The opportunism of the flâneur is great in life and business—but not in personal life and matters that involve others. The opposite of opportunism in human relations is loyalty, a noble sentiment—but one that needs to be invested in the right places, that is, in human relations and moral commitments. The error of thinking you know exactly where you are going and assuming that you know today what your preferences will be tomorrow has an associated one.
Nassim Taleb
“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”
Albert Einstein
“Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.”
Thomas A. Edison
“Regard everything as an experiment.”
Corita Kent
“Art, like life, should be free, since they are both experimental.”
George Santayana
“Art is realm of thought experiments that quicken, sharpen and sweeten our being in this world.”
Wendy Steiner
“And you find gold, so to speak, effortlessly, just as in rational but undirected trial-and-error-based research. It is exactly like options, trial and error, not getting stuck, bifurcating when necessary but keeping a sense of broad freedom and opportunism. Trial and error is freedom.”
George Santayana
“The true method of knowledge is experiment.”
William Blake
“You may not know in your mind where you are going, but you know it by doing.”
Nassim Taleb
“Life is ‘trying things to see if they work.”
Ray Bradbury
“Every great inspiration is but an experiment – though every experiment we know is not a great inspiration.”
Charles Ives
“Art flourishes where there is a sense of nothing having been done before, of complete freedom to experiment; but when caution comes in you get repetition, and repetition is the death of art.”
Alfred North Whitehead
“With experimentation comes surprise and discovery.”
Kim Lee Kho
“To pry into the secrets of this world, we must make experiments. But experiment is a clumsy instrument, afflicted with a fatal determinacy which destroys causality.”
Banesh Hoffman
“Experiment, experiment, experiment – until it finally flows from within you. It is a hard road. But the result is also a deep inner satisfaction.”
Jack Dickerson
“No wise man tries every day what he has proved wrong the day before.”
James Truslow Adams
“Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”
Jules Verne
“I would say to any artist: ‘Don’t be repressed in your work, dare to experiment, consider any urge, if in a new direction all the better.’”
Edward Weston
“No experiment is ever a complete failure. It can always be used as a bad example.”
Paul Dickson
“When you’re experimenting you have to try so many things before you choose what you want, and you may go days getting nothing but exhaustion.”
Fred Astaire
“Experimentation keeps new ideas rising to the surface.”
Joseph Orr
“Observation is a passive science, experimentation an active science.”
Claude Bernard
“There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge…observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.”
Denis Diderot
“I have never made radically different experiments. Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should.”
Pablo Picasso
“I didn’t think; I experimented.”
Pablo Picasso
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“We can be creative and generate new breakthroughs, if we’re willing to work with ideas from the pool of history—both distant and more recent—despite the potential for our experiments to fail.”
Doug Dawson
“It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
Anthony Burgess
“If it’s not broken, tinker with it till you find out how it works.”
Bob Proctor
“The Law of Probabilities: the more things you try, the more likely one of them will work.”
Jack Canfield
“My best work is always done… when I’m experimenting. If I stop experimenting I feel it just becomes a drudgery.”
William Dobell
“What works for one artist doesn’t necessarily work for another – try anything and everything and go with what works for you.”
Paul Dixon
“Try things against your grain to find out just what your grain really is.”
Irwin Greenberg
“Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment.”
Steve Albini
“I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them.”
Charles Darwin
“The real measure of success is the number of experiments that can be crowded into 24 hours.”
Thomas Alva Edison
“Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.”
Will Rogers
Which is your favorite from the list? Have any other quotes about experimentation you’d add? Let me know in the comments.
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