Portuguese Proverb on Experience and Error

Background and Context

The proverb is Portuguese folk wisdom that reached English readers through the dictionaries of foreign sayings popular around 1900. It belongs to a large family of European proverbs about learning by doing; Portuguese also says a experiência é mãe da ciência, experience is the mother of science.

It came into this collection by way of television. The Boston private detective Spenser quotes it in the closing scene of "No Room at the Inn," a 1985 episode of Spenser: For Hire, while returning his friend Hawk's new car from the police impound and promising to cover the cost. Hawk had backed him up on the case and has just said he hopes Spenser is through working for the cops.

Interpretation

The proverb says that experience, the practical sense of how things go, is something mistakes produce. The errors are the tree, and experience is the fruit, the part of the tree worth having. Mistakes are still mistakes in this picture, but they are not barren: something useful grows on them.

The image also says something about how. Fruit has to be picked, and a person who makes mistakes and never stops to collect anything from them has the tree and none of the harvest.

Current Relevance

Schools now teach a version of this openly. Classroom posters tell children that mistakes are how the brain grows, and "growth mindset" programs train students to treat a wrong answer as a step instead of a verdict. The proverb is an older, plainer form of the same idea, from long before anyone printed it on a poster.

Impact and Legacy

In English the proverb has stayed a minor saying, overshadowed by a famous relative: Oscar Wilde's "Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes," from Lady Windermere's Fan (1892). The two sit at opposite ends of one thought. The proverb takes the learning seriously, while Wilde suspects "experience" is mostly a nicer word for the mistakes themselves.

Contrasting Views or Controversies

Hawk gives the first objection in the very scene where the line is spoken: "Yeah, well, one mistake's enough for this fool." A tree is a lot of errors, and Hawk's point is that a sharp person shouldn't need that many. A saying that pictures a whole tree of them can make repeating a mistake sound like part of the process.

The objection lands harder on the English than on the Portuguese. The tree is the translator's addition; the original speaks only of fruit gathered from errors and says nothing about how many it takes.

Practical Application

• Readers: when a saying arrives labeled "an old Portuguese proverb" or the like, look for the original wording. Translation often adds the memorable part, as the tree here shows.
• Teachers: grade the revision as well as the first attempt. Credit for what changed between drafts rewards the gathering, which is the part the proverb cares about.
• Voters: ask candidates the question a good interviewer would: name a decision you got wrong and what you do differently now. A candidate with no answer has gathered nothing, or isn't saying.

Background on the Author

The proverb has no known author. It is anonymous Portuguese folk wisdom, its origin and date unrecorded.

The man who quotes it here, Spenser, is a fictional Boston private detective created by the novelist Robert B. Parker (1932–2010) in The Godwulf Manuscript (1973). He is a former boxer who cooks well and reads widely, and his name is spelled like the Elizabethan poet's. On television he was played by Robert Urich (1946–2002), with Avery Brooks as Hawk, and Spenser's habit of quoting poems and proverbs carried over from the novels to the show.

---