A Life Spent Making Mistakes Is

This line comes from the Preface to Shaw's 1906 play The Doctor's Dilemma, where it appears as part of a longer sentence: "Attention and activity lead to mistakes as well as to successes; but a life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing." The play itself centres on a physician who must choose which of two patients receives his one remaining dose of a life-saving tuberculosis treatment — a moral dilemma that inspired the Preface's extended meditation on medicine, ethics, and the value of engaged living over cautious inaction.