Errors famous quotes

Terrible errors are rarely made all at once. Usually they are performed one small misstep at a time.
-- A. Lee Martinez

#Errors #Made #Terrible

Where but in the very ***** of comedown is redemption: as where but brought low, where but in the grief of failure, loss, error do we discern the savage afflictions that turn us around: where but in the arrangements love crawls us through
-- A. R. Ammons

#Grief #Loss #Errors

It is possible to be a meta-physician without believing in a transcendent reality; for we shall see that many metaphysical utterances are due to the commission of logical errors, rather than to a conscious desire on the part of their authors to go beyond the limits of experience.
-- A.J. Ayer

#Believe #Reality #Errors

Error often is to be preferred to indecision.
-- Aaron Burr

#Errors #Indecision

Many persons who are not conversant with mathematical studies imagine that because the business of [Babbage’s Analytical Engine] is to give its results in numerical notation, the nature of its processes must consequently be arithmetical and numerical, rather than algebraical and analytical. This is an error. The engine can arrange and combine its numerical quantities exactly as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and in fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly.
-- Ada Lovelace

#Errors #Giving #Might

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

#Crush #Army #Errors

It is better to be divided by truth than to be united in error. It is better to speak the truth that hurts and then heals, than falsehood that comforts and then kills. It is better to be hated for telling the truth than to be loved for telling a lie. It is better to stand alone with the truth, than to be wrong with a multitude. It is better to ultimately succeed with the truth than to temporarily succeed with a lie. There is only one Gospel.
-- Adrian Rogers

#Hurt #Lying #Errors

It is better to be divided by truth than to be united in error. It is better to speak the truth that hurts and then heals, than falsehood that comforts and then kills.
-- Adrian Rogers

#Hurt #Errors #Comfort

As long as men will not be freed from their errors and delusions, humanity will not be able to go towards ("marcher vers", Fr.) the accomplishment of its true destinies.
-- African Spir

#Destiny #Men #Errors

Of all the pitfalls in our paths and the tremendous delays and wanderings off the track, I want to say that they are not what they seem to be. I want to say that all that seems like fantastic mistakes are not mistakes, all that seems like error is not error; and it all has to be done. That which seems like a false step is the next step.
-- Agnes Martin

#Mistake #Errors #Track

Save me from the error of judging a church by its size, popularity or the amount of its yearly offerings.
-- Aiden Wilson Tozer

#Errors #Offering #Judging

Error sometimes supplies the surprise that makes life interesting.
-- Aimee Liu

#Errors #Interesting #Sometimes

Understand that for every rule which I have mentioned from the Quran, the Devil has one to match it, which he puts beside the proper rule to cause error.
-- Al-Ghazali

#Errors #Evil #Quran

A collection of errors does not make a truth: quality cannot stem from quantity – a value is not a weight. The reasons of the majority cannot be taken as good reasons.
-- Alain de Benoist

#Taken #Errors #Quality

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
-- Alan Perlis

#Writing #Errors #Two

In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.
-- Alan Perlis

#Errors #Programming #Reborn

In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.
-- Albert Camus

#Dream #Children #Errors

We know the laws of trial and error, of large numbers and probabilities. We know that these laws are part of the mathematical and mechanical fabric of the universe, and that they are also at play in biological processes. But, in the name of the experimental method and out of our poor knowledge, are we really entitled to claim that everything happens by chance, to the exclusion of all other possibilities?
-- Albert Claude

#Errors #Law #Play

By honestly acknowledging your past errors, but never damning yourself for them, you can learn to use your past for your own future benefit.
-- Albert Ellis

#Failure #Past #Errors

Perhaps the prevalence of pedantry may be largely accounted for by the common error of thinking that, because useful knowledge should be remembered, any kind of knowledge that is at all worth learning should be remembered too.
-- Albert J. Nock

#Thinking #Errors #May

But I shall let the little I have learnt go forth into the day in order that someone better than I may guess the truth, and in his work may prove and rebuke my error. At this I shall rejoice that I was yet a means whereby this truth has come to light.
-- Albrecht Durer

#Mean #Errors #Light

"a fatal and perhaps fateful error of judgment" "...this was the last chance for the United Nations to get a grip on themselves and apply the principles of their Charter"
-- Alec Douglas-Home

#War #Errors #Principles

I am a frail vessel full of errors.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#Errors #Self #Frail

It is a just observation that the people commonly intend the Public Good. This often applies to their very errors. But their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend they always reason right about the means of promoting it.
-- Alexander Hamilton

