blunder, or is man's God? — Friedrich Nietzsche

There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder. — Alfred Austin

Which is it? Is man only a blunder of God? Or is God only a blunder of man? — Friedrich Nietzsche

A wise man's kingdom is his own breast: or, if he ever looks farther, it will only be to the judgment of a select few, who are free from prejudices, and capable of examining his work. Nothing indeed can be a stronger presumption of falsehood than the approbation of the multitude; and Phocion, you know, always suspected himself of some blunder when he was attended with the applauses of the populace. — David Hume

Mistakes are always paid for in casualties and troops are quick to see any blunder made by their commanders. - DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER — Geary A. Rummler

I won't play with you anymore. You have insulted my friend -when an opponent cursed himself for a blunder — Miguel Najdorf

The indulgence in grief is a blunder. — Benjamin Disraeli

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types
the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution. — G.K. Chesterton

He [Bloch] was one of those touchy, highly-strung people who cannot bear to have made a blunder, will not admit it to themselves, and whose whole day is ruined by it. — Marcel Proust

Much later, when I was discussing cosmological problems with Einstein, he remarked that the introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest blunder he ever made in his life. — George Gamow

Not necessary that every problem has a solution, you have to live with 'some' problems..rather than forcing a solution and doing a blunder, live with it.. People always have solutions for 'your' problems but none for their own.. — Honeya

Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. Only if symbols are construed to mean what they are not intended to mean can there arise imaginary, insoluble conflicts ... the blunder leads to blasphemy: the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness. — Theodosius Dobzhansky

My dad doesn't have an iota of the depressive in him. He just depresses other people. Nothing brings him down. But this can't be true. I think it just comes out when absolutely no one else is around. It always seemed that while I knew he loved us a lot, my father actually needed nothing to be happy except books. There was enough in literature to challenge, entertain, amuse and inspire a man for a lifetime. Books and music were simply enough to sustain anyone was what he radiated. Humor, love, tragedy, it was all contained therein. And if all he needed was books, then he probably wouldn't mind if he lost the house and the wife and the whole life. Because the story was more important than the family. The story being that he was going to write the Great American Novel and finally be important, and in being important, he would be loved. Willing to lose his family to be loved by his family. Oh, the tragic blunder of this. It could almost drive someone mad. Wait, it did drive someone mad. — Jeanne Darst

Jane, I never meant to wound you thus. If the man who had but one little ewe lamb that was dear to him as a daughter, that ate of his bread and drank of his cup, and lay in his bosom, had by some mistake slaughtered it at the shambles, he would not have rued his bloody blunder more than I now rue mine. Will you ever forgive me?" Reader, I forgave him at the moment and on the spot. There was such deep remorse in his eye, such true pity in his tone, such manly energy in his manner; and besides, there was such unchanged love in his whole look and mien - I forgave him all: yet not in words, not outwardly; only at my heart's core. — Charlotte Bronte

Perceiving myself in a blunder, I attempted to correct it. I might have seen there was too great a disparity between the ages of the parties to make it likely that they were man and wife. One was about forty: a period of mental vigour at which men seldom cherish the delusion of being married for love by girls: that dream is reserved for the solace of our declining years. The other did not look seventeen. — Emily Bronte

I do not believe indeed, I deem it a comic blunder to believe that the exercise of reason is sufficient to explain our condition and where necessary to remedy it, but I do believe that the exercise of reason is at all times necessary ... — Peter Medawar

Every blunder behind us is giving a cheer for us, and only for those who were willing to fail are the dangers and splendors of life. — Carl Sandburg

( ... ) to think that worms and slugs are neurologically simple is another blunder of contemporary, scientifically uninformed philosophy. To take as an example the current "superstar" nematode worm
superstar, because it was the first multicellular organism to have its genome completely sequenced, by 1998, and is widely used as a model organism
the 1 mm long Caenorhabditis elegans, it exhibits a nervous system of 302 neurons and a sensorimotor system with very complex connectivity patterns. — Istvan Aranyosi

George theThird Ought never to have occurred. One can only wonder At so grotesque a blunder. — E.C. Bentley

