This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth.
Error | God | Imperfection | Intelligence | Truth |
Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
To error and not reform, this may indeed be called error.
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 perturbation? “By no means.” No one... who is in a state of fear or sorrow or perturbation is free; but whoever is delivered from sorrows and fears and perturbations, he is at the same time also delivered from servitude.
Be calm in argument; for fierceness makes error a fault, and truth discourtesy. Why should I feel another man’s mistakes more than his sicknesses or poverty? In love I should: but anger is not love, nor wisdom either; therefore gently move. Calmness is great advantage; he that lets another chafe may warm him at his fire, mark all his wand’rings and enjoy his frets, as cunning fencers suffer heat to tire.
Anger | Argument | Calmness | Cunning | Error | Fault | Love | Man | Poverty | Truth | Wisdom |
Gampopa, known as Sonam Rinchen from Gampo or Dagpo Lha-je from Gampo NULL
Unless the mind be trained to selflessness and infinite compassion, one is apt