Quotes & Sayings About Making Errors

Making every allowance for the errors of the most extreme fallibility, the history of Catholicism would on this hypothesis represent an amount of imposture probably unequaled in the annals of the human race. — William Edward Hartpole Lecky

Independence is important to intelligent decision making for two reasons. First, it keeps the mistakes that people make from becoming correlated. Errors in individual judgment won't wreck the group's collective judgment as long as those errors aren't systematically pointing in the same direction. One of the quickest ways to make people's judgments systematically biased is to make them dependent on each other for information. — James Surowiecki

It is important that we forgive ourselves for making mistakes. We need to learn from our errors and move on. — Steve Maraboli

Progress through trial and error depends not only on making trials, but on recognizing errors. — Virginia Postrel

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. — Christopher Peter Grey

The bottom line is that if I did it, you can do it. I got rich without the benefit of a college education or a penny of capital but making many errors along the way. I went from being a pauper.. a hippie dropout on the dole, living in a crummy room without the proverbial pot to piss in, without even the money to pay the rent, without a clue as to what to do next.. to being rich.. — Felix Dennis

I take the point of view that missing an important trade is a much more serious error than making a bad trade. — William Eckhardt

Further, my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn't introspect, doesn't exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the "victims" of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather. Finally, a thought. He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors - though never the same error more than once - is more reliable than someone who has never made any. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways - operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes - makes you smarter. Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you're forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them - as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go - end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it. — Daniel Coyle

The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities - perhaps the only one - in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there. — Karl Popper

Rather than engage in the sort of selective retention that so many investors tend to do and pretend mistakes never happened, I prefer to 'own' them. This allows me to learn from them and, with any luck, avoid making the same errors again. — Barry Ritholtz

Long-married couples balance their checkbooks as a substitute for love-making, or they refuse each other love by protesting one another's financial error or excess. — Diana Trilling

A basic truth that the history of the creation of the transistor reveals is that the foundations of transistor electronics were created by making errors and following hunches that failed to give what was expected. — William Shockley

Starting a startup is a process of trial and error. What guided the founders through this process was their empathy for the users. They never lost sight of making things that people would want. — Jessica Livingston

If your decision-making is improved on the ground, certainly you'll be less likely to make the kind of errors that will linger with you the rest of your life and lead to regret, remorse, and a whole cascade of psychological dysfunction. — Amishi Jha

I got better the way everyone gets better: by trial and error and error and error, by fumbling around and making mistakes but not giving up and working incredibly hard at it every day and eventually, through a painful and laborious process of eliminating every wrong turn, finding my way. — Mishka

I became a manager very young. My first sous chef job I was, maybe, 25. It was a bit too early for me. But it's on-the-job training. You really just get stuck in there and it's trial and error. You learn by your mistakes, and hopefully you don't keep making them. And if you do, you just keep trying to fix it. — April Bloomfield

Get-rich-quick thinking leads to three basic errors: (1) Getting involved with things you cannot understand; (2) Risking funds you cannot afford to lose, that is, borrowed funds; and (3) Making hasty decisions. Each of these actions violates one or more biblical principles ... Together they constitute a sin called greed. — Larry Burkett

If making an error doesn't make you mad, what's the point? Why put all the work in? — Troy Glaus

My errors are by now natural and incorrigible; but the good that worthy men do the public by making themselves imitable, I shall perhaps do by making myself evitable. — Michel De Montaigne

There's nothing bad; there's just making errors on the way back Home. — Lester Levenson

The smaller the town the more important the ball club was. But if you beat a bigger town they'd practically hand you the key to the city. Any if you lost a game by making an error in the ninth or something like that, well, the best thing to do was just pack your grip and hit the road, because they'd never let you forget it. — Smoky Joe Wood

Fear, the strength of earth's religions, gripping every living soul, Was a monstrous human error for the making of men whole. — Laurell K. Hamilton

Progressive disclosure defers advanced or rarely used features to a secondary screen, making applications easier to learn and less error-prone. — Jakob Nielsen

