Great Mistakes Quotes - Page 3

• To desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Mistake, Desire, Immortality

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• Senator [Ben] Sanders and I share some very big progressive goals. I've been fighting for universal healthcare for many years, and we're now on the path to achieving it. I don't want us to start over again. I think that would be a great mistake, to once again plunge our country into a contentious debate about whether we should have and what kind of system we should have for healthcare.

  Hillary Clinton

  Country, Mistake, Fighting

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.

  David Whyte

  Mistake, Drama, Ifs

  David Whyte (2009). “The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship”, p.50, Penguin

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• We are, in a way, temporary ambulatory repositories for our nucleic acids. This does not deny our humanity; it does not prevent us from pursuing the good, the true and the beautiful. But it would be a great mistake to ignore where we have come from in our attempt to determine where we are going.

  Carl Sagan

  Beautiful, Mistake, Humanity

  Carl Sagan (1973). “Carl Sagan's Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective”, p.6, Cambridge University Press

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• Those who think that in order to dress well it is necessary to dress extravagantly or grandly, make a great mistake. Nothing so well becomes true feminine beauty as simplicity.

  George D. Prentice

  Mistake, Thinking, Order

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• One of the great mistakes that can be made by a man of my age is to get involved in athletic competition with children-unless, of course, they are under six. And even then, stay away from hide-and-seek.

  Bill Cosby

  Children, Mistake, Men

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• There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Mistake, Science, Opportunity

  "The New Industrial State". Book by John Kenneth Galbraith. Chapter XVIII, Section 5, p. 208, 1967.

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• It is a great mistake for presidents and other leading executives of organizations having branches throughout the country to chain themselves to their desks at headquarters and send out rigid instructions to those in charge of distant branches and offices. Because a man sits in a palatial office in New York or Chicago or Philadelphia or Detroit and draws a big salary, it does not necessarily follow that he knows better than the man on the spot what ought to be done.... Paul, Caesar, Napoleon did not merely sit at home and issue long-range instructions.

  B. C. Forbes

  Country, New York, Mistake

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• Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy.

  E. M. Forster

  Mistake, Humility, Hypocrisy

  E. M. Forster (2010). “Aspects of the Novel”, p.183, RosettaBooks

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• Don't get upset with your imperfections. It's a great mistake because it leads nowhere - to get angry because you are angry, upset at being upset, depressed at being depressed, disappointed because you are disappointed. So don't fool yourself. Simply surrender to the Power of God's Love, which is always greater than our weakness.

  Saint Francis de Sales

  Faith, Mistake, Inspiration

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• You make a great, very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.

  William James

  Art, Mistake, Teaching

  William James (2008). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.14, Nuvision Pubns

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• No man ever progressed to greatness and goodness but through great mistakes.

  Frederick William Robertson

  Mistake, Greatness, Men

  Frederick William Robertson (1871). “Life, Letters, Lectures, and Addresses”, p.767

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• Though it is a great mistake to make friends of the wicked and foolish, it is unwise to make enemies of them, for they are very numerous.

  John Lubbock

  Mistake, Enemy, Wicked

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• Ambitious men spend their youth in rendering themselves worthy of patronage; it is their great mistake. While the foolish creatures are laying in stores of knowledge and energy, so that they shall not sink under the weight of responsible posts that recede from them, schemers come and go who are wealthy in words and destitute of ideas, astonish the ignorant, and creep into the confidence of those who have a little knowledge.

  Honore de Balzac

  Success, Mistake, Ambition

  Honore de Balzac (2011). “The Magic Skin: Or The Wild Ass's Skin”, p.99, The Floating Press

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• The danger, though - and there have been signs of this recently - is that Europe begins to demonstrate a return to more nationalist sentiment. To my mind, that would be a great mistake.

  Lakshmi Mittal

  Motivational, Mistake, Europe

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• Women have decided to be people, which is a great mistake. Women were nicer than people.

  Quentin Crisp

  Mistake, People, Decided

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• It is a very easy thing to devise good laws; the difficulty is to make them effective. The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws; and consequently the greatest art of a politician is to render vices serviceable to the cause of virtue.

  Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

  Art, Mistake, Men

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• 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

  Mistake, Reading, Missing

  R. A. Torrey, Edward D. Andrews (2016). “CHRISTIAN LIVING: How to Succeed in the Christian Life [Updated and Expanded]”, p.156, Christian Publishing House

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• 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

  Giving Up, Mistake, Drinking

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• The highest art is where has been most perfectly breathed the sentiment of humanity...Some persons suppose that landscape has no power of communicating human sentiment. But this is a great mistake. The civilized landscape peculiarly can: and therefore I love it more and think it more worthy of reproduction than that which is savage and untamed. It is more significant. Every act of man, every thing of labor, effort, suffering, want, anxiety, necessity, love, marks itself wherever it has been.

  George Inness

  Art, Mistake, Men

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• Our great mistake in education is ... the worship of book-learning-the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind. ... We ought to follow exactly the opposite course with children-to give them a wholesome variety of mental food, and endeavour to cultivate their tastes, rather than to fill their minds with dry facts.

  John Lubbock

  Education, Memories, Children

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• The assumption that the egoless condition, or union of self and God, is man's final goal and ultimate destiny is a great mistake. My purpose here is to affirm that the unitive state is a hidden path in itself, a movement in its own right that ultimately leads to no-self (no true-self and no-union). In short, the unitive state is the hidden path to no-self.

  Bernadette Roberts

  Mistake, Destiny, Men

  Bernadette Roberts (1985). “The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center”, p.15, SUNY Press

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• 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

  Mistake, Saint, Atoms

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• 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

  Mistake, Men, White Man

  Interview with David Barsamian, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. September 29, 2011.

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• 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

  Mistake, Thinking, America

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