An experiment is a test done to discover if something works

• Experiment: A course of action tentatively adopted without being sure of the outcome.  Oxford Dictionary
• Experiment: A test done in order to learn something or to discover if something works or is true.  Cambridge Dictionary
• Experiment: A test, trial, or tentative procedure; an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of testing a principle, supposition.  Dictionary.com
• Experiment: An operation or procedure carried out under controlled conditions in order to discover an unknown effect or law, to test or establish a hypothesis, or to illustrate a known law.  Merriam Webster
• Learning,  Mistakes,  Explore new approaches

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See life as a process of experimentation…

• Don’t be timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Life is an experiment in which you may fail or succeed. Explore more, expect least. Santosh Kalwar
• It’s much easier on the emotions when one sees life as an experiment rather than a struggle for popularity. Criss Jami
• Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun. Mary Lou Cook
• Faith begins as an experiment and ends as an experience. William Ralph Inge
• This process of self-discovery is scientific and the invariable rule of science has to be applied – experiment and observe. Barry Long
• Past is experience, Present is experiment and Future is expectation. Use your experience in your experiments to achieve your expectations.
• The real measure of success is the number of experiments that can be crowded into 24 hours. Thomas Alva Edison
• In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration. Ansel Adams
• For the majority of us, the past is a regret, the future an experiment. Mark Twain
• Art like life should be free, since both are experimental. George Santayana
• Consider everything an experiment. Corita Kent
• Liberty is the possibility of doubting, of making a mistake, of searching and experimenting. Ignazio Silone
• No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• We cannot advance without new experiments in living, but no wise man tries every day what he has proved wrong the day before. James Truslow Adams
• I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art. Madonna

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… a process of trial and error

• Your development towards wisdom is a process of experimentation, trial and error, so it’s inevitable things will not always go to plan or turn out how you’d want. Compassion is the remedy for harsh judgement – of ourselves and others. Forgiveness is not only divine – it’s also ‘the act of erasing an emotional debt’. Behaving ethically, with integrity, and with humour – especially the ability to laugh at yourself and your own mishaps – are central to the perspective that ‘mistakes’ are simply lessons we must learn. Cherie Carter- Scott
• Instead of trying and failing choose either to experiment or practice. Kevin Everett Fitz Maurice
• 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. Franklin D. Roosevelt
• 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
• You never know with these things when you’re trying something new what can happen. This is all experimental. Richard Branson
• Mistakes

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In effect, we’re all scientists and life is a mighty laboratory

• Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos. David Cronenberg
• Your life is a kind of laboratory where you’re constantly experimenting with your own higher knowing, always increasing your capacity to design the life you choose. David Emerald
• Observation is a passive science, experimentation an active science. Claude Bernard
• No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong. Albert Einstein
• Science

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It is only through experimenting that we learn and grow

• Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own life. Herbert Otto
• It is only through failure and through experiment that we learn and grow. Isaac Stern
• Experience is the past tense of experiment. Gegory Alan Elliot
• We gain all genuine insight from questions and experiments. Jonathan Lockwood Huie
• Life is one long experiment in learning. Who can be perfect all the time? Sometimes I feel half- wise, sometimes half- stupid.   Terri Guillemets
• The biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work. Charles F. Kettering
• Learning,  Growth,  Life is a university

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Experimentation leads to discovery, creativity and innovation

• Every great inspiration is but an experiment. Charles Ives
• It’s hard for corporations to understand that creativity is not just about succeeding. It’s about experimenting and discovering. Gordon Mackenzie
• Necessity is not the mother of invention. Knowledge and experiment are its parents. Willis R. Whitney
• An experiment disproving a prediction is a discovery. Enrico Fermi
• Discovery,  Creativity,  Innovation

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Without experimenting and trying new things, we stagnate

• That without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, moribund. Anthony Bourdain
• A fool is a man who never tried an experiment in his life. Erasmus Darwin
• Explore new approaches

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The only way to figure out what works is to experiment

• You’ve got to experiment to figure out what works. Andrew Weil
• Life is trying things to see if they work. Ray Bradbury

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Therefore, try out new things and stretch your comfort zone

• The country demands bold, persistent experimentation. 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. Franklin D. Roosevelt
• Try it out. Play around with a new idea. Do something strange. If you never leave your comfort zone, you won’t grow. Jessica Hagy
• Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Don’t be afraid to expand yourself, to step out of your comfort zone. That’s where the joy and the adventure lie. Herbie Hancock
• In breaking away from the familiar and the expected, you’ll be forced and privileged to face greater challenges, learn harder lessons, and really get to know yourself. Kelly Cutrone
• You can only grow if you’re willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new. Brian Tracy
• Don’t fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have.
• When we tire of well-worn ways, we seek for new. This restless craving in the souls of men spurs them to climb, and to seek the mountain view. Wheeler Wilcox
• It’s essential to keep an open mind, and to be willing–better yet, eager–to try new things. Michael Abrash
• A man practices the art of adventure when he is unafraid of new ideas, new theories and new philosophies. When he has the curiosity to experiment–to test and try new ways of living and thinking. Wilfred A. Peterson
• I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them. Charles Darwin
• Over the next four years, we will be bold. We will be willing to experiment. We will not fear failure. Matt Blunt
• Stretch your comfort zone