#Mean #Errors #People

It is an unquestionable truth, that the body of the people in every country desire sincerely its prosperity. But it is equally unquestionable that they do not possess the discernment and stability necessary for systematic government. To deny that they are frequently led into the grossest of errors, by misinformation and passion, would be a flattery which their own good sense must despise.
-- Alexander Hamilton

#Country #Passion #Errors

I should esteem it the extreme of imprudence to prolong the precarious state of our national affairs, and to expose the Union to the jeopardy of successive experiments, in the chimerical pursuit of a perfect plan. I never expect to see a perfect work from imperfect man. The result of the deliberations of all collective bodies must necessarily be a compound, as well of the errors and prejudices, as of the good sense and wisdom, of the individuals of whom they are composed.
-- Alexander Hamilton

#Men #Errors #Perfect

Our great error is that we suppose mankind to be more honest than they are.
-- Alexander Hamilton

#Honesty #Errors #Honest

Would there not be the greatest reason to apprehend, that error in the first sentence would be the parent of error in the second sentence? That the strong bias of one decision would be apt to overrule the influence of any new lights, which might be brought to vary the complexion of another decision? Those, who know any thing of human nature, will not hesitate to answer these questions in the affirmative.
-- Alexander Hamilton

#Strong #Errors #Light

There may be in every government a few choice spirits, who may act from more worthy motives. One great error is that we suppose mankind more honest than they are. Our prevailing passions are ambition and interest...
-- Alexander Hamilton

#Passion #Ambition #Errors

No one is exempt from the rule that learning occurs through recognition of error.
-- Alexander Lowen

#Errors #Recognition

Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurled: / The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
-- Alexander Pope

#Errors #Judging #World

Some positive persisting fops we know, Who, if once wrong, will needs be always so; But you with pleasure own your errors past, And make each day a critique on the last.
-- Alexander Pope

#Past #Errors #Each Day

If I want my daughter to try something, I eat it in front of her repeatedly without forcing the issue and, with some trial and error, the world is our oyster!
-- Alexandra Guarnaschelli

#Daughter #Mother #Errors

A few observation and much reasoning lead to error; many observations and a little reasoning to truth.
-- Alexis Carrel

#Truth #Errors #Littles

There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.
-- Alfred North Whitehead

#Math #Errors #Facts

Error itself may be happy chance.
-- Alfred North Whitehead

#Errors #May #Chance

Learning preserves the errors of the past as well as its wisdom.
-- Alfred North Whitehead

#Learning #Past #Errors

Error is the price we pay for progress.
-- Alfred North Whitehead

#Errors #Progress #Pay

Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.
-- Allan Bloom

#Errors #Tolerance #Enemy

Most people/musicians hear things differently and what might please one might not please another. One man's meat is another man's poison. Don't be afraid to dig, the most important people/musicians in my life always have. If you do decide to dig, don't always expect to come up with a clean face. It's o.k. The most important lessons to me have been learned by trial and error. All I'm trying to say is "try to find yourself," as I have.
-- Allan Holdsworth

#Men #Errors #People

Those who are seeking the true religion will never find it outside the Catholic Church alone, because, in every other religion, if they trace it up to the author, they will find some impostor whose imagination furnished a mass of sophisms and errors
-- Alphonsus Liguori

#Errors #Imagination #Catholic

Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error. The error is thinking that when someone stands in the way of our wants, we can justify getting that person out of our lives. Abortion and racism stem from the same poisonous root, selfishness.
-- Alveda King

#Thinking #Errors #Roots

Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error.
-- Alveda King

#Errors #Racism #Abortion

In religious belief as elsewhere, we must take our chances, recognizing that we could be wrong, dreadfully wrong. There are no guarantees; the religious life is a venture; foolish and debilitating error is a permanent possibility. (If we can be wrong, however, we can also be right.)
-- Alvin Plantinga

#Religious #Errors #Guarantees

The recognition that no knowledge can be complete, no metaphor entire, is itself humanizing. It counteracts fanaticism. It grants even to adversaries the possibility of partial truth, and to oneself the possibility of error.
-- Alvin Toffler

#Errors #Recognition #Metaphor

Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.
-- Alvin Toffler

#Writing #Errors #Editors

DISCUSSION, n. A method of confirming others in their errors.
-- Ambrose Bierce

#Science #Errors #Method

DISABUSE, v.t. To present your neighbor with another and better error than the one which he has deemed advantageous to embrace.
-- Ambrose Bierce

#Errors #Neighbor #Embrace

One of the most serious errors, if not the most serious error, committed by colonial powers in Africa, may have been to ignore or underestimate the cultural strength of African peoples.
-- Amilcar Cabral

