“If you make a mistake and do not correct it, this is called a mistake.”
Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher
Source: The Analects, Chapter I
“If you make a mistake and do not correct it, this is called a mistake.”
Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher
Ingvar Kamprad (1926–2018) Entrepreneur
"The Testament of a Furniture Dealer" http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/pdf/reports-downloads/the-testament-of-a-furniture-dealer.pdf (1976).
“Seek out people who aren’t afraid of making mistakes”
Paulo Coelho book Aleph
Aleph (2011)
Context: Seek out people who aren’t afraid of making mistakes and who, therefore, do make mistakes. Because of that, their work often isn’t recognized, but they are precisely the kind of people who change the world and, after many mistakes, do something that will transform their own community completely”.
Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)
1880s, 1884, Letter to Theo (Nuenen, Oct. 1884)
Context: I tell you, if one wants to be active, one must not be afraid of going wrong, one must not be afraid of making mistakes now and then. Many people think that they will become good just by doing no harm - but that's a lie, and you yourself used to call it that. That way lies stagnation, mediocrity.
Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile. You don't know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas is, which says to the painter, You can't do a thing. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of 'you can't' once and for all.
Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily. He wades in and does something and stays with it, in short, he violates, "defiles" - they say. Let them talk, those cold theologians.
“Making mistakes is a lot better than not doing anything.”
Billie Joe Armstrong (1972) American singer and guitarist
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher
Discourses on the Condition of the Great
“It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.”
Joseph Conrad book An Outcast of the Islands
Source: An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Pt. 3, Ch. 2; possibly an adaptation of a Polish proverb, "Ten się nie myli, kto nic nie robi" — "One is not wrong, who does nothing."
Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki
A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Collective Ownership of Code and Text