Great Mistakes Quotes

One great mistake made by intelligent people is to refuse to believe that the world is as stupid as it is. ~ Claudine Guerin De Tencin

I believe that it is a great mistake not to stand up for people, even when you differ with them, if you feel that they are trying to do things that will help our country. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. ~ Milton Friedman

Make mistakes. Make great mistakes , make wonderful mistakes, make glorious mistakes. Better to make a hundred mistakes than to stare at a blank piece of paper too scared to do anything wrong, too scared to do anything. ~ Neil Gaiman

Andres Segovia, the great name for guitar, he put classical guitar on the map. He was the proponent of it, the best in the world. So I was listening to a record that he had made, and a little bauble happened in the middle of the record. A finger slipped, and I said, 'Wait a minute. He's not allowed to make mistakes,' - my mind. ~ George Benson

You can discover great things through 'mistakes.' ~ Jordan Bridges

There is a glory in a great mistake. ~ Nathalia Crane

I think it's great to be flawed. I am hugely flawed, and I like it this way. That's the fun of life. You fall, get up, make mistakes, learn from them, be human and be you. ~ Priyanka Chopra

No man ever progressed to greatness and goodness but through great mistakes. ~ Frederick William Robertson

My best advice for writers is: Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly - all these make for great stories. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Many who read their Bibles make the great mistake of confining all their reading to certain portions of the Bible which they enjoy. In this way they get no knowledge of the Bible as a whole. They miss altogether many of the most important phases of Bible truth. ~ R.A. Torrey

I want to tell you that I think this war is a great mistake. ~ Pierre Laval

It is the privilege of true genius, And especially genius who opens up a new path, To make great mistakes with impunity ~ Lewis Carroll

Television was a great place for me to kind of fall on my face and make mistakes and be okay with it and move on. ~ Max Martini

It feels great to be a role model and I'm very careful with the things I do. I'm not perfect, I do make a lot of mistakes, but I try my best. ~ Angie Stone

Babe Ruth made a great mistake when he gave up pitching. ~ Tris Speaker

I thought for a change I would give up drinking, and it was a great mistake, and, although I reduced the size of my nose and improved my beauty, my stomach suffered. ~ Winslow Homer

A doctrine is something that pins you down to a given mode of conduct and dozens of situations which you cannot foresee, which is a great mistake in principle. When the word 'containment' was used in my 'X' article, it was used with relation to a certain situation then prevailing, and as a response to it. ~ George F. Kennan

Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The greatest mistake a man can make is to be afraid of making one. ~ Maxwell Maltz

I've made some great mistakes in my life, but, you know, they were honest mistakes. ~ Henry Rollins

The fact that we did not give the demonstrators in Iran our moral support when a young woman named Neda bled to death in the streets of Iran will go down as one of the great mistakes of the 21st Century. ~ John McCain

I truly believed that other people in my position didn't make mistakes; I couldn't see that everybody makes them, even people with great experience. ~ Katharine Graham

Don't argue for other people's weaknesses. Don't argue for your own. When you make a mistake, admit it, correct it, and learn from it / immediately. ~ Stephen R. Covey

I think a badly crafted, great idea for a new film with a ton of spelling mistakes is just 100 times better than a well-crafted stale script. ~ Alexander Payne

There are tons of examples of U.K. and European mistakes. A classic one is pensions. That's obviously not an America-specific thing. The British and European economies are suffering under the weight of what is to come. The next great Ponzi scheme after Madoff is probably pensions. ~ Dambisa Moyo

Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar

As it can be maintained that all the great advances have come from men under forty, so the history of the world shows that a very large proportion of the evils may be traced to the sexagenarians, nearly all the great mistakes politically and socially, all of the worst poems, most of the bad pictures, a majority of the bad novels and not a few of the bad sermons and speeches. ~ William Osler

[Hemingway] always used to bawl me out for including so much topical stuff. He always claimed that was a great mistake, that in fifty years nobody would understand. He may have been right; it's getting to be true. ~ John Dos Passos

One of the great joys of being a slip fielder who takes a catch is you are able to contribute to the bowler's success. Yes, you are putting yourself in the firing line if you stuff it up, but you must want to be in that position to make a difference, and recognise sometimes that you might make mistakes. There are no easy catches in the slips. ~ Rahul Dravid

Leaping away from my mistakes has propelled me forward. It has great force behind it. It makes for great storytelling. ~ Holly Near

I think Franklin Roosevelt was a lousy president. What he did- which is to impose this great nanny state on America- was a great mistake. ~ Ed Crane

Ah, how true it is that we love ourselves too much and proceed with too much human prudence, that we may not lose an atom of our consideration! Oh, what a great mistake that is! The Saints did not act thus. ~ Teresa Of Avila

