Recently I shared a core belief from my childhood, “One learns by trying.” The search engine didn’t find that specific phrase so I think I learned the lesson by observing my father with his invention process. He’s a mechanical engineer who worked in the defense industry as a contract worker for government projects.
The corollary to the phrase is that “Sometimes what you learn is that doing that thing really was not pleasant/effective/fun/beneficial; and that it seems to be something to not ever repeat doing; or that it seems to be an activity worth actively avoiding even accidentally ever doing again; or that it seems to be a really dangerous thing to have tried, which may be worth warning others to avoid ever trying in the first place, as well.”
That first part is easier to write.
I found a few similar quotes while not finding “One learns by trying.” These were all “Popular Quotes” on goodreads.com and while I didn’t find the one that was close enough for the search engine’s algorithms,
these are a few that stood out to me as similar or otherwise helpful (from 17 pages of 100) On re-reading them I realize a sub-corollary could be, “Reading the Instruction Manual first is a good idea.” or something along those lines:
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
― Anne Frank, Anne Frank’s Tales from the Secret Annex
“
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
―
Virginia Woolf,
A Room of One’s Own
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Whatever you are, be a good one.”
― Abraham Lincoln
“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don’t know the answer”
― Douglas Adams
“Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
― Mark Twain
“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, All Men are Brothers: Autobiographical Reflections
“I can’t give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.”
― Herbert Bayard Swope
“What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. Don’t complain.”
― Maya Angelou, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now
“Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.”
― Joseph Conrad, Chance
“I don’t want to be a man,” said Jace. “I want to be an angst-ridden teenager who can’t confront his own inner demons and takes it out verbally on other people instead.”
“Well,” said Luke, “you’re doing a fantastic job.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes
“Promise me you’ll always remember: You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”
― A.A. Milne
“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
― Virginia Woolf
“When you’re in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, ‘Damn, that was fun’.”
― Groucho Marx
“It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary
“Peace begins with a smile.”
― Mother Teresa
“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.”
― Dalai Lama XIV
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
“The truth.” Dumbledore sighed. “It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
― Joe Klaas, Twelve Steps to Happiness
“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
― Aristotle
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
― Mark Twain
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
― Mark Twain
“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
― Albert Einstein
“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost
“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
― Elbert Hubbard
“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches
“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”
― Bob Marley
“The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”
― Bob Marley
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
― Rob Siltanen
“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
― Thomas A. Edison
“Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”
― Roald Dahl
“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline
The Paradoxical Commandments
“People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.
If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.
The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.
The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.
People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.
People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.
Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.”
― Kent M. Keith, The Silent Revolution: Dynamic Leadership in the Student Council
“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”
― William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well
“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
― Lao Tzu
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges
“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”
― Oscar Wilde
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
― Albert Einstein
“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
“We read to know we’re not alone.”
― William Nicholson, Shadowlands
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”
― Dr. Seuss
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin
“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers
“Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.”
― Mark Twain
“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
― Mark Twain
“Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we’re quoting.”
― John Green
“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
These turned up when I entered “One learns by trying” directly into the Goodreads.com search engine:
“But what if I make a mistake?’ Will asked.
Gilan threw back his head and laughed. ‘A mistake? One mistake? You should be so lucky. You’ll make dozens! I made four or five on my first day alone! Of course you’ll make mistakes. Just don’t make any of them twice. If you do mess things up, don’t try to hide it. Don’t try to rationalize it. Recognize it and admit it and learn from it. We never stop learning, none of us.”
― John Flanagan, Erak’s Ransom
“
One of the biggest, and possibly the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer… is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is infinitely better, truer, more moving, more fascinating, more perceptive, than anything you’re going to manage to get down on paper. (And if you ever think otherwise, then you’ve turned into an arrogant self-satisfied prat, and should look for another job or another avocation or another weekend activity.) So you have to learn to live with the fact that you’re never going to write well enough. Of course that’s what keeps you trying — trying as hard as you can — which is a good thing.”
―
Robin McKinley
“I’ve often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they’re on, why they don’t fall off it, how much time they’ve probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on. I tried to write one once. It was called Welcome to Earth. But I got stuck on explaining why we don’t fall off the planet. Gravity is just a word. It doesn’t explain anything. If I could get past gravity, I’d tell them how we reproduce, how long we’ve been here, apparently, and a little bit about evolution. I didn’t learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It’s also a source of hope. It means we don’t have to continue this way if we don’t like it.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
“You get older and you learn there is one sentence just four words long and if you can say it to yourself it offers more comfort than almost any other. It goes like this… Ready ”
“Ready.”
“At least I tried.”
― Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting
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