What makes a good judge? Confidence for one. An expert, in Shanteau's view, is someone good at convincing others he or she is an expert. Good judges may make small errors, but they will "generally avoid large mistakes." When they encounter exceptions, experts are good at making"single-case deviations in their decision patterns." Novices, meanwhile, tend to stick stubbornly to the rules, even when they are inappropriate. — Tom Vanderbilt

Change the attitude toward errors. Think of an object's user as attempting to do a task, getting there by imperfect approximations. Don't think of the user as making errors; think of the actions as approximations of what is desired. — Donald A. Norman

We must recognize our own behavioral errors. To be blunt, you are not likely to become a cognitive Zen master anytime soon. But a little enlightenment could keep you from making some common investing errors. — Barry Ritholtz

I think of evolution as an error-making and error-correcting process, and we are constantly learning from experience. — Jonas Salk

In Tetlock's research, subjects are asked to solve problems and make decisions.11 For example, they're given information about a legal case and then asked to infer guilt or innocence. Some subjects are told that they'll have to explain their decisions to someone else. Other subjects know that they won't be held accountable by anyone. Tetlock found that when left to their own devices, people show the usual catalogue of errors, laziness, and reliance on gut feelings that has been documented in so much decision-making research.12 But when people know in advance that they'll have to explain themselves, they think more systematically and self-critically. They are less likely to jump to premature conclusions and more likely to revise their beliefs in response to evidence. — Jonathan Haidt

The man who can own up to his error is greater than he who merely knows how to avoid making it. — Jean Francois Paul De Gondi

There's a large core of powerlessness which is balanced against the unwritten contract that says that if you behave, you'll be okay. No wonder people pay so much attention to knowing the rules, to knowing the right people, to not making waves, to never making errors
to not risking, trying, innovating. — Judith M Bardwick

The single greatest impediment to error prevention in the medical industry is that we punish people for making mistakes, — Lucian Leape

Failure is your inability to recognize that you have made the same mistakes again. Making a mistake is normal; it turns abnormal when it's not recognized! — Israelmore Ayivor

But you'd get arguments from all kinds of people that the Bible has got to be perfect. That God would not permit such errors to be made in the Holy Word."
"I thought God gave everyone free will. Which would presumably - and evidently - include the freedom to be incorrect when translating one language into another."
"Stop making me think. I'm believing over here. — Jim Butcher

The people who come to work deserve to be paid properly, and there's no excuse. I could understand someone making a small error, but sometimes people make systematic errors, and that's not right. — Fred DeLuca

Some primary reasons that both Plato and Aristotle had for believing in God were utterly erroneous - simple errors caused by our being stuck to the planet and misled by the sensation that the planet is standing still. If they had been aware that the Earth spins, they would have understood that, by and large, we are making our own light show in the night sky. As it was, the precision of the movements of all the stars seemed astonishing. If we knew how we lined up among the planets, their motion would not seem so strange and willful. Also, had the philosophers been able to leave planet Earth for a jaunt in outer space, they could have seen that, at a distance from gravity and atmosphere, moving things tend to keep moving, without any need for an impelling force. From out there, the motion of the planets would seem natural as well. — Jennifer Michael Hecht

Learning means making errors. Those who are learning spiritually make errors just the way anyone does when he is growing. — Harold Klemp

Life is an error-making and an error-correctin g process, and nature in marking man's papers will grade him for wisdom as measured both by survival and by the quality of life of those who survive. — Jonas Salk

In all of history, we have found just one cure for error - a partial antidote against making and repeating grand, foolish mistakes, a remedy against self-deception. That antidote is criticism. — David Brin

I AM A CONSISTENT WINNER BECAUSE: 1. I objectively identify my edges. 2. I predefine the risk of every trade. 3. I completely accept the risk or I am willing to let go of the trade. 4. I act on my edges without reservation or hesitation. 5. I pay myself as the market makes money available to me. 6. I continually monitor my susceptibility for making errors. 7. I understand the absolute necessity of these principles of consistent success and, therefore, I never violate them. — Mark Douglas