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The only way to get different results in life is to experiment with new approaches

• It’s impossible to make real improvements to our lives unless we do things differently. Brian Tracy
• If you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done. Thomas Jefferson
• When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge. Tuli Kupferberg
• To achieve what you’ve never achieved before, you need to do what you’ve never done before.
• Perhaps the way to meet tomorrow’s challenges is not to use yesterday’s solutions, but to dare to think the previously unthinkable, to speak the previously unspeakable, and to try that which was previously out of the question. Neale Donald Walsch
• If we are to achieve results never before accomplished, we must expect to employ methods never before attempted. Sir Francis Bacon
• If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success. John D. Rockefeller
• Explore new approaches

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Experiment with knowledge and wisdom by trying it out in your own life

• Nothing is true unless it works. And it has to work for you, not for someone else. Raymond Charles Barker
• The true method of knowledge is experiment. William Blake
• Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment. Steve Albini
• It is necessary to combine knowledge born from study with sincere practice in our daily lives. These two must go together. The Dalai Lama
• Knowledge needs to be a verb. Edwards Denning
• The knowledge that we consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results. Peter Drucker
• Knowledge isn’t power until it is applied. Dale Carnegie
• It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong. Richard Feynman
• No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life. Marcus Aurelius
• No, life has not disappointed me. On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year — ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge — and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery. Friedrich Nietzsche
• 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
• Knowledge,  Wisdom

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No experiment is ever a failure – it simply instructs

• A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions–as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. Friedrich Nietzsche
• No experiment is ever a complete failure. It can always be used as a bad example. Paul Dickson
• There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes. Richard Buckminster Fuller
• Failure

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If you approach life as an experiment, then mistakes and failure simply useful stepping stones along the way

• There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial, error, and experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately “work.” Cherie Carter- Scott
• You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. Anaïs Nin
• Your development towards wisdom is a process of experimentation, trial and error, so it’s inevitable things will not always go to plan or turn out how you’d want. Cherie Carter- Scott
• There are no mistakes or failures, only lessons. Denis Waitley
• Accept failure as a normal part of living. View it as part of the process of exploring your world; make a note of its lessons and move on. Tom Greening
• Some of the best lessons we ever learn, we learn from our mistakes and failures. The error of the past, is the wisdom and success of the future. Tyron Edwards
• We don’t make mistakes…we just have learnings. Anne Wilson Schaef
• Probably he who never made a mistake, never made a discovery. Samuel Smiles
• An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field. Niels Bohr
• Mistakes are merely steps up the ladder. Paul J. Meyer
• Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. Albert Einstein
• A successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way. Dale Carnegie
• We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure – all your life. John W. Gardner

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In fact, failed experiments are often more instructive than success

• Success tends to lock you in a pattern, and you get the attitude, “If it’s not broken, why fix it?” This attitude prevents you from experimenting and trying other approaches that in the long run may do you a lot more good.  Roger von Oech
• Success teaches us nothing; only failure teaches. Hyman G. Rickover
• The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by my failures. Humphrey Davy
• Success is a poor teacher. Robert T. Kiyosaki
• Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know. William Saroyan
• We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do by finding out what will not do. And probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery. Samuel Smiles
• Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes. John Dewey
• I think success has no rules, but you can learn a lot from failure. Jean Kerr
• It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done. Samuel Smiles
• Failure,  Success

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If an experiment ends in failure, simply experiment with a different approach

• Failure is a signpost to turn you in another direction. Oprah Winfrey
• Failure is just a way for our lives to show us that we’re moving in the wrong direction, that we should try something different. It holds no more power than we give it. Oprah Winfrey
• For every failure, there’s an alternative course of action. You just have to find it. When you come to a roadblock, take a detour. Mary Kay
• Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently. Henry Ford
• When defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not sound, rebuild those plans, and set sail once more toward your coveted goal. Napoleon Hill
• Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Samuel Beckett

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On a lighter note

• Marriage is too interesting an experiment to be tried only once. Eva Gabor
• Coffee in England always tastes like a chemistry experiment. Agatha Christie
• That which we call sin in others is experiment for us. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• I wish my stove came with a Save As button like Word has. That way I could experiment with my cooking and not fear ruining my dinner. Jarod Kintz
• That which we call sin in others is experiment for us. Ralph Waldo Emerson

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