Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

It is part of my thesis that all our knowledge grows only through the correcting of our mistakes.

The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.

Every time is a learning experience, and you pick up a little bit, and you learn things and try not to repeat them the next time.

You can never learn less; you can only learn more. The reason I know so much is because I have made so many mistakes.

Error, when she retraces her steps, has farther to go before she can arrive at truth than ignorance.

Error is worse than ignorance.

Experience can dull. With most men experience is a series of mistakes; the more experience you have the less you know.

Anyone who can't learn from other people's mistakes simply can't learn, and that;s all there is to it. There is value in the wrong way of doing things. The knowledge gained from errors contributes to our knowledge base.

You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.

We do not progress from error to truth, but from truth to truth

I learn from my mistakes. It’s a very painful way to learn, but without pain, the old saying is, there’s no gain.

Ignorance is the mother of research.

You must never feel badly about making mistakes ... as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.

A mistake is valuable if you do four things with it: recognize it, admit it, learn from it, forget it

Learn from the past, but don't live there. Build on what you know so that you don't repeat mistakes.

I've learned that each mistake was probably a reflection of something that I was (or others were) doing wrong, so if I could figure out what that was, I could learn how to be more effective.

I look at my older writing to see where my weaknesses are and then I try to address those weaknesses and make new mistakes.

You've got to learn from your mistakes. And not do them again.

But there are roughly two sorts of informed people, aren't there? People who start off right by observing the pitfalls and mistakes and going round them, and the people who fall into them and get out and know they're there because of that. They both come to the same conclusions but they don't have quite the same point of view.

Uncertainty is the prerequisite to gaining knowledge and frequently the result as well.

The more you know, the more you know you don't know and the more you know that you don't know.

If my false figures came near to the facts, this happened merely by chance ... These comments are not worth printing. Yet it gives me pleasure to remember how many detours I had to make, along how many walls I had to grope in the darkness of my ignorance until I found the door which lets in the light of the truth ... In such manner did I dream of the truth.

I realized then that I didn't understand anything. I read all the books I could.

How can we get the most from every mistake we make?

The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.