Mistakes are the portals for discovery.

The line frames error not as a setback but as an entryway (“portal”) into new knowledge. It suggests that discovery is often inseparable from trial, misjudgment, and revision: when plans fail, hidden assumptions are exposed and alternative paths appear. Read in a modernist key often associated with Joyce, it can also imply that breakthroughs in art and thought come from pushing beyond “correct” forms—allowing slips, misreadings, and experiments to generate unforeseen meanings. The aphorism thus valorizes intellectual humility and creative risk: progress depends less on avoiding mistakes than on learning to pass through them into insight.