Gregory Benford Quotes

Someone once told me not to be afraid of being afraid, because, as she said, 'Anxiety is a glimpse of your own daring.' Isn't that great? It means that part of your agitation is just excitement about what you're getting ready to accomplish. Don't sell yourself short by being so afraid of failure that you don't dare to make any mistakes. Make your mistakes and learn from them. And remember: No matter how many mistakes you make, your mother always loves you!

I'd like to just be a little bit more open to making mistakes and not worrying about it so much.

Unwillingness to risk failure is always there, but it gets harder when you feel you have more to lose.

To avoid situations in which you might make mistakes may be the biggest mistake of all.

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

You can't live in fear of preventing mistakes.

The fear of mistakes is the fast track to irrelevance.

What we should really fear is not failure but the heart that is no longer brave enough to take risks and embrace challenges

The greatest mistake a person can make is to be afraid of making one.

Many people fail not so much because of their mistakes; they fail because they are afraid to try.

We shall make mistakes; and if we let these mistakes frighten us from our work we shall show ourselves weaklings.

Those who make no mistakes are making the biggest mistakes of all - they are attempting nothing new.

The biggest thing is you cannot be afraid to miss the game-winning shot. It's not that you want to make it; it's that you're not afraid to miss it. You're not afraid to make a play and it go wrong. You have to have amnesia. You're not afraid to make a play and it go wrong.

Sometimes all that saves me is being willing to make mistakes. There are projects that strike me as so beautiful, important, complicated, or just plain big, that they convince me of my own inadequacy. This awful state of reverence leads to paralyzing brain freeze. At times like that the only way out is for me to decide, 'To hell with it. I can't do it right, so I'll do it wrong. I can't do it well, but I can do it badly.' Sometimes, with luck, while I'm sweating to do it wrong, I stumble on a right way.

We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure.

Everyone is coming from a place of fear and my feeling is stop being so afraid. If something doesn't work then that's fine at least then you know it doesn't work. Don't worry so much about it not working, you can always fix that.

[H]e who fears to lose will never win.

Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just part of life. What does the world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back to where I came from because I didn't have the courage to say "yes" to life?

If you are afraid to take a chance, take one anyway. What you don't do can create the same regrets as the mistakes you make.

Don't let the fear of losing be greater than the excitement of winning.

You can't be afraid to fail. It's the only way you succeed - you're not gonna succeed all the time, and I know that.

I think to be courageous, you have to be afraid. For me, it feels very courageous when I go skiing because I'm very, very afraid to ski. It's dangerous! I feel very scared. But when I'm acting, I don't feel very scared.

If you worried about falling off the bike, you'd never get on.

Well, I always run the risk of falling on my face, which has in fact happened.

I didn't like the idea of being foolish, but I learned pretty soon that it was essential to fail and be foolish.