The philosophy of Atheism has its root in the earth, in this life; its aim is the emancipation of the human race from all God-heads, be they Judaic, Christian, Mohammedan, Buddhistic, Brahmanistic, or what not. Mankind has been punished long and heavily for having created its gods, nothing but pain and persecution, have been man's lot since gods began. There is but one way out of this blunder. Man must break his fetters which have chained him to the gates of heaven and hell, so that he can begin to fashion out of his reawakened and illumined consciousness a new world upon the earth. — Emma Goldman

In that world, those with seeing eyes could only blunder about, but the blind man would be at home, and now instead of being the one who was guided by others, he might be one the one to whom the others clung for guidance. — George R. Stewart

I have made so many mistakes, and such really stupid ones, I would start blubbing away if I could remember even half of them. But do not dwell on cock-ups, I say. You don't learn by your mistakes - at least I don't - so best to blunder on making fresh ones. — Charles Saatchi

Laughter isn't even the other side of tears. It is tears turned inside out. Truly the suffering is great, here on earth. We blunder along, shredded by our mistakes, bludgeoned by our faults. Not having a clue where the dark path leads us. But on the whole, we stumble along bravely, don't you think? — Alice Walker

There are old pilots and there are bold pilots', goes the saying, 'there are no old bold pilots'. Hal never qualified as old. He'd survived his fuel tank blunder; his next mistake killed him.
In the years that followed, other pilot friends and acquaintances were killed in flying accidents. We were never ready; the news always shocked. Whether we learned from these shocks is doubtful; every pilot is certain that Death will never find him. — R.J. Childerhose

Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret. — Benjamin Disraeli

It is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder. — E. M. Forster

The [Libyan] rebels this week kind of hinted to the United States that they could use a little help. Right. Like, America would just blunder around the Middle East killing people without all the facts. That doesn't sound like the America I know. — Bill Maher

What is the cat?" he exclaimed. "It is a corrective. God, having made the mouse, said, 'I've made a blunder.' And he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse, plus the cat, Is the revised and corrected proof of creation. — Victor Hugo

It was not just the drink, though, that was making me happy, but the tenderness of things, the simple goodness of the world. This sunset, for instance, how lavishly it was laid on, the clouds, the light on the sea, that heartbreaking, blue-green distance, laid on, all of it, as if to console some lost suffering waybarer. I have never really got used to being on this earth. Somethings I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was meant to contain us? — John Banville

There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement. — William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin

Brooding over blunders is the biggest blunder — Muhammad Ali

There are people, of course, who think it unscientific to take anything seriously; they do not want their intellectual playground disturbed by graver considerations. But the doctor who fails to take account of man's feelings for values commits a serious blunder, and if he tries to correct the mysterious and well-nigh inscrutable workings of nature with his so-called scientific attitude, he is merely putting his shallow sophistry in place of nature's healing processes. — C. G. Jung

For her it had always been easy to apologize. It was simple to admit her mistakes because otherwise they seemed to lie across her lap paralyzing her until she said those two words. Then her blunder flew away to the trees where all wrong deeds lived after being made right. — Sarah Noffke

Women learned one important lesson
namely, that it is impossible for the best of men to understand women's feelings or the humiliation of their position. When they asked us to be silent on our question during the War, and labor for the emancipation of the slave, we did so, and gave five years to his emancipation and enfranchisement ... I was convinced, at the time, that it was the true policy. I am now equally sure that it was a blunder. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

If you blunder by accident into a secret it's like you've pushed open a door where you thought was just a wall. You can look through, if you're brave or reckless enough you can even step inside-taking a chance what you'll learn is worth what it costs. — Joyce Carol Oates

And Pandora pointed out to Epimetheus that he neither had wings nor wheels & so he should therefore not expect that of her also.And that besides,she had also brought with her a jar containing 10,000 gifts from Zeus for the blunder he had made in distributing to the beasts all the abilities that should have been given to men.And thus, he should be satisfied with whatever he had been given.As she, Pandora, had spoken. — Nicholas Chong

African leaders should not turn the continent into a giant collector of donations and loans from wealthy nations - they must find other plausible means to help established their economic security so as to minimize poverty. This incoherent blunder on the mainland must be scrutinized. — Duop Chak Wuol

In placing civil disobedience before constructive work I was wrong and I did not profit by the Himalayan blunder that I had committed. — Mahatma Gandhi