It is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code. ~ Katharine Fullerton Gerould

In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes. ~ John Ruskin

It is a great mistake to regard a certain object as pleasurable in itself and to store the idea of it in the mind in hope of fulfilling a want by its actual presence in the future. If objects were pleasurable in themselves, then the same dress or food would always please everyone, which is not the case. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

I am always sorry to hear that such and such a person is going to school to be educated. This is a great mistake. If the person is to get the benefit of what we call education, he must educate himself, under the direction of the teacher. ~ Fanny Jackson Coppin

To say that certainly America was very lucky to get a large amount of land, and the native Indians were extremely unlucky to have white men coming over here, is one thing. But to say that the whole of the American prosperity was based on exploiting the indigenous population would be a great mistake. ~ Amartya Sen

The victim should have the right to end his life, if he wants. But I think it would be a great mistake. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope. ~ Stephen Hawking

In my judgment, a great mistake has been made by well meaning and zealous men, through treating error and infidelity with altogether too much respect. ~ J.G. Holland

A great restaurant doesn't distinguish itself by how few mistakes it makes but by how well they handle those mistakes. ~ Danny Meyer

Sift each of us through the great sieve of circumstance and you have a residue, great or small as the case may be, that is the man or the woman. ~ Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

I said with great dignosity, Father, I am afraid I can't discuss my private life with you as I have a date with Lord of the Flies. ~ Louise Rennison

And that, Brunetti realized, was beginning to interest him a great deal, for the answer to his death must lie there, as it always did. Santore ~ Donna Leon

God and the Blessed Virgin were too far from him: God was too great and stern and the Blessed Virgin too pure and holy. ~ James Joyce

Words are truly the image of the soul. ~ Basil The Great

I just do what feels right. I think the great thing about getting to do what I do is that you can try out being a different person without having to screw up your life to do it. ~ Anna Paquin

Great stories strengthen us to be great souls. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The sciences have two extremities which meet. The first is the ignorance in which men find themselves at birth. The second is that attained by great souls. They have surveyed whatever man can know, find that they know all, meet in that same ignorance whence they started. It is a clever ignorance, which knows itself. Those among them who, having emerged from the first ignorance, have been unable to achieve the other & have some smattering of this self-satisfied knowledge, pose as experts. The latter do not disturb people, are no more mistaken in their judgments on everything than others. The masses, the skilled, make up the retinue of a nation. The others, who respect it, are equally respected by it. ~ Comte De Lautreamont

We frequently fall into error and folly, not because the true principles of action are not known, but because for a time they are not remembered; he may, therefore, justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences that may early be impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to occur habitually to the mind. ~ Samuel Johnson

She throws away the inedible toast and looks at me, her blue eyes sad. "I'm a bad cook."

My first inclination is to say, "You're just realizing this now?", but I don't. Instead I shrug. "You're good at a lot of other things."

"I can't crochet either."

I purse my lips to keep from agreeing. "Well...you - "

"And I can't sing. I don't even remember the shade of my natural hair color and I've had this outfit since the eighties."

I glance at her red top and tan pants. Yeah. Those should really go - along with a lot of other things in the house. "You're sort of making it hard for me to make you feel better when you keep tossing all the things you aren't good at, at me." I brighten. "You can dance! You're a great dancer."

"I'm having a mid-life crisis."

"You're forty-six," I scoff. "You're too young for that. I mean, maybe in four years... ~ Lindy Zart

Sunset is a wonderful opportunity for us to appreciate all the great things the sun gives us! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,

its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones
toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire

where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song. ~ Mary Oliver

By ecstasy I mean inner joyousness, and by inner joyousness I mean those inspirational fires which burn within the consciousness of great geniuses, fires which give to them an inconquerable vitality of spirit which breaks down all barriers as wheat bends before the wind. ~ Walter Russell

Idolatry involves putting the things we love in the place of God or seeing God as a means of getting the things that we want, and that's the second great struggle of our lives. ~ Colin S. Smith

Everyone listened to this amusing narrative with great interest, and the moment that Behemoth concluded it, they all shouted in unison: 'Lies! ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

Our only consolation, as we feel our own strength failing us, is to feel that we may help those who come after us to do more and to do better than ourselves, fixing their eyes as they can on the great horizons of which we only had a glimpse," pronounced Pasteur, with characteristic gallantry. Many ~ Bill Wasik

Here's a professional tip: If you have to say you're kidding, it might not be a great joke. ~ Ellen DeGeneres

