Quotes & Sayings About Trial And Error

The hypothesis that economic organization is the resultant of a series of historic accidents is intructive in that many organizational innovations appear to be the result of trial and error. — Oliver E. Williamson

Effective leaders are made, not born. They learn from trial and error, and from experience. — Colin Powell

The difference between the amoeba and Einstein is that, although both make use of the method of trial and error elimination, the amoeba dislikes erring while Einstein is intrigued by it. — Karl Popper

We have all learned everything we know physically - from walking to running a marathon - by trial and error, so there's no reason to become our own worst enemies when we suffer a setback. From time to time everyone falls short of their goals. It's an illusion to believe that champions succeed because they do everything perfectly. You can be certain that every archer who hits the bull's-eye has also missed the bull's-eye a thousand times while learning the skill. — Amby Burfoot

God is a God of purpose. He doesn't wake-up and start dabbling into things; He doesn't practice trial and error. His ways are sure, they may be low but they are always sure. — Jaachynma N.E. Agu

I got into the movies by accident. When I got an offer, I thought, 'Let's try this, too.' Everything in my life has happened by trial and error. I didn't even think I would win the Miss India title, so where's the question of thinking I'd come this far. — Priyanka Chopra

Operating by trial and error mostly, we've evolved a tacitly agreed upon list of the elements that make for a good fantasy. The first decision the aspiring fantasist must make is theological. King Arthur and Charlemagne were Christians. Siegfried and Sigurd the Volsung were pagans. My personal view is that pagans write better stories. When a writer is having fun, it shows, and pagans have more fun than Christians. Let's scrape Horace's Dulche et utile off the plate before we even start the banquet. We're writing for fun, not to provide moral instruction. I had much more fun with the Belgariad/Malloreon than you did, because I know where all the jokes are.
All right, then, for item number one, I chose paganism. (Note that Papa Tolkien, a devout Anglo-Catholic, took the same route.) — David Eddings

How many times have you said, 'This is it. I've finally found my one true love'? And how many times has the reality turned out differently? Paperback romances and fairy tales promote an ideal of a first and only love, but few of us can claim to have had such uncomplicated good fortune. For most people, the process of finding the perfect partner is one trial and error: breakups, makeups, missed opportunities and misunderstandings. Human love is a fragile creation, and sometimes the smallest thing - the wrong choice of words or a single clumsy gesture - can make love shatter, stall or fade away. — Haruki Murakami

As counterintuitive as it sounds, 'speed to fail' should be every entrepreneur's motto. Success isn't born wholly-formed like Venus from a clamshell; it's developed through relentless trial and error. — Jay Samit

That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conquerer of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to maintain faithful to that nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed doen in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed! ...
[T]he chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishments vital in themselves, were the antidotes to Fascism ... because they were clear and distinct and verifiable at every step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness like the radio and newspapers. — Primo Levi

Indonesia isn't the most beautiful country in the world. I don't think so. Italy is much lovelier - and France too. It's a very problematic country. And that's why you have to stay here for the rest of your life. Indonesia is a process. It's not a finished idea. It's a practice, and a trial and error. — Goenawan Mohamad

Autonomy and dependency are like light and shade, caught in the pull of each other's gravity, until, after considerable trial and error, each individual can find his or her own place in the world. — Haruki Murakami

A 1670 revision of the criminal code found yet another use for salt in France. To enforce the law against suicide, it was ordered that the bodies of people who took their own lives be salted, brought before a judge, and sentenced to public display. Nor could the accused escape their day in court by dying in the often miserable conditions of the prisons. They too would be salted and put on trial. Breton historians have discovered that in 1784 in the town of Cornouaille, Maurice LeCorre had died in prison and was ordered salted for trial. But due to some bureaucratic error, the corpse did not get a trial date and was found by a prison guard more than seven years later, not only salted but fermented in beer, at which point it was buried without trial. — Mark Kurlansky

The method of learning by trial and error - of learning from our mistakes - seems to be fundamentally the same whether it is practised by lower or by higher animals, by chimpanzees or by men of science. — Karl R. Popper

The version of technology we live with most closely resembles the one that Scots such as James Watt organized and perfected. It rests on certain basic principles that the Scottish Enlightenment enshrined: common sense, experience as our best source of knowledge, and arriving at scientific laws by testing general hypotheses through individual experiment and trial and error. — Arthur Herman

It took several years of trial and error, soul-searching and hard work to shape the ROI program into the ROI Community. In the first few years, we got to see the power of these gatherings and the resulting connections that spanned the globe. It inspired us to think about how we could transform an annual gathering into a year-round community. — Lynn Schusterman

I sat in the barber's chair in David Miller's makeup shop, hours and hours of trial and error. While David poked at me with his crusty brushes, I grew more and more profane. That's how I started to find the voice of Freddy. — Robert Englund

Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant. Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America's asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I'm a big believer in cooking your own meals. It makes it much easier not only to ensure that you eat fresh foods but also to follow the second rule of eating (see previous chapter), which advises incorporating as many colors, tastes, textures, and aromas as possible into one's meal. Beyond those benefits, I feel that cooking celebrates self-respect, and it's especially important on the Warrior Diet. Through cooking, you can control exactly what you put inside your body. It's a creative process, where you use trial and error to determine what you like.You can use different herbs and spices to increase or balance flavors, aromas, and textures.You're not a scavenger on the Warrior Diet. — Ori Hofmekler

[Fantasy] is a constructive aspect of the child's experimental exploration of reality, or his progressive relating of himself to reality, of his trial-and-error attempts to solve his reality problems. — Lauretta Bender

I went to a bookstore to try to find a book. The bottom line is, it all comes by trial and error. It was scary and exciting at first you don't know what to expect. But once you look into your child's eyes, you forget about that. — Michael Jordan

If you have any idea for a poem, an exact grid of intent, you are on the wrong path, a dead-end alley, at the top of a cliff you haven't even climbed. This is a lesson that can only be learned by trial and error. — Mary Ruefle

This turns out not to be true. Darwinian change is inevitable in any system of information transmission so long as there is some lumpiness in the things transmitted, some fidelity of transmission and a degree of randomness, or trial and error, in innovation. To say that culture 'evolves' is not metaphorical. — Matt Ridley

The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I'm there for my son 24/7, because I don't want him to take the road we took. I believe if I had a father around, I would've learned plenty things. There was no father there to tell me look here son, this is the wrong way to go. When we were coming up, we learned through trial and error. Anthony 'Ada' Allen, one of the former leaders and founders of the Rebellion Raiders street gang. — Drexel Deal

The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.) — Carl Sagan

When I go into the garden, I forget everything. It's uncomplicated in my world of gardening. It's trial and error, really. If something doesn't work, it comes out, and you start all over again. — Emilia Fox

The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends. — Wallace Stegner

Just as evolution is a series of trial-and-error experiments, life is full of false starts and inevitable stumbling. The key to success is the ability to extract the lessons out of each of these experiences and to move on with that new knowledge. For — Tina Seelig

I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed. — Max Born

I did it the stupid way, through trial and error. — Jake Roberts

Science advances by trial and error. When mistakes are made, the peer-review publication process usually roots them out. Cuccinelli's version of the scientific process would be "make an error and go to trial." Einstein did not arrive at E=mc2 in his first attempt. If he were working in the state of Virginia under Cuccinelli today, he could be jailed for his initial mistakes and perhaps never achieve that landmark equation. — Scott Mandia

[Doubt] is not a new idea; this is the idea of the age of reason. This is the philosophy that guided the men who made the democracy that we live under. The idea that no one really knew how to run a government led to the idea that we should arrange a system by which new ideas could be developed, tried out, and tossed out if necessary, with more new ideas bought in - a trial-and-error system. This method was a result of the fact that science was already showing itself to be a successful venture at the end of the eighteenth century. Even then it was clear to socially minded people that the openness of possibilities was an opportunity, and that doubt and discussion were essential to progress into the unknown. If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar ... doubt is not to be feared, but welcomed and discussed. — Richard Feynman

successfully train new spotters: by trial-and-error feedback. A novice would hazard a guess and the expert would say yes or no. Eventually the novices became, like — David Eagleman

And when we love, we know love will last. Significantly, we know, having learned through much trial and error, that true love begins with self-love. And that time and time again our search for love brings us back to the place where we started, back to our own heart's mirror, where we can look upon our female selves with love and be renewed. — Bell Hooks

There are species on this planet we've never seen. They live in lands and seas that no human has ever explored, and they are struggling to survive in a world unknown to us...We destroy their homes. And then they are gone, before we even have a chance to meet them.
Every species on this planet tells a story, an evolutionary novel packed with generations upon generations of knowledge. Letting those species disappear is like setting fire to every library on earth...the key to understanding life itself- is right here: millions of years of trial and error, data we can never even hope to accrue on our own...The only way we will ever learn what animals have to teach us about ourselves- about life- is if we keep them around. — Christie Wilcox

You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error. — Tim Harford

Never give up your right to be wrong, and be sure to give others that right too. — Tim Fargo

Try on 100 different hats if you can, until you find the one that suits you best. It's a trial and error thing. — Philip Treacy

In order to figure this artmaking stuff out, it's trial and error and experimentation, and takes some time and hard thinking. Putting work out in many forms and stages is an extension of how I see things. I feel the art process is best served when it invites comments and constructive criticism from people. — Jim Goldberg

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

Don't ever make the mistake [of thinking] that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit. — Linus Torvalds

Decision-making compresses trial-and-error learning experiences into an instantaneous mental evaluation about what the consequence of a particular action will be for a given situation. It requires the on-line integration of information from diverse sources: perceptual information about the stimulus and situation, relevant facts and experiences stored in memory, feedback from emotional systems and the physiological consequences of emotional arousal, expectations about the consequences of different courses of action, and the like. This sort of integrative processing, as we've seen is the business of working memory circuits in the prefrontal cortex. In chapters 7 and 8 , we discussed the role of the prefrontal cortex in working memory and considered the contribution of the lateral and medial prefrontal cortex. Here, we will focus on two of the subareas of the medial prefrontal cortex in light of their relation to the motive circuits outlined above. — Joseph E. Ledoux

That's the thing about being young
we are textbook pages
of trial and error
falling down and getting up
not by way of standing and
brushing off our jeans
buy by laying where we fell
until we were high enough to forget — Kalyn Roseanne Livernois

There's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fibre — Terry Pratchett

Failure is essential. Trial and error is necessary. — David Bergen

This was a type of war that we'd had no experience with before. Some of our policies were kind of trial and error in character. — William Westmoreland

Survival in the demand economy depends on and requires experimentation, risk taking, and trial and error. — Kevin Allen

Through trial-and-error and observable outcomes, our ancestors narrowed the field of edible mushroom candidates to just a few with remarkable, health-supporting properties. — Paul Stamets

Sixteen is an intensely troublesome age. You worry about little things, can't pinpoint where you are in any objective way, become really proficient at strange, pointless skills, and are held in thrall by inexplicable complexes. As you get older, though, through trial and error you can learn to get what you need, and throw out what should be discarded. And you start to recognize (or be resigned to the fact) that since your faults and deficiences are well nigh infinite, you'd best figure our your good points and learn to get by with what you have. — Haruki Murakami

The first scene I ever shot for 'Louie Bluie,' on that first day, I had never seen the camera before. I didn't know where to put it. I just knew what was strong about these guys and what I wanted to capture, so I tried to work backward from there and figure it out. Trial and error. Hopefully I got a little bit better at it. — Terry Zwigoff

After working with many nutritionists, reading books, and practicing trial and error on my own body, I have finally found a way to control my weight without deprivation. I call my program 'Somersizing,' and Somersizing is not a diet. Diet is a nasty four-letter word that conjures up negative thoughts of sacrifice and obsession and guilt. — Suzanne Somers

You don't learn from a situation where you do something well. You enjoy it and you give yourself credit, but you don't really learn from that. You learn from trial and error, trial and error, all the time. — Suzanne Farrell

Maybe being an adult wasn't crossing some arbitrary age line into wisdom. Maybe it was like anything else - training wheels and mistakes, trial and error, and now and again that feeling that you might have wings. — Megan Crane

I nod to the other will grayson, up onstage. he nods to me. we have something between us, him and me. but the truth? everybody has it. that's our curse and our blessing. that's our trial and our error and our it. the applause continues. i look up at tiny cooper. he may be heavy, but right now he floats. — David Levithan

I am inclined to trust you. You shouldn't be like that with another man, not ever; but I can't help it. I felt it strongly from the instant I heard your voice; and though I thought momentarily that it would falter, it didn't. It's still here. You see, the essence of trust is not knowing a person's motive; it's knowing what isn't. It's a simple process of trial and error that gets you to the heart of a man; and once that soft voice and those light feet of yours got to moving I saw in you no measure of ill intent. — Richard Ronald Allan

Trial and error is not bad, but not the best. If you don't know where the crowd is going, don't follow it. Get set. — Israelmore Ayivor

I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Science is not, as so many seem to think, something apart, which has to do with telescopes, retorts, and test-tubes, and especially with nasty smells, but it is a way of searching out by observation, trial and classification; whether the phenomena investigated be the outcome of human activities, or of the more direct workings of nature's laws. Its methods admit of nothing untidy or slip-shod; its keynote is accuracy and its goal is truth. — Archibald E. Garrod

I think it is absolutely crazy in this day and age that I have to go through a trial and error method to see if my child is allergic to an antibiotic or peanuts. I should just know. — Anne Wojcicki

I'm no expert, no natural-born talent, definitely no guru. As you'll soon learn, only through a colossal experiment in trial and error did I reach the sexual summit. Although I own up to having worn a cape in a few intimate scenarios, I don't possess supernatural powers of any kind. Perhaps my IQ is slightly above average, but Mensa isn't busting down my door. If pressed to define myself, I'd say I'm Horatio Alger between the sheets: a self-made swinging single male. . . with a hefty dose of Buster Keaton mixed in. — Daniel Stern

I think that the path that I took was normal in the American society where young women and men are not trained as to how to make the transition from being a girl to being a woman, from being a boy to being a man. And so I think that most young people in America live by trial and error, and not by parental instruction, community guidance. — Sister Souljah

Signs are an extremely personal language that we develop throughout our lives, by trial and error, until we begin to understand that God is guiding us. — Paulo Coelho

Children do not have to learn that streets are dangerous places by potentially fatal trial and error. — Keith Henson

Children, then, acquire social skills not so much from adults as from their interactions with one another. They are likely to discover through trial and error which strategies work and which do not, and later to reflect consciously on what they have learned. — Zick Rubin

The elements of trial and error, similar to earth and sky, and fire and water, delineates the constituent modules of our lives. Living robustly includes more failures than successes. We achieve adeptness to living by exhibiting a willingness to make good faith mistakes and learn from each misadventure. Every effort that fails to achieve our expected result is understandably frustrating. The fact is that without ideas and dreams and devoid of occasional crash landings, a person can never hope to achieve any worthy acts to temper resounding personal disappointment. Meaningful success is ultimately defined when a person dies, when an entire life's work devoted to performing passionate and compassionate enterprises can be judge as a whole unit. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I usually get involved in the interviews about the animators and the filmmaking in general, because I had a chance.I got to know, not only Marc Davis, but Frank Thomas, Artie Johnson, Ward Kimball, all these great animators, and just ask them all these questions about how they did certain things, what their trials and errors were, the ups and downs. — Andreas Deja

Fail your way forward. Recognize that Ready, fire, aim is superior to ready, aim, aim, aim. Straightforward trial and error produces better results than endless vacillating. If you're afraid to make decisions and act on them in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty, get a job. Failure's lessons are essential to success. — Steve Pavlina

I think of the universe as the body of God, and the creative capability we see and can exhibit as the mind of God. I will use this phrase to describe our system, that it's a creative, intelligent, self-organizing, learning trial-and-error, interactive, non-locally interconnected evolutionary system. — Edgar Mitchell

In rural North Carolina, you can get lots of great advice about how to clean and quarter a deer carcass, but we didn't really have anyone to ask for video advice, so we just kept learning through trial and error. — Rhett McLaughlin

We proceed by doubt, by trial and error, by resisting the impulse to lunge after certainty. — William Deresiewicz

But no matte what kind of an understanding is adopted, whether associated with positivism, which asserts that the truth can only be reached by trial and error, or rationalism, which asserts that everything can be explained and grasped by reason, whether the perspective of romanticism, which overemphasizes imagination and sensitivity, or an approach based on ardent naturalism, whether based on realism, which aims to describe everything as it is including its shortcomings, or a curiosity-raising approach such as surrealism, whether idealism, which asserts that there is nothing real but ideas, or cubism, which asserts that there is nothing real but instead of direct description, or some other such current or perspective, that is not true poetry. — M. Fethullah Gulen

There are a few things that can be done only by experiencing them. Love is one of them. There is no way to learn it; you have to do it. And by trial and error one learns. — Rajneesh

