Error Quotes

To avoid being drawn into error, keep a firm grip on the truth.

Error is to be pitied and pardoned: it is the weakness of human nature. But vice is a foul blemish, not pardonable in any character.

Complicity with error will take from the best of men the power to enter any successful protest against it.

We must not say that every mistake is a foolish one.

Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of someone's mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers

It is with pleasure I receive reproof, when reproof is due, because no person can be readier to accuse me, than I am to acknowledge an error, when I am guilty of one; nor more desirous of atoning for a crime, when I am sensible of having committed it.

To stumble twice against the same stone, is a proverbsial disgrace.

Habit is the nursery of errors.

The fatal errors of life are not due to man's being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one's finest moment. They are due to man's being logical.

It is much easier to meet with error than to find truth; error is on the surface, and can be more easily met with; truth is hid in great depths, the way to seek does not appear to all the world.

Affery, like greater people, had always been right in her facts, and always wrong in the theories she deduced from them.

Errors flies from mouth to mouth, from pen to pen, and to destroy it takes ages.

Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.

Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth.

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

The longer I live, the more it grieves me to see man, who occupies his supreme place for the very purpose of imposing his will upon nature, and freeing himself and his from an outrageous necessity--to see him taken up with some false notion, and doing just the opposite of what he wants to do; and then, because the whole bent of his mind is spoilt, bungling miserably over everything.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

The cautious seldom err.

There is no more dangerous error than that of mistaking the consequence for the cause.

It is human to err, but it is devilish to remain willfully in error.

Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power.

Man must strive, and striving he must err.

A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.

The person who has no opinion will seldom be wrong.

Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of the soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities.

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature.

One errs as long as one strives.

L'homme n'est qu'un sujet plein d'erreur, naturelle et ineffa c° able sans la gra" ce. Man is nothing but a subject full of natural error that cannot be eradicated except through grace.

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.

To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.

It is not to everyone's taste that truth should be pronounced pleasant. But at least let no one believe that error becomes truth when it is pronounced unpleasant.

Truth has to be repeated constantly, because Error also is being preached all the time, and not just by a few, but by the multitude. In the Press and Encyclopaedias, in Schools and Universities, everywhere Error holds sway, feeling happy and comfortable in the knowledge of having Majority on its side.

To free a man from error is to give, not to take away. Knowledge that a thing is false is a truth. Error always does harm; sooner or later it will bring mischief to the man who harbors it.

A new truth is a truth, an old error is an error.

All philosophers make the common mistake of taking contemporary man as their starting point and of trying, through an analysis of him, to[21] reach a conclusion. "Man" involuntarily presents himself to them as an aeterna veritas as a passive element in every hurly-burly, as a fixed standard of things. Yet everything uttered by the philosopher on the subject of man is, in the last resort, nothing more than a piece of testimony concerning man during a very limited period of time.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

Error has made man so deep, sensitive, and inventive that he has put forth such blossoms as religions and arts. Pure knowledge could not have been capable of it.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

Every man who has declared that some other man is an ass or a scoundrel, gets angry when the other man conclusively shows that the assertion was erroneous.

To desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake

He who only tastes his error will long dwell with it, will take delight in it as in a singular felicity; while he who drains it to the dregs will, if he be not crazy, find it to be what it is.

Mistakes are made on two counts: an argument is either based on error or incorrectly developed.

It is therefore correct to say that the senses do not err — not because they always judge rightly, but because they do not judge at all.

There are men who never err, because they never propose anything rational.

No one who lives in error is free.

The errors of the observer come from the qualities of the human mind.

Imagination is the deceptive part in man, the mistress of error and falsehood.

The error of our eye directs our mind.What error leads must err.

Dark Error's other hidden side is truth.

You correct an error by bringing truth to it.

The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished -- it is no longer secure in its instincts.

The history of human opinion is scarcely anything more than the history of human errors.

Experience never misleads; what you are misled by is only your judgment, and this misleads you by anticipating results from experience of a kind that is not produced by your experiments.

No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.

Quite often, as life goes on, when we feel completely secure as we go on our way, we suddenly notice that we are trapped in error, that we have allowed ourselves to be taken in by individuals, by objects, have dreamt up an affinity with them which immediately vanishes before our waking eye; and yet we cannot tear ourselves away, held fast by some power that seems incomprehensible to us. Sometimes, however, we become fully aware and realize that error as well as truth can move and spur us on to action.

Truth must be repeated again and again, because error is constantly being preached round about.

All err the more dangerously because each follows a truth. Their mistake lies not in following a falsehood but in not following another truth.