I wasn't sure if i was embarrassed or just irritated. Cursing, I held the packet to my chest and stomped off. I turned around to send him one last seething glare and ran smack dab into a tree. Or at least it felt like a tree. But trees weren't warm. And they didn't have 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 Good Lord, 8? Eight pack? And dear God i was counting. I had touched each muscle. And great my hand was firmly places against the guys stomach.
I jerked my hand back and closed my eyes.
"Were tyou just counting my abs?" His voice sounded amused. It also sounded like a movie star voice, the type that makes you want to jump into the TV screen. It was deep, strong and had a slight accent I couldn't place. British? Scottish? ~ Rachel Van Dyken

The great powers claim that whatever they possess is theirs by right, but whatever we, the smaller countries possess is negotiable. ~ Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

Many of the things which we deplore, the prevalence of tuberculosis, the mounting record of crime in certain sections of the country, are not due just to lack of education and to physical differences, but are due in great part to the basic fact of segregation which we have set up in this country and which warps and twists the lives not only of our Negro population, but sometimes of foreign born or even of religious groups. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

In the last analysis, provincialism is your belief in yourself, in your neighborhood, in your reality. It is patriotism without belligerence. Convincing cases have been made to show that all great art is provincial in the sense of reflecting a place, a time, and a Zeitgeist. ~ Richard M. Weaver

Parliaments are the great lie of our time. ~ Konstantin Pobedonostsev

The rich people are apparently leaving America. They're giving up their citizenship. These great lovers of America who made their money in this country-when you ask them to pay their fair share of taxes they run abroad. We have 19-year old kids who lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan defending this country. They went abroad. Not to escape taxes. They're working class kids who died in wars and now billionaires want to run abroad to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. What patriotism! What love of country! ~ Bernie Sanders

Sam's Place had never felt so empty. He suspected the emptiness was not in the old Quonset hut; it was in him. There was nothing in him now, nothing but the great emptiness of death, which he seemed to carry with him like a virus. ~ William Kent Krueger

Organizing the books was a fun afternoon. We decided to put the thick hardback books, mostly intro. to philosophy textbooks and Norton literature anthologies, on the top shelves where they looked good but stayed out of reach since there's no reason for opening them ever again. Then we went by genre: mysteries, cozies, modernists, mountains, sci-fi, beloved childhood volumes, books we bought abroad, books required in school we couldn't sell back, books bought for us we'll read soon, books bought for us we have no intention of reading, books we want to read but are too long for a commitment with our current schedules...We're not really done with this organization, and I doubt we ever will be, but that's one great part about it. ~ Joshua Isard

In a world where the great technologies enable us to record, replay, cut and paste, zoom in, and delete, listening is the crucial commitment to keep the heart touchable. ~ Mark Nepo

To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic. ~ Roger Ebert

I'm a huge fan of a Hillary Clinton candidacy. I think Hillary will be an incredibly strong candidate, and hopefully it will inspire my party to put up someone great. ~ Nicolle Wallace

But it is not emancipation that the great majority seeks. When pressed, most men will admit that it takes but little to be happy. (Not that they practice this wisdom!) Man craves happiness here on earth, not fulfillment, not emancipation. Are they utterly deluded, then, in seeking happiness? No, happiness is desirable, but it is a by-product, the result of a way of life, not a goal which is forever beyond one's grasp. Happiness is achieved en route. And if it be ephemeral, as most men believe, it can also give way, not to anxiety of despair, but to a joyousness which is serene and lasting. To make happiness the goal is to kill it in advance. If one must have a goal, which is questionable, why not self-realization? The unique and healing quality in this attitude toward life is that in the process goal and seeker become one. ~ Henry Miller

The great thing about being considered insane is that you've got an excuse to do anything you want ~ Karen Francisco

The Maya built with stone, while this region had been extensively settled by a separate, sophisticated culture that built great earthen mounds. This was an entirely new culture. Even as Strong's work showed definitively that Mosquitia was not part of the Maya realm, however, his discoveries raised more questions than they answered. ~ Douglas Preston

We call them survivors, but once the vampires get you, the person you were dies, like any traumatized part of you never leaves that room, that car, that moment, and you walk forward a ghost of your former self. You rebuild yourself over the years, but the person you were isn't the person you become. The great bad thing happens, and you become a ghost in your own life, and then you become flesh and blood and remake your life, but the ghosts of what happened don't go away completely. They wait for you in low moments, and then they wail at you, shaking their chains in your face and trying to strangle you with them. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

