You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t possibly live long enough to make them all yourself.

The line compresses a serious idea into a punchline: individual experience is too limited to serve as one’s only teacher. “Learn from the mistakes of others” advocates humility and attentiveness—reading history, listening to mentors, and observing consequences—so that costly errors need not be repeated personally. The second sentence supplies the comic logic: human lifespan is finite, but the catalog of possible mistakes is effectively infinite. The humor softens what could sound preachy, making the advice memorable. It also implies an ethics of shared knowledge: wisdom accumulates socially, and prudence means borrowing that accumulated experience rather than insisting on learning everything the hard way.

1) "You must learn from the mistakes of others—you can’t possibly live long enough to make them all yourself."
2) "Learn from other people’s mistakes. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself."
3) "Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t possibly live long enough to make them all yourself."