Error Quotes
Knowledge being to be had only of visible and certain truth, error is not a fault of our knowledge, but a mistake of our judgment, giving assent to that which is not true.
John Locke
Nazareth
But now, instead of discussion and argument, brute force rises up to the rescue of discomfited error, and crushes truth and right into the dust. "Might makes right," and hoary folly totters on in her mad career escorted by armies and navies.
Adin Ballou
It is a great error to take oneself for more than one is, or for less than one is worth.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There is a lot of difference between tempting and leading into error. God tempts but does not lead into error. To tempt is to provide opportunities for us to do certain things if we do not love God, but putting us under no necessity to do so. To lead into error is to compel a man necessarily to conclude and follow a falsehood.
Blaise Pascal
Freedom is based on truth, and no man is completely free as long as any part of his belief is based on error.
Nathan Eldon Tanner
Early scientific thinking was holistic, but speculative -- the modern scientific temper reacted by being empirical, but atomistic. Neither is free from error, the former because it replaces factual inquiry with faith and insight, and the latter because it sacrifices coherence at the altar of facticity. We witness today another shift in ways of thinking: the shift toward rigorous but holistic theories. This means thinking in terms of facts and events in the context of wholes, forming integrated sets with their own properties and relationships.
Ervin Laszlo
They have their belief, these poor Tibet people, that Providence sends down always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom some belief in a kind of Pope! At bottom still better, a belief that there is a Greatest Man; that he is discoverable; that, once discovered, we ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds. This is the truth of Grand Lamaism; the "discoverability" is the only error here.
Thomas Carlyle
To err and not reform, this may indeed be called error.
Confucius
Mere negations give all advantage to superstition; error seems wisdom and wealth when truth is silent.
George Holyoake
And now, if we try to assign a value, in and of itself, outside its relations to the dream and with error, to classical unreason, we must understand it not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled.
Michel Foucault
You don't learn from a situation where you do something well. You enjoy it and you give yourself credit, but you don't really learn from that. You learn from trial and error, trial and error, all the time.
Suzanne Farrell
Whether surrounded with error or truth, the web woven around them in childhood's days lasts, and seldom wears threadbare...The traditions of my earliest recollection are so forcible upon me that it seems impossible for me to get rid of them. And so it is with others; hence the necessity of correct training in childhood.
Brigham Young
God created Adam master and lord of living creatures, but Eve spoilt all, when she persuaded him to set himself above God's will. 'Tis you women, with your tricks and artifices, that lead men into error.
Martin Luther
Obviously, this is a tough loss. Our margin for error is real small and we're going to have to run the table.
Bob Hartley
Still, it is an error to argue in front of your data. You find yourself insensibly twisting them round to fit your theories.
Arthur Conan Doyle
The thing is not only to avoid error, but to attain immense masses of truth.
Thomas Carlyle
Who thinks it just to be judged by a single error?
Beryl Markham
Is freedom anything else than the power of living as we choose? Nothing else. Tell me then, you men, do you wish to live in error? We do not. No one who lives in error is free. Do you wish to live in fear? Do you wish to live in sorrow? Do you wish to live in tension? By no means. No one who is in a state of fear or sorrow or tension is free, but whoever is delivered from sorrows or fears or anxieties, he is at the same time also delivered from servitude.
Epictetus