Mistakes Quotes

“Learn from your history, but don’t live in it.”
― Steve Maraboli

“The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and with the comfort of old age.”
― Plato, The Republic and Other Works

“Show me a person who has never made a mistake and I'll show you someone who has never achieved much.”
― Joan Collins

“When the ax came into the forest the trees said the handle is one of us.”
― Alice Walker

“Let us cry for the spilt milk, by all means, if by doing so we learn how to avoid spilling any more. Let us cry for the spilt milk, and remember how, and where, and why, we spilt it. Much wisdom is learnt through tears, but none by forgetting our lessons.”
― Maria Amparo Ruiz De Burton, The Squatter and the Don

“I hope I remember everything," said Toni.
"You won't," said Trapp. "That's how you learn. But after you make the same mistake one, or two, or five times, you'll eventually get it. And then you'll make new mistakes.”
― Louis Sachar, The Cardturner: A Novel about a King, a Queen, and a Joker

“I want to reach back into my history with a grade-school pink eraser, scrubbing away my decisions like mistakes on a math test. To bad I drew my mistakes in ink.”
― Emery Lord, Open Road Summer

“I have learned from my mistakes, and I am sure I can repeat them exactly”
― Peter Cook

“Your mistakes only define the rest of your life if you let them. Don’t let them.”
― Sabaa Tahir, A ​Sky Beyond the Storm

“Do you ever make silly mistakes? It is one of my very few creative activities.”
― Len Deighton

“Men are born to sin…What does matter most, is not that we err, it is that we do benefit from our mistakes, that we are capable of sincere repentance, of genuine contrition.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, The Sunne in Splendour

“Millions of deaths would not have happened if it weren’t for the consumption of alcohol. The same can be said about millions of births.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Sometimes … I think parents work so hard to keep us from making their mistakes, they won’t allow us to make our own.”
― Charles Sheehan-Miles, A Song for Julia

“It is said that there are four kinds of horses: excellent ones, good ones, poor ones, and bad ones. The best horse will run slow and fast, right and left, at the driver’s will, before it sees the shadow of the whip; the second best will run as well as the first one does, just before the whip reaches its skin; the third one will run when it feels pain on its body; the fourth will run after the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones. You can imagine how difficult it is for the fourth one to learn how to run!

When we hear this story, almost all of us want to be the best horse. If it is impossible to be the best one, we want to be the second best. That is, I think, the usual understanding of this story, and of Zen. You may think that when you sit in zazen you will find out whether you are one of the best horses or one of the worst ones. Here, however, there is a misunderstanding of Zen. If you think the aim of Zen practice is to train you to become one of the best horses, you will have a big problem. This is not the right understanding. If you practice Zen in the right way it does not matter whether you are the best horse or the worst one. When you consider the mercy of Buddha, how do you think Buddha will feel about the four kinds of horses? He will have more sympathy for the worst one than for the best one.

When you are determined to practice zazen with the great mind of Buddha, you will find the worst horse is the most valuable one. In your very imperfections you will find the basis for your firm, way-seeking mind. Those who can sit perfectly physically usually take more time to obtain the true way of Zen, the actual feeling of Zen, the marrow of Zen. But those who find great difficulties in practicing Zen will find more meaning in it. So I think that sometimes the best horse may be the worst horse, and the worst horse can be the best one.

If you study calligraphy you will find that those who are not so clever usually become the best calligraphers. Those who are very clever with their hands often encounter great difficulty after they have reached a certain stage. This is also true in art and in Zen. It is true in life. So when we talk about Zen we cannot say, 'He is good,' or 'He is bad,' in the ordinary sense of the words. The posture taken in zazen is not the same for each of us. For some it may be impossible to take the cross-legged posture. But even though you cannot take the right posture, when you arouse your real, way-seeking mind, you can practice Zen in its true sense. Actually it is easier for those who have difficulties in sitting to arouse the true way-seeking mind that for those who can sit easily.”
― Shunryu Suzuki

“It’s okay to not be perfect and not to have everything figured out. It’s okay to feel things that are shameful, hate, and feel guilty. I feel like the message we’ve tried to stand by, is that it’s basically okay to have scars and to show them. To show that you’ve been through all sorts of things and have come out a different and better person because of it.”
― Hayley Williams

“Every trail has its end, and every calamity brings its lesson!”
― James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans

“You got one choice at the beginning but if you didn't choose right, things got narrow real quick.”
― Ron Rash, Serena

“You can make heaven out of hell, or hell out of heaven. The choice is yours.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Sometimes God will place a wall on your path to force you to go in another direction.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“When we are young, Angela, we may fall victim to the misconception that time will heal all wounds and that eventually everything will shake itself out. But as we get older, we learn this sad truth: some things can never be fixed. Some mistakes can never be put right - not by the passage of time, and not by our most fervent wishes, either. In my experience, this is the hardest lesson of them all.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.”
― Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction

“Most people, if they know they have done wrong, foolishly suppose they can conceal their error by defending it, and finding a justification for it; but in my belief there is only one medicine for an evil deed, and that is for the guilty man to admit his guilt and show that he is sorry for it. Such an admission will make the consequences easier for the victim to bear, and the guilty man himself, by plainly showing his distress at former transgressions, will find good grounds of hope for avoiding similar transgressions in the future.”
― Arrian, The Campaigns of Alexander

“I think making mistakes and discovering them for yourself is of great value, but to have someone else to point out your mistakes is a shortcut of the process.”
― Shelby Foote

“We have all made mistakes, each and every one of us. The trick is to not keep making them over and over.” “I don’t,” I said, not modestly but truthfully. “I keep finding new mistakes to make. I suspect that I have a genius for it.”
― Sara Poole, Poison

“Our mistakes and regrets are not barriers to becoming who we can be; they are a necessary ingredient.”
― David Schnarch, Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships

“The devil lives in our mistakes, the lord lives in our rights. Who lives in our ignorance, and who wins after all?”
― Maya Angelou Kwabena kodom Nicholas Sparks Rosa Parks

“This is a dynamic and mysterious universe and human life is, no doubt, conditioned by imponderables of which we are only dimly aware. People sometimes say, "the strangest coincidence happened." Coincidences may seem strange, but they are never a result of caprice. They are orderly laws in the spiritual life of man. They affect and influence our lives profoundly. These so-called imponderables are so important that you should become spiritually sensitized to them. Indeed, the more spiritually minded you become the more acute your contact will be with these behind-the-scenes forces. By being alive to them through insight, instruction, and illumination, you can make your way past errors and mistakes on which, were you less spiritually sensitive, you might often stumble.”
― Norman Vincent Peale, Stay Alive All Your Life

“Stay away from any minute of joy that can bring you a lifetime of sorrow.”
― Dennis E. Adonis

“There are things that once done can’t be undone, things that once said can’t be unsaid.”
― Lisa Gardner, The Neighbor

“Learning to cover a mistake is as important as getting everything right.”
― Suzanne Harper, The Juliet Club