The network made me join Twitter. I am very scared of social media, and I don't know how to use it, so it's kind of trial and error. — Jay Ryan

As countries get rich they start increasing education and the very educated people tend to not like trial and error, because they think they're obligated to use the body of knowledge they have. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Most of what I learned as an entrepreneur was by trial and error. — Gordon Moore

If I want my daughter to try something, I eat it in front of her repeatedly without forcing the issue and, with some trial and error, the world is our oyster! — Alexandra Guarnaschelli

I learn the most from trial and error. I learn about what I'd like to be able to do from people like Barbara Mason. Saying I want to sing like Barbara Mason and doing it, it's two very different scenarios. — Mayer Hawthorne

Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design. — Jane Jacobs

As you get older, though, through trial and error you learn to get what you need, and throw out what should be discarded. And you start to recognize (or be resigned to the fact) that since your faults and deficiencies are well nigh infinite, you'd best figure out your good points and learn to get by with what you got. — Haruki Murakami

I'm figuring out what I want by trial and error, and maybe that's not the best way, but it's all I've got. All I know is that I need to be my own person, someone shaped by my desire, not fear of disappointing the people who are supposed to love me. — Cora Carmack

Most of our stuff was trial and error. You live with a tape recorder, you turn it on, you play the song and you listen to it. — Levon Helm

Start to give more thought to the world around you. Stop exposing yourself to situations that drain your energy. You will discover through a trial and error process that you will have more energy. — Frederick Lenz

Art and science have so much in common - the process of trial and error, finding something new and innovative, and to experiment and succeed in a breakthrough. — Peter M. Brant

To tell an adult exactly what steps to take towards his salvation was apt to weaken him. It deprived him of his inalienable right to trial and error which was tonic to the character. — Frances Gray Patton

We cannot rely on trial-and-error approaches to deal with existential risks ... We need to vastly increase our investment in developing specific defensive technologies ... We are at the critical stage today for biotechnology, and we will reach the stage where we need to directly implement defensive technologies for nanotechnology during the late teen years of this century ... A self-replicating pathogen, whether biological or nanotechnology based, could destroy our civilization in a matter of days or weeks. — Ray Kurzweil

Scranton showed that we have been building and using jet engines in a completely trial-and-error experiential manner, without anyone truly understanding the theory. Builders — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Plotting is an organic, and wildly inefficient process of trial and error. — James Hynes

I am not in favor of immortality. I believe death for humans is the way of getting rid of accumulated errors - as in trial and error. Without death, the old folks would start to gang up on the babies (the new trials). Immortality
> immortal mistakes. — Esther Dyson

You learn out of bitter experience, trial and error. Life teaches you that. As sincere as you all are, you can't learn it all in school. — George Cukor

The faithful believe that certain truths have been 'revealed.' The skeptics and secularists believe that truth is only to be sought by free inquiry and trial and error. Only one of those positions is dogmatic. — Christopher Hitchens

Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work. — Cheryl Strayed

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

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone. — Terry Pratchett

Creativity is the process of sensing problems or gaps in information, then identifying the difficulties and seeking solutions through trial and error or through forming hypotheses. — Ellis Paul Torrance

Action and reaction, ebb and flow, trial and error, change - this is the rhythm of living. Out of our over-confidence, fear; out of our fear, clearer vision, fresh hope. And out of hope, progress.
Bruce Barton — Bruce Barton

Dyslexia lends itself to original thinking, not rote formulas, because you can't do the formulas - you think up your own method based on intuition and instincts. Creativity is trial and error, trying to figure out a way to do something emotionally and intuitively. — Philip Schultz

In contrast, markets - oft mythologized as "natural" are the most unnatural things going. Libertarians will tell you "market laws are laws of nature", what baloney. Markets - and the other great modernist cornucopian tools - are magnificent wealth generating machines, built ad-hoc, through trial and error, constantly fine-tuned and refined, tinkered, adjusted. — David Brin

American baseball, by luck, trial, and error, and since the famous playing rules council of 1889, had struck on an almost perfect balance between offense and defense, and it was that balance, in fact, that and the accountability - the beauty of the records system which found a place to keep forever each least action - that had led Henry to baseball as his final great project. — Robert Coover

we have something between us, him and me. the the truth? everybody has it. that's our curse and our blessing. that's our trial and our error and our it. — John Green