Roger Babson Quotes

Experience is a safe guide.

Knowledge must come through action. You can have no test which is not fanciful, save by trial.

The surest way to learn is by doing it, but often, the lesson is: Don't do it!

All experiment is made on a basis of tradition; all tradition is the crystallization of experiment.

Only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet

Sometimes I learn by someone giving me warnings and giving me advice about what to do next. And other times, a lot of times, I have to put my hand into the fire.

Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life.

There is no way to find the best design except to try out as many designs as possible and discard the failures.

The only way to 'find out if it will work out' is to do it.

The only way you improve is to try new things.

The is always much to be said for not attempting more than you can do and for making a certainty of what you try. But this principle, like others in life and war, has it exceptions.

The only way to improve the chances for finding winners is to keep all the choices open and try them all.

When I was younger, I'd get very empirical with myself. "I have a hypothesis about myself. I'll put myself in a situation, see what happens, then I'll draw a conclusion based on the empirical evidence. Hypothesis: I can play basketball." So I'd try. "Conclusion: I cannot play basketball."

Long experience has taught me not always to believe in the limitations indicated by purely theoretical considerations. These, as we well know, are based on insufficient knowledge of all the relevant factors.

It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.

But there's no substitute for getting smarter faster. And the way you get smarter is to screw around vigorously. Try stuff. See what works. See what fails miserably. Learn. Rinse. Repeat.

Common sense comes from experience, and kids need to fail as well as succeed in order to learn it. It's difficult to develop common sense when you spend a lot of time in your room where nothing much happens.

By experience", says Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long wandering." Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then?

A lot is gained through experience, but experience teaches some and not others. Effectiveness and excellence, whether or not they were attained by simply having the knack or through the school of hard knocks, is really what you want to reward.

What it takes to do a job will not be learned from management courses. It is principally a matter of experience, the proper attitude, and common sense — none of which can be taught in a classroom... Human experience shows that people, not organizations or management systems, get things done.

Once turn to practice, error and truth will no longer consort together.

How great a quality is horse sense! Someone has defined it as that something which keeps horses from betting on men!

To toy with something is to manipulate it, to try it out within sets of contexts none of which is determinate.

Don't speak to fools, they scorn the wisdom of your words.

THERE'S NO OTHER WAY to find out whether or not you'll be successful other than just doing it