Errors Quotations | Page 12

All happiness is a work of art: the smallest error falsifies it, the slightest hesitation alters it, the least heaviness spoils it, the slightest stupidity brutalizes it.

Life is atrocious, we know. But precisely because I expect little of the human condition, man's periods of felicity, his partial progress, his efforts to begin over again and continue, all seem to me like so many prodigies which nearly compensate for the monstrous mass of ills and defeats, of indifference and error. Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time.

I don't have the educated knowledge of what textures, colors, shapes and spaces need to be put together to make something just right. I'm learning it by trial and error, which is something that's slow going.

To cite the facts of history is to fall prey to 'moral equivalence,' or 'political correctness,' or 'the error of of atheism,' or one of the other misdeeds concocted to guard against the sins of understanding and insight into the real world.

One of the truths about the world is that there are two superpowers, one a huge power which happens to have its boot on your neck; another, a smaller power which happens to have its boot on other people's necks. I think that anyone in the Third World would be making a grave error if they succumbed to illusions about these matters

Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history. There isn't the slightest possibility that its (in my view, horrendous) ideas would be implemented, because they would quickly destroy any society that made this colossal error. The idea of 'free contract' between the potentate and his starving subject is a sick joke, perhaps worth some moments in an academic seminar exploring the consequences of (in my view, absurd) ideas, but nowhere else.

Before one can correctly understand the work of the Holy Spirit, he must first of all know the Spirit himself. A frequent source of error and fanaticism about the work of the Holy Spirit is the attempt to study and understand His work without, first of all, coming to know Him as a person.

It seems that truth is progressive approximation in which the relative fraction of our spontaneously tolerated residual error constantly diminishes.

By and large, I seem to have made more mistakes than any others of whom I know, but have learned thereby to make ever swifter acknowledgment of the errors and thereafter immediately set about to deal more effectively with the truths disclosed by the acknowledgment of erroneous assumptions.

Whatever humans have learned had to be learned as a consequence only of trial and error experience. Humans have learned only through mistakes.

Truth is the progressive diminution of residual error.

Unbelief is judged by Jesus not as an intellectual error but as a hostile act of prejudice against God himself.

We all know that a book is not really a person. It isn’t a human being. But if you are a lover of books as books – as objects, that is – and ignore the human element in them – that is, their voices – you will be committing an error of the soul, because you will be an idolator, or else a fetishist.

By Hercules! I prefer to err with Plato, whom I know how much you value, than to be right in the company of such men.

To err is human, but to persevere in error is only the act of a fool.

He who hangs on the errors of the ignorant multitude, must not be counted among great men.

For one day spent well, and agreeably to your precepts, is preferable to an eternity of error.

If I am mistaken in my opinion that the human soul is immortal, I willingly err; nor would I have this pleasant error extorted from me; and if, as some minute philosophers suppose, death should deprive me of my being, I need not fear the raillery of those pretended philosophers when they are no more.

I remember coming on my first set and it being a playground of things I wanted to ask questions about: cameras and lenses and what the lenses do, what's the focus puller doing and how does that work? Why is there less margin for error when there's less light? I was always asking questions and watching directors closely.

Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they had both made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.

All my desires are born of my dreams. And I have proven my love with words. To what fantastic creatures have I entrusted myself, in what dolorous and ravishing world has my imagination enclosed me? I am sure of having been loved in the most mysterious of domains, my own. The language of my love does not belong to human language, my human body does not touch the flesh of my love. My amorous imagination has always been constant and high enough so that nothing could attempt to convince me of error.

If the DHS insists, as bureaucracies are apt to do, that open-source must be certified via a sanctioned, formal process, it will interfere with the informal process of open-source itself. It seems to me the DHS is trying to turn an open-source development project into a Microsoft (or IBM or Oracle) software development project. And we know what that means: more, not fewer, errors -- security and otherwise.

It's in no way my interest (according to the common acceptance of that word) to convince the world of their errors; that is, I shall get nothing from it but the private satisfaction of having done good to mankind, and I know nobody that reckons that satisfaction any part of their interest.

There ain't no grammatical errors in a non-literate society.

I want you to be supervised, all day every day, by people who forgive your errors and believe in your destiny.

The plan of "counting the chickens before they are hatched" is an error of ancient date, but it does not seem to improve by age.