#Errors #May #Serious

Whenever there is a simple error that most laymen fall for, there is always a slightly more sophisticated version of the same problem that experts fall for.
-- Amos Tversky

#Fall #Simple #Errors

I usually get involved in the interviews about the animators and the filmmaking in general, because I had a chance.I got to know, not only Marc Davis, but Frank Thomas, Artie Johnson, Ward Kimball, all these great animators, and just ask them all these questions about how they did certain things, what their trials and errors were, the ups and downs.
-- Andreas Deja

#Errors #Interviews #Trial And Error

Any theory, hypothesis, philosophy, sect, creed or institution that fears investigation, openly manifests its own error.
-- Andrew Jackson Davis

#Philosophy #Errors #Creeds

Admit your errors before someone else exaggerates them.
-- Andrew Mason

#Mistake #Errors

Failing to open the center at the right moment - a common error by White in the Exchange Lopez - can allow Black an excellent game.
-- Andrew Soltis

#Games #White #Errors

If religion is about truth, why is it so afraid of error?
-- Andrew Sullivan

#Errors

In spite of some bad experiences, I'm a firm believer in the trial and error method of learning.
-- Andy Rooney

#Learning #Errors #Trial And Error

A well-informed mind is the best security against the contagion of folly and vice. The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to escape from the languor of idleness. Store it with ideas, teach it the pleasure of thinking; and the temptations of the world without, will be counteracted by the gratifications derived from the world within.
-- Ann Radcliffe

#Thinking #Errors #Ideas

It is an old error of man to forget to put quotation marks where he borrows from a woman's brain
-- Anna Garlin Spencer

#Men #Errors #Brain

It is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather.
-- Anne Fadiman

#Errors #Ice Cream #Weather

What do I believe? It has been a long journey of discovery. There have been hesitations and errors along the way, and no doubt will be more, because I am still learning, both about myself and about life.
-- Anne Perry

#Believe #Journey #Errors

It is not error which opposes the progress of truth; it is indolence, obstinacy, the spirit of routine, every thing which favors inaction.
-- Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune

#Truth #Errors #Progress

For the most basic assumption that dictated my early attempts to respond to creative music commentary was the mistaken belief that western journalists had some fundamental understanding of black creativity—or even western creativity—but this assumption was seriously in error.
-- Anthony Braxton

#Creativity #Errors #Creative

The obvious precedent for Beijing 2008 was the Berlin Olympics, in 1936. Both were showcases for a muscle-flexing nation, although Hitler made an elementary error when he chose not to dress his young National Socialists in lime-green catsuits laced with twinkling fairy lights.
-- Anthony Lane

#Errors #Light #Green

I wonder if these death penalty proponents would still hold that it's worth some risk of error if it were their loved one who was murdered by the state, though innocent.
-- Antoinette Bosco

#Errors #Risk #Death Penalty

Inborn errors of metabolism.
-- Archibald Garrod

#Errors #Metabolism #Biochemistry

Honest error may play prologue to wonders.
-- Ari Berk

#Errors #Play #May

The majority of mankind would seem to be beguiled into error by pleasure, which, not being really a good, yet seems to be so. So that they indiscriminately choose as good whatsoever gives them pleasure, while they avoid all pain alike as evil.
-- Aristotle

#Pain #Errors #Evil

Every wicked man is in ignorance as to what he ought to do, and from what to abstain, and it is because of error such as this that men become unjust and, in a word, wicked.
-- Aristotle

#Ignorance #Men #Errors

The error of Socrates must be attributed to the false notion of unity from which he starts. Unity there should be, both of the family and of the state, but in some respects only. For there is a point at which a state may attain such a degree of unity as to be no longer a state, or at which, without actually ceasing to exist, it will become an inferior state, like harmony passing into unison, or rhythm which has been reduced to a single foot. The state, as I was saying, is a plurality which should be united and made into a community by education
-- Aristotle

#Feet #Errors #Community

When we look at the matter from another point of view, great caution would seem to be required. For the habit of lightly changing the laws is an evil, and, when the advantage is small, some errors both of lawgivers and rulers had better be left; the citizen will not gain so much by making the change as he will lose by the habit of disobedience.
-- Aristotle

#Errors #Views #Law

Let the Word be preached, the truth taught, and error will be uncovered and souls delivered.
-- Arno C. Gaebelein

#Christian #Errors #Soul

Investment in reliability will increase until it exceeds the probable cause of errors, or until someone insists on getting some useful work done.
-- Arthur Bloch

#Work #Errors #Reliability

Still, it is an error to argue in front of your data. You can find yourself insensibly twisting them round to suit your theories.
-- Arthur Conan Doyle

#Errors #Data #Finding Yourself

Admitting errors clears the score and proves you wiser than before.
-- Arthur Guiterman

#Failure #Errors #Admitting

There is hardly a more common error than that of taking the man who has one talent, for a genius.
-- Arthur Helps

#Science #Men #Errors

A great and frequent error in our judgment of human nature is to suppose that those sentiments and feelings have no existence, which may be only for a time concealed. The precious metals are not found at the surface of the earth, except in sandy places.
-- Arthur Helps

#Character #Errors #Feelings

Every error has its consequences and venges itself unto the seventh generation.
-- Arthur Koestler

#Errors #Generations #Consequence

In the social equation, the value of a single life is nil; in the cosmic equation, it is infinite... Not only communism, but any political movement which implicitly relies on purely utilitarian ethics, must become a victim to the same fatal error. It is a fallacy as naïve as a mathematical teaser, and yet its consequences lead straight to Goya's Disasters, to the reign of the guillotine, the torture chambers of the Inquisition, or the cellars of the Lubianka.
-- Arthur Koestler

#Errors #Political #Single Life

I trust that a graduate student some day will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent history of the twentieth century. Perhaps in the end he will conclude that the multitude of errors committed in the name of Munich may exceed the original error of 1938.
-- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

#Writing #Errors #Names

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets you fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer

#Eye #Men #Errors

Every human perfection is linked to an error which it threatens to turn into
-- Arthur Schopenhauer

#Errors #Perfection #Turns

As the strata of the earth preserve in succession the living creatures of past epochs, so the shelves of libraries preserve in succession the errors of the past and their expositions, which like the former were very lively and made a great commotion in their own age but now stand petrified and stiff in a place where only the literary palaeontologist regards them.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer

#Past #Errors #Age

There is only one inborn erroneous notion that we exist in order to be happy So long as we persist in this inborn error the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of disappointment.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer

#Disappointment #Errors #Elderly

Of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to mature. A child under the age of fifteen should confine its attention either to subjects like mathematics, in which errors of judgment are impossible, or to subjects in which they are not very dangerous, like languages, natural science, history, etc.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer

#Children #Maturity #Errors

Human existence is an error...it is bad today and every day it gets worse, until the worst happens.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer

#Depressing #Errors #Today

There is only one safeguard against error, and that is to be established in the faith; and for that, there has to be prayerful and diligent study, and a receiving with meekness the engrafted Word of God. Only then are we fortified against the attacks of those who assail us.
-- Arthur W. Pink

#Errors #Receiving #Study

Almost all doctrinal error is really truth perverted. Truth wrongly divided. Truth disproportionately held and taught.
-- Arthur W. Pink

#Errors #Taught

An army of philosophers would not be sufficient to change the nature of error and to make it truth.
-- Averroes

#Army #Errors #Philosopher

To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
-- Ayn Rand

#Reality #Thinking #Errors

That an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.
-- Ayn Rand

#Mean #Errors #Firsts

You'll come back, because yours is an error of knowledge, not a moral failure, not an act of surrender to evil, but only the last act of being victim to your own virtue. We'll wait for you and when you come back, you will have discovered that there need never be any conflict among your desires, nor so tragic a clash of values as the one you've borne so well.
-- Ayn Rand

#Errors #Evil #Waiting

My biggest error? Something that is to happen yet.
-- Ayrton Senna

#Errors

the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Spiritual #Errors #Limited Resources

Human manners are wildly inconsistent; plenty of people have said so. But this one takes the cake: the manner in which we're allowed to steal from future generations, while commanding them not to do that to us, and rolling our eyes at anyone who is tediously PC enough to point that out. The conspicious consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spirtual error, or even bad manners.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Eye #Cake #Errors

bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.
-- Barbara Tuchman

#Errors #Yesterday #Forever

I'm interested in the truth, and unauthorized biographies are not. Yes, I would like to correct those errors someday.
-- Barbra Streisand

#Errors #Biographies #Someday

He's marked his entrance with an error of some momentum
-- Barry Davies

#Soccer #Errors #Momentum

Error can point the way to truth, while empty-headedness can only lead to more empty-headedness or to a career in politics.
-- Barry Hughart

#Errors #Careers #Way

Many errors, of a truth, consist merely in the application of the wrong names of things.
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Truth #Knowledge #Errors

Due process is a growth too sturdy to succumb to the infection of the least ingredient of error.
-- Benjamin Cardozo

#Errors #Growth #Ingredients