A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals to discovery.
Failure Quotes
Nothing here is flagged as misattributed. Shakespeare, the judge Lord Ellenborough, Ben Carson and Frederick William Robertson lead, and the sourced lines are all older and drier than the usual motivational material. Wilde, in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), says experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes, and in 1894 that ambition is the last refuge of the failure. Burns’s Scots Musical Museum (1787) has the bleakest of the three: now all is done that men can do, and all is done in vain.
If you came for the line about failing and trying again, you will not find it here. Try the Success page.
One goes to the right, the other to the left; both are wrong, but in different directions.
The camel set out to get him horns and was shorn of his ears.
Lack of recent information is responsible for more mistakes of judgment than erroneous reasoning.
If this fail,
The pillar'd firmament is rottenness,
And earth's base built on stubble.
The error of our eye directs our mind:
What error leads must err.
While man's desires and aspirations stir,
He can not choose but err.
Why, like the hindmost chariot wheels, art curst
Still to be near but ne'er to reach the first.