That's what we called him. Our prince. And we were princesses. God's princesses. His daughters, who deserved nothing less than God's best. And while we were determining God's best, the message was clear: don't settle for anything less. Ladies, we've gone nuts. Of course God wants us to marry a great guy. Of course he wants us to find someone who loves us, treats us right, and maybe even makes our heart beat a little faster. He certainly wants someone whose calling we can join, a man with whom we can serve God with effectiveness and joy. But while I'm all for understanding our worth in God's eyes, remember that we're not perfect prima donnas who deserve the best and nothing less. On the contrary, we're sinners who will someday marry other sinners. God has a plan for our future marriages, and it's not to fulfill all our dreams or give us a storybook ending. His goal is to work out his purposes and glorify himself. ~ Lisa Anderson

We must get back to a very strong Christianity ... Christianity shaped America and England, and we need to get back to those moral foundations that made us great. ~ George Carey

Our present culture, however, specializes in inflaming endless lust for possessions with advertisements that constantly convince us that we need more (particularly to create the ease we have never found). The marketers don't tell us much about their products, but they spend a great deal of energy (and enormous amounts of money) appealing to our fears and dreams. Thus, the idolatry of possessions plays to the deeper idolatry of our selves-and in an endlessly consuming society, persons are always remaking themselves with new belongings. ~ Marva Dawn

You talk about seeing around corners as an element of success. That's what differentiates the good leader. Not many people have it. Not many people can predict that corner. That would be a characteristic of great leaders. ~ Jack Welch

Despite the great advantages of digital video and the great ease of using the medium, still those who use it have first to understand the sensitivities of how to best use the medium. ~ Abbas Kiarostami

We are always in a hurry to be happy, M. Danglars; for when we have suffered a long time, we have great difficulty in believing in good fortune. But ~ Alexandre Dumas

Fear is the great squanderer of dreams... ~ Alexia Purdy

Indie music is 'it' now. It's kind of a revolution to the music: 1980s, 1990s music was getting very sanitized; they were complying with the music industry. Music was getting more and more dead in a way. Now, because of the social climate that's very severe, the artists are compelled to start being real. It's really great that indie music is now. ~ Yoko Ono

...as an actor there`s nothing better than a great moody moment to play with nothing to say. It`s so much easier to do because you can really get inside your head. ~ Ewan McGregor

My mother wasn't rich, and I never seen my father. I was a street performer. I've been shot. And now I'm known around the world, and I've touched a lot of people with my music. That's one of the great testimonies that's gonna go down in history. ~ R. Kelly

The Holy ... Machine?" I mumbled.
"Yes." She gave a little laugh. "A great miracle. He is a kind of robot, but God has given him a soul - and not an ordinary human soul either, but the soul of a saint or an angel!"
"But ... I thought robots were ... bad ... "
"Yes, of course, and Mary Magdalene was a whore. To God, all things are possible. ~ Chris Beckett

Julian recognized that the strength of the orthodox Church rested to a great extent on the imperial discrimination in its favour. According to Ammianus, he tried to atomize the Church by ending the system:
'He ordered the priests of the different Christian sects, and their supporters to be admitted to the palace, and politely expressed his wish that, their quarrels being over, each might follow his own beliefs without hindrance or fear. He thought that freedom to argue their beliefs would simply deepen their differences, so that he would never be faced by a united common people. He found from experience that no wild beasts are as hostile to men, as Christians are to each other.' ~ Paul Johnson

The press waited. It looked now like a great big beast. Soon he'd throw a lot of words into it. And in a few hours it would be hungry again, as if those words had never happened. You could feed it, but you could never fill it up. ~ Terry Pratchett

All great ideas are dangerous. ~ Oscar Wilde

Without my specs on, I think I look really great; then I put them on, and I scream. But at 62, I still think less is better. I use Clarins foundation, but I don't put it everywhere - I hate that covered look - so just on the sides of my nose where the veins have gone bang. ~ Jane Birkin

Let's be honest, Mr. Ravenwood. You have no place in this town. You are not part of it and clearly, neither is your niece. I don't think you are in any position to make demands."
"Mrs. Lincoln, I appreciate your candor, and I will try to be as frank with you as you have been with me. It would be a grave error for you, for anyone in this town, really, to pursue this matter. You see, I have a great deal of means. I'm a bit of a spendthrift, if you will. If you try to prevent my niece from returning to Stonewall Jackson High School, I will be forced to spend some of that money. Who knows, perhaps I'll bring in a Wal-Mart."
There was another gasp from the bleachers.
"Is that a threat?"
"Not at all. ~ Kami Garcia

Orthodox Christians have the habit of claiming all great men, all men who have held important positions, men of reputation, men of wealth. As soon as the funeral is over clergymen begin to relate imaginary conversations with the deceased, and in a very little while the great man is changed to a Christian - possibly to a saint. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll