Donald Knuth Quotes

I make lots of mistakes. I try hard not to make the same mistake more than three or four times.

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

Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.

No one's going to see my mistakes; I just need the safety of these mistakes to lead me to the right answers.

No one's walking around here perfect. Everyone's gonna make mistakes. That's part of how you learn.

You will get something wrong today, and tomorrow, and every day of your life. So will I, and everybody you know. You don’t have a choice about being wrong sometimes: mistakes will be your life-long companion. But you do have a choice about whether to approach your error in terror so you suppress, ignore and repeat it — or to make it your honest, open ally in trying to get to the truth.

Just as we may learn from our successes (how to do it) so also can we learn from our mistakes (how not to do it). It just isn't in the cards that anybody should get by forever without making mistakes and perhaps sometimes making costly ones.

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.

You learn from the mistakes you make and from the mistakes other people make. The truth is, you don't learn from success; you learn from failure.

I always make mistakes and I always fix things up, as best I can, in the cutting room.

It's all part of my journey - I've done a lot of stupid things, but you learn by your mistakes.

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

I learn the most from making my own mistakes.

I've done well over time but made lots of mistakes, too. Learn from your mistakes.

I have found that I always learn more from my mistakes than from my successes. If you aren't making some mistakes, you aren't taking enough chances.

I've made a lot of mistakes and I don't regret any of them. Sometimes that's the only way you learn.

It's okay to make mistakes. Mistakes are our teachers - they help us to learn.

Of course it's important to make mistakes, as long as you grow from them.

Sometimes the best way to learn something is by doing it wrong and looking at what you did.

As humans, we're going to make mistakes. It's what makes us human, and most of the time, the most effective way of learning is from a mistake.

Life isn't about algebra and geometry. Learning by making mistakes and not duplicating them is what life is about.

You learn more when things go wrong.

I'm very good at making mistakes, so I realized that I should embrace mistakes and learn from them.

If I had it all to do over again, I would do most all things differently. However, how would I know that if, I had not had the opportunity to do them the first time.

To swear off making mistakes is very easy. All you have to do is swear off having ideas.