Errors of human judgment can infect even the smartest people, thanks to overconfidence, lack of attention to details, and excessive trust in the judgments of others, stemming from a failure to understand that others are not making independent judgments, but are themselves following still others - the blind leading the blind. - ROBERT J. SHILLER, PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS, YALE UNIVERSITY — Pamela Yellen

Errors in decision-making lead young people to under-save for retirement, doctors to miss tumours, CEOs to make catastrophic investments, governments to engage in needless wars, and parents to irreversibly traumatize their children. — Noreena Hertz

My first program taught me a lot about the errors that I was going to be making in the future, and also about how to find errors. That's sort of the story of my life, making errors and trying to recover from them. I try to get things correct. I probably obsess about not making too many mistakes. — Donald Knuth

Every entrepreneur faces trade-offs when founding and growing their company. As we discovered at YouTube, those early decisions have far-reaching impacts and lead to unforeseen pitfalls down the road. Noam Wasserman uses vivid anecdotes and deep research to expertly outline the key early choices that define a startup, making The Founder's Dilemmas an invaluable alternative to real-world trial and error. — Chad Hurley

Admit your errors before someone else exaggerates them. — Andrew Mason

But part of the job of economics is weeding out errors. That is much harder than making them, but also more fun. — Robert Solow

Mr. Ellison is that unreasonable man that possesses the ostranenie effect-- he has a keen eye to see the simplest things and make them profound, and make simple minded people see deeply into mundane topics- bringing a philosophical charm to even politics.

No man, not even a semi-god lived an entire life without making a mistake and the fact that Mr. Ellison has lived a life so grandiose with such few errors, is a testament and a plaque to the big person he is. — Avra Amar Filion

He clothed his motives in the names of virtue, and I have wondered whether he ever knew that no gift will ever buy back a man's love when you have removed his self-love.
There was a man, who perhaps made many errors in performance but whose effective life was devoted to making men brave and dignified and good in a time when they were poor and frightened and when ugly forces were loose in the world to utilize their fears. This man was hated by the few. When he died the people burst into tears in the streets and their minds wailed, What can we do now? How can we go on without him? — John Steinbeck

One of the truths about the world is that there are two superpowers, one a huge power which happens to have its boot on your neck; another, a smaller power which happens to have its boot on other people's necks. I think that anyone in the Third World would be making a grave error if they succumbed to illusions about these matters — Noam Chomsky

I think one of the big errors people are making right now is thinking that old-style businesses will be obsolete, when actually they will be an important part of this new civilization. Some retail groups are introducing e-commerce and think that the bricks are no longer useful. But they will continue to be important. — Carlos Slim

Almost every comedy you see is about people making all wrong choices and making all the errors of judgement possible. Good comedy is when it works on this scale. Because it is psychologically very real. — Colin Firth

Love makes us wake up in the morning with a sense of purpose and a flow of creative ideas. Love floods our nervous system with positive energy, making us far more attractive to prospective employers, clients, and creative partners. Love fills us with powerful charisma, enabling us to produce new ideas and new projects, even within circumstances that seem to be limited. Love leads us to atone for our errors and clean up the mess when we've made mistakes. Love leads us to act with impeccability, integrity, and excellence. Love leads us to serve, to forgive, and to hope. Those things are the opposite of a poverty consciousness; they're the stuff of spiritual wealth creation. — Marianne Williamson

You know in politics you are dealing in the realm of choices. You don't always have clear-cut decision between a thoroughly principled position and a thoroughly unprincipled one. You're making snap decisions with paucity of information, generally trying to do the best that you can, but you will make errors, and sometimes it's a decision between a bad and a worse alternative. It has to be done, because we need to order our society, and of politics it can literally be said: Bad job, but someone's got to do it. — Peter Costello

When we look at the matter from another point of view, great caution would seem to be required. For the habit of lightly changing the laws is an evil, and, when the advantage is small, some errors both of lawgivers and rulers had better be left; the citizen will not gain so much by making the change as he will lose by the habit of disobedience. — Aristotle.