A bending staff I would not break, A feeble faith I would not shake, Nor even rashly pluck away The error which some truth may stay, Whose loss might leave the soul without A shield against the shafts of doubt.

A lot of very competent people sometimes make errors.

What is a disease is wishing with an equal intensity what is needed and what is desirable, and suffer for not being perfect as you would suffer for not having bread. The romantic error is this wanting the moon as if there was a way to get it.

I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought.

An opinion, right or wrong, can never constitute a moral offense, nor be in itself a moral obligation. It may be mistaken; it may involve an absurdity, or a contradiction. It is a truth; or it is an error: it can never be a crime or a virtue.

The logic now in use serves rather to fix and give stability to the errors which have their foundation in commonly received notions than to help the search for truth. So it does more harm than good.

It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tost upon the sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below: but no pleasure is comparable to standing upon the vantage ground of truth . . . and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below.

But the greatest error of all the rest is the mistaking or misplacing of the last or farthest end of knowledge: for men have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true account of their gift of reason, to the benefit and use of men...

The errors of young men are the ruin of business, but the errors of aged men amount to this, that more might have been done, or sooner.

It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives

Truth comes out of error more readily than out of confusion.

Another error is an impatience of doubt and haste to assertion without due and mature suspension of judgment. For the two ways of contemplation are not unlike the two ways of action commonly spoken of by the ancients; the one plain and smooth in the beginning, and in the end impassable; the other rough and troublesome in the entrance, but after a while fair and even. So it is in contemplation; if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.

And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive--in other words, only what is conducive to welfare--is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact.

Jacobins, I have a truth to tell you. You do not know your most deadly enemies; they are the constitutional priests. It is they who protest most in the provinces against anarchists, disorganisers, Dantonism, Robespierrism, Jacobinism... Do not cherish any longer the popular errors; cut at the roots of superstition! Declare openly that the priests are your enemies.

There is no more evil thing in this world than race prejudice, none at all. [...] It justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty, and abomination than any other sort of error in the world.

Most deadly errors arise from obsolete assumptions.

Every judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.

The most persistent principles in the universe are accident and error.

Nietzsche says that as soon as he had read a single page of Schopenhauer, he knew he would read every page of him and pay heed to every word, even to the errors he might find. Every intellectual aspirant will be able to name men whom he has read in this way.

'Scientific' computer simulations predict global warming based on increased greenhouse gas emissions over time. However, without water's contribution taken into account they omit the largest greenhouse gas from their equations. How can such egregious calculation errors be so blatantly ignored? This is why man-made global warming is 'junk' science.

All of comedy at some level is trial-and-error, whether it's a stand-up trying out jokes or a comedy show trying stories.

Is it not better to remain in suspense than to entangle yourself in the many errors that the human fancy has produced? Is it not better to suspend your convictions than to get mixed up in these seditious and quarrelsome divisions?

As if fixing the little errors would made the big stuff manageable.

I don't think there's any way you can worry about how many errors or how many bad plays you've made. You can get into a fielding funk just as quick as you can hitting.

When error holds so much power, play disappears. Creativity ceases.

In evaluating the way in which ball possessions are gained during the course of a game, we find that 60 to 80 percent of the possessions are gained by rebounding and after an opponent's score. Twenty percent come from opponents's error, and only 5 percent of the possessions come from steals and interceptions. A study of the way ball possessions are gained makes it seem highly impractical to base pressure defense on interceptions and steals.

The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.

The error in positivism is that it takes as its standard of truth the contingently given division of labor, that between the science and social praxis as well as that within science itself, and allows no theory that could reveal the division of labor to be itself derivative and mediated and thus strip it of its false authority.

So easy it is to see the errors of past ages, so difficult to acknowledge our own!

I nearly broke out laughing when the wrteched soothsayer warned Caesar: "Beware the Ides of April." I thought it a miracle (and a relief) that no one in the udience had snickered or yelled out a correction. How could such an error be made by an actor? Had my ears deceived me?

Remarkable visions and genuine insight are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance. Products, services, career paths... whatever it is, the forces for mediocrity will align to stop you, forgiving no errors and never backing down until it's over

The tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.

Law is error, you see. It's an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.

...In another time, What cannot be seen will define us, and we shall be prompted To say that language is error, and all things are wronged By representation. The self, we shall say, can never be Seen with a disguise, and never be seen without one.

Spontaneous love admits errors, hesitations and human failings. It can be tested and repaired.

Our approach to existential risks cannot be one of trial-and-error. There is no opportunity to learn from errors. The reactive approach - see what happens, limit damages, and learn from experience - is unworkable. Rather, we must take a proactive approach. This requires foresight to anticipate new types of threats and a willingness to take decisive preventive action and to bear the costs (moral and economic) of such actions.

We leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen - there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark.

Remember always, that man is a creature whose reason is often darkened with error.

Is it too much to expect from the schools that they train their students not only to interpret but to criticize; that is, to discriminate what is sound from error and falsehood, to suspend judgement if they are not convinced, or to judge with reason if they agree or disagree?

Science progresses not by convincing the adherents of old theories that they are wrong, but by allowing enough time to pass so that a new generation can arise unencumbered by the old errors.

The truth is perilous never to the true, Nor knowledge to the wise; and to the fool, And to the false, error and truth alike, Error is worse than ignorance.

Error is worse than ignorance.

The reason is that in a group, individual errors on either side of the true figure cancel each other out.

I do not agree or disagree in everything with either one party or the other. Because all seem to me to have some truth and some error, but everyone recognizes the other's error and nobody discerns his own.

May God in his mercy enable us without obstinacy to perceive our errors.

Neither with those nor with the others, with all I agree and dissent; in all part of truth and part of error must be seen.

Truth burns up error.

A little foolishness, enough 2 enjoy life, & a little wisdom to avoid the errors, that will do

It is not that the intellect sometimes misunderstands. Rather, the intellect always misunderstands. It is not that the intellect sometimes errs, it is that the intellect is the error.

To recognize our bias toward error should teach us modesty and reflection, and to forgive it should help us avoid the inhumanity of thinking we ourselves are not as fallible as those who, in any instance, seem most at fault. Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.

There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding. ... If you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is the posture of grace.

An error becomes a mistake when we refuse to admit it.

We best oppose error by promoting a solid knowledge of the word of truth, and the greatest kindness we can do to children, is to make them early to know the Bible.

We have a cunning adversary, who watches to do mischief, and will promote errors, even by the words of scripture.

It is well to cultivate a friendly feeling towards error, to treat it as a companion inseparable from our lives, as something having a purpose, which it truly has.

The environment itself will teach the child, if every error he makes is manifest to him, without the intervention of a parent of teacher, who should remain a quiet observer of all that happens.

As soon as the error has been recognized and corrections made, it's equally important that the error be forgotten and the successful attempt remembered and dwelt upon.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.

The very common error of young or unconfident cooks is to keep putting more of their own personal ideology into a plate until there's so much noise that you really can't even hear a tune. You can say more in an empty space than you can in a crowded one.

Perfection is a polished collection of errors.

The most difficult days have been the ones I've had to spend correcting a mistake. We're all human, and we make errors in spite of the pains we take not to. It's important to take ownership of the situation and to work to make it right.

When did I ever teach anything wrong from this stand? When was I ever confounded? I want to triumph in Israel before I depart hence and am no more seen. I never told you I was perfect; but there is no error in the revelations which I have taught. Must I, then, be thrown away as a thing of naught?

It is a human tendency "to measure truth and error by our capacity."

My errors are by now natural and incorrigible; but the good that worthy men do the public by making themselves imitable, I shall perhaps do by making myself evitable.

To the extent we are perceiving anyone's guilt -choosing to focus on the errors of their personality rather than the eternal innocence of their spirit - we're closing our hearts, deflecting a miracle and causing our own inevitable suffering.

He had fallen into the error of all liberals: the belief that men are prepared to reform themselves, that good will attracts good will, that truth has leavening virtue of its own.

[The error in the teaching of mathematics is that] mathematics is expected either to be immediately attractive to students on its own merits or to be accepted by students solely on the basis of the teacher's assurance that it will be helpful in later life. [And yet,] mathematlcs is the key to understanding and mastering our physical, social and biological worlds.

The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards.

You want to favor systems that benefit from error, disorder, variability and things like that. You want to favor these systems and unfortunately, when - there's something I call the Soviet Illusion. The more the government becomes intrusive, the more things have to follow a script, and it can't handle this kind of system.

As countries get rich they start increasing education and the very educated people tend to not like trial and error, because they think they're obligated to use the body of knowledge they have.