Lew Wallace Quotes

Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously.

U2's best work has always been when we didn't know what we're doing.

You never know why something works or doesn't.

Every time I make a plan, God laughs at me.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, but that's what we face when we're dealing with improvisation.

Life is always surprising to me. When you think it's going to get dull, it never really does.

It might be a huge hit, it might not; but you learn something doing it.

With improvisation, I just do it. It might be a total failure but then you just throw the dice again.

Nowhere are our calculations more frequently upset than in war.

You can't predict a show, that is the damndest thing, you can't predict if a show is going to work or not until it's on the air.

There's no 'Chutes and Ladders' in life.

Research is so unpredictable. There are periods when nothing works and all your experiments are a disaster and all your hypotheses are wrong.

Much of what we're going to try will not work, and much of what does work will do so for unanticipated reasons.

If innovations were predictable, they wouldn't be discoveries.

I have gone into every project with the same enthusiasm and the same hope, but some have worked out, and some haven't.

I fail every once in a while, but failing is your first attempt at learning. I'm not worried about it.

'Fail hard, fail fast, fail often. It's the key to success.' This one I learned from experience!

Failure is a learning experience, and the guy who has never failed has never done anything.

Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.

Nature gropes and blunders and performs the crudest acts. There is no steady advance upward. There is no design.

Every start on an untrodden path is a venture which only in unusual circumstances looks sensible and likely to succeed.

You're going to fail a few times, because that is the only time you actually learn something.

Nothing works until it does. Nobody knows anything. You don't know what people are going to respond to. People are always surprised by stuff.

I don't really have any advice, other than to say it's the most appallingly difficult thing I've ever tried to do and I wish I had a better idea of how to do it. In my experience what you end up with is the by-product of your failure to achieve what you set out to do. It may turn out OK, but it wasn't what you meant and you've no idea how you got there.

Where destiny blunders, human prudence will not avail.