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, I watched helplessly as the Bush administration led America into a strategic blunder of historic proportions. It became painfully obvious that the executive branch of our government did not trust its military. It relied instead on a neoconservative ideology developed by men and women with little, if any, military experience. Some senior military leaders did not challenge civilian decision makers at the appropriate times, and the courageous few who did take a stand were subsequently forced out of the service. — Ricardo Sanchez

I left home at 17, traveled. I got married when I was 21. That's a young age. As it turned out, things were fine, then not so fine, and then it was a blunder. That happens all the time. — Fred Couples

But even if ego-death is regarded as the optimum model for human existence, one of liberation from ourselves, it still remains a compromise with being, a concession to the blunder of creation itself. We should be able to do better, and we can. To have our egos killed off is second-best to killing off death and all the squalid byplay that flitters around it. So let all lands be small, and grower smaller and smaller until no lands are left where any human footstep need press itself upon the earth. — Thomas Ligotti

Because bread was so important, the laws governing its purity were strict and the punishment severe. A baker who cheated his customers could be fined £10 per loaf sold, or made to do a month's hard labor in prison. For a time, transportation to Australia was seriously considered for malfeasant bakers. This was a matter of real concern for bakers because every loaf of bread loses weight in baking through evaporation, so it is easy to blunder accidentally. For that reason, bakers sometimes provided a little extra- the famous baker's dozen. — Bill Bryson

And one would worship a woman whom all perfections dower, But the other smiles at transparent wiles; and he quotes from Schopenhauer . Thus two by two we wrangle and blunder about the earth, And that body we share we may not spare; but the Gods have need of mirth. — James Branch Cabell

She lay there with her eyes closed, as if sleep were a shy creature that might venture out if she played dead. But every time it seemed to be drawing closer, some loud thought would crash and blunder through the undergrowth, putting it to flight. — Frances Hardinge

Nature proceeds by blunders; that is its way. It is also ours. So if we have blundered by regarding consciousness as a blunder, why make a fuss over it? Our self-removal from this planet would still be a magnificent move, a feat so luminous it would bedim the sun. What do we have to lose? No evil would attend our departure from this world, and the many evils we have known would go extinct along with us. So why put off what would be the most laudable masterstroke of our existence, and the only one? — Thomas Ligotti

And he thought about the Devil, in whom he did not believe, and he looked around at the two windows where the fires were gleaming. It seemed to him that out of those crimson eyes the Devil himself was looking at him--that unknown force that had created the mutual relation of the strong and the weak, that coarse blunder which one could never correct. That strong must hinder the weak from living--such was the law of Nature; but only in a newspaper article or in a schoolbook was that intelligible and easily accepted. In the hotchpotch which was everyday life, in the tangle of trivialities out of which human relations were woven, it was no longer a law, but a logical absurdity, when the strong and the weak were both equally victims of their mutual relations, unwillingly submitting to some directing force, unknown, standing outside life, apart from man. — Anton Chekhov

Errors were not only meant to be committed by fools. — Michael Bassey Johnson

The way you blunder from one catastrophe to the next, it's a wonder the whole galaxy doesn't hate you.
The galaxy is a big place, General. You provincial military types don't get far enough out to really see that.
-General Tagon & Captain Kevyn Andreyasn — Howard Tayler

Will there never come a season Which shall rid us from the curse? Of a prose which knows no reason And an unmelodious verse: When the world shall cease to wonder At the genius of an Ass, And a boy's eccentric blunder Shall not bring success to pass: When mankind shall be delivered From the clash of magazines, And the inkstand shall be shivered Into countless smithereens: When there stands a muzzled stripling, Mute, beside a muzzled bore: When the Rudyards cease from Kipling And the Haggards Ride no more. — James Kenneth Stephen

With all dear Emma's little faults, she is an excellent creature. Where shall we see a better daughter, or a kinder sister, or a truer friend? No, no; she has qualities which may be trusted; she will never lead any one really wrong; she will make no lasting blunder; where Emma errs once, she is in the right a hundred times. — Jane Austen

The greatest blunder I have seen that almost everyone makes is to just speak their mind. It doesn't make any sense. They sound like the squawking ducks in a pond. The mind is not meant to be spoken. The mind is mostly waves of thoughts and sensations from many sources. The mind is meant to know the truth. Know your own mind and use it to speak the truth. — Harbhajan Singh Yogi

My approach to parenting is that everything is open - everything. I'm not very good at covert, or subtle, and I've had to learn timing. I do blunder in a bit. — Dawn French

Shaken from sleep, and numbed and scarce awake,
Out in the trench with three hours' watch to take,
I blunder through the splashing mirk; and then
Hear the gruff muttering voices of the men
Crouching in cabins candle-chinked with light.
Hark! There's the big bombardment on our right
Rumbling and bumping; and the dark's a glare
Of flickering horror in the sectors where
We raid the Boche; men waiting, stiff and chilled,
Or crawling on their bellies through the wire.
"What? Stretcher-bearers wanted? Some one killed?"
Five minutes ago I heard a sniper fire:
Why did he do it? ... Starlight overhead
Blank stars. I'm wide-awake; and some chap's dead. — Siegfried Sassoon

They don't want clever men; clever men have ideas, and ideas cause trouble; they want men who have charm and tact and who can be counted on never to make a blunder. — W. Somerset Maugham

Support a compatriot against a native, however the former may blunder or plunder. — Richard Francis Burton

Men have made of fortune an all-powerful goddess, in order that she may be made responsible for all their blunder's. — Madame De Stael

Pragmatically, aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced, but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its sensations and perceptions. To quarrel on its behalf is always a blunder. — Harold Bloom

How long shall we blunder along without the aid of unpartisan and authoritative scientific assistance in the administration of justice, no one knows; but all fair persons not conventionalized by provincial legal habits of mind ought, I should think, unite to effect some change. — Learned Hand

Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfolded, as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you. — J.I. Packer

Man's greatest blunder has been in trying to make peace with the skies instead of making peace with his neighbors — Elbert Hubbard

An ostentatious man will rather relate a blunder or an absurdity he has committed, than be debarred from talking of his own dear person. — Joseph Addison

Denying Ahab greatness is an aesthetic blunder: He is akin to Achilles, Odysseus, and King David in one register, and to Don Quixote, Hamlet, and the High Romantic Prometheus of Goethe and Shelley in another. Call the first mode a transcendent heroism and the second the persistence of vision. Both ways are antithetical to nature and protest against our mortality. The epic hero will never submit or yield. — Harold Bloom

One man may hit the mark, another blunder; but heed not these distinctions. Only from the alliance of the one, working with and through the other, are great things born. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

It is a capital blunder; as you discover, when another man recites his charities. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

And however dark the skies may appear, And however souls may blunder, I tell you it all will work out clear, For good lies over and under. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Joly, perceiving a cat prowling on a gutter, extracted philosophy from it. "What is the cat?" he exclaimed. "It is a corrective. The good God, having made the mouse, said: 'Hullo! I have committed a blunder.' And so he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse, plus the cat, is the proof of creation revised and corrected. — Victor Hugo

Grief is the agony of an instant: the indulgence of grief is the blunder of life. — Benjamin Disraeli

I don't think I shall ever find peace till I make up my mind about things,' he said gravely. He hesitated. 'It's very difficult to put into words. The moment you try you feel embarrassed. You say to yourself: "Who am I that I should bother myself about this, that, and the other? Perhaps it's only because I'm a conceited prig. Wouldn't it be better to follow the beaten track and let what's coming to you come?" And then you think of a fellow who an hour before was full of life and fun,and he's lying dead; it's all so cruel and meaningless. It's hard not to ask yourself what life is all about and whether there's any sense to it or whether it's all a tragic blunder of blind fate. — W. Somerset Maugham

Soul-the spiritual principle, the creative spark of God-cannot work if you panic. Anxiety shuts down the creative centers. When you can't think, whatever you try to do becomes one blunder piled upon another. If you slow down, the spiritual principle can begin working through you so that you can figure out the solution to the problem that is bothering you. — Harold Klemp

It is in fact no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some irreparable blunder that will play directly into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-Communist effort for a long while to come. — Whittaker Chambers

There are moments in life when you blunder in front of a window, or a glass. And you stop to see the most risible creature peering back at you, in some hideous weskit that he has mistaken for the very pineapple of fashion, a kingsman slung round his neck like the banner of his pretentions, with an expression of adolescent constipation that is clearly intended as Deep Sagacity. You blink - you may even for an instant begin to laugh - until the realization dawns: this is a reflection, and it is mine. You've draped yourself in Rainbow togs and swaddled yourself in fervent convictions, but in that reflection there you stand: exposed in the knobbly white nakedness of your own absurdity. — Ian Weir

When everything else failed, we can still become immortal by making an enormous blunder ... — John Kenneth Galbraith

One of the least appealing aspects of modern presidential candidates is that, to avoid saying anything that might prove to be an embarrassing, costly blunder, they cling to a rigid set of talking points that reveal as little as possible about what they really think and who they really are. — David Horsey

It was like making a blunder at a party; there was nothing to do about it, it was dreadfully mortifying, but it showed a lack of sense to ascribe too much importance to it. — W. Somerset Maugham

If [President Obama] does not go on the offensive against ISIS ... they are coming here. This is just not about Baghdad, this is just not about Syria, this is about our homeland. And if we get attacked because he has no strategy to protect us, then he will have committed a blunder for the ages. — Lindsey Graham

When individuals blunder, it is unfortuante and their families go down. When rulers fail, it is a national tragedy — Gurcharan Das

There's a great blunder which we commit. Through communication, we try to control people ... The fact is that nobody can control anybody. All you can do is flow. You can flow with each other, like rivers and streams flow with each other and they all end up in the same ocean. All things come from God and all things go to God. It's a very simple formula which you have learned. — Harbhajan Singh Yogi

I used to think information was destroyed in black hole. This was my biggest blunder, or at least my biggest blunder in science. — Stephen Hawking

The balance of this world is not upset by accident. It is not upset by those who blunder accidentally into wrong. Evil comes when those who know better, who have seen the pain they cause, nevertheless cause more pain. — Michael Grant

I think the number one public-relations blunder Osama has made is that he lives in a cave-fortress and if there's one thing we've learned from it's that you can't trust a guy who lives in a cave-fortress
Lex Luther, Captain Nemo, Dr. Evil. I'm telling you the list goes on. — David Letterman

What a mistake those who do not hope make! Judas made a huge blunder the day in which he sold Christ for 30 denarii, but he made an even bigger one when he thought that his sin was too great to be forgiven. No sin is too big: any wretchedness, however great, can always be enclosed in infinite mercy. — Pope John Paul I

To hate someone just because he doesn't presume like you is big blunder. — M.H. Rakib

Mankind's biggest blunder, ignorance. Mankind's second, infallible. — M.T. Dismuke

My great crime in the world is blunder I will get into scrapes without intention or any bad motive. — Stand Watie

We must not judge God from this world. It's just a study that didn't come off. It's only a master who could make such a blunder. — Vincent Van Gogh

If you've made a mistake, if you've made a blunder, admit it to yourself, and then go to the people affected by it and admit it to them, and tell them you're sorry. Full-heartedly and openly. The fact of the matter is, that people who do that make an enormous impression. It's the right thing to do. It's the moral thing to do. — Brit Hume

In 1979, for example, Microsoft gave Boeing Commercial Airplane Co. the right to buy any Microsoft product for $50 per copy, until the end of time. Today most Microsoft applications sell in the $300 to $500 range, ten years from now they may cost thousands each. — Robert X. Cringely

It seems obvious that if a species has the brainpower for speech, along with the sort of appendages that can manipulate a pair of pliers, it will eventually blunder into science, technology, and radio. — Seth Shostak

Had Moreau had any intelligible object, I could have sympathized at least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that. I could have forgiven him a little even, had his motive been only hate. But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless! His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on; and the Things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at last to die painfully. — H.G.Wells

The terrible error in the course of human civilization is undoubtedly the defective judgment that allowed religious authorities usurp the foundation of societal morality, in which all collective ethics of humankind must take a cause. This appalling blunder is comparable only to assigning the leper exclusive franchise to run beauty clinics in the society; this can only lead to cycles upon cycles of common infection syndrome. — Adebowale Ojowuro

If you do your "homework" well you can be sure you'll feel more relaxed. Make sure you have a walk or rest before the game because the most important thing is to be focused during the game itself! If you get tired by preparation you won't have enough energy left for the whole game, and we all know that a single blunder can ruin all the work done beforehand! — Judit Polgar