Benjamin Franklin Quotes

As a true scientist, I have been proved wrong so many times that I'm very humble.

To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.

Success is not a good teacher, failure makes you humble.

Every time I am in danger of believing the glamour of my own press, some incident inevitably brings me back to earth.

I'm just smart enough to know what it is I don't know and try to learn as I go along and accept that you're going to make mistakes, and there are going to be things that are not going to be perfect.

Of course I make mistakes. I'm human. If I didn't make mistakes, I'd never learn. You can only go forward by making mistakes.

Experience is what enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

I have spent seventy years finding out that I am not God.

There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake, though all the World sees them to be in downright nonsense.

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

I am not afraid if the criticism concerns what I do wrong, because then I know. Because if you say the King cannot be criticized, it means that the King is not human.

I don't consider myself supremely talented, but I really like to try things and sift through it and see what mess I made.

Once I saw that we were not the ultimate arbiters of divine truth but flawed human beings, I couldn't pretend otherwise.

If you start to believe the hype about yourself, then you start to lose the bigger picture, and your focus is in the wrong place.

I thought I knew it all. Again, I knew absolutely nothing.

Some people learn from books, some listen to the advice of others, some learn from mistakes. I fit into the last category. So sue me.

Be humble, or you'll stumble.

I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.

Few people are modest enough to be estimated at their true worth.

To conceal ignorance is to increase it. An honest confession of it, however, gives ground for the hope that it will diminish some day or the other.

Nor is he the wisest man who never proved himself a fool.

I mean, you can't make anything without making mistakes, is the truth, and I'm very grateful for those misses that I've had in my career at home, because you learn so much more from them than you ever do from the hits. You learn that you really have to work hard, which I wasn't really doing at that time. You sort of think 'I've cracked it, I'm doing it.'And you start to think perhaps you're more of a dude than you really are.

I made a mistake. That happens. It proves I'm human, which you know, for some people, is a revelation.

It is no great thing to be humble when you are brought low; but to be humble when you are praised is a great and rare attainment.

I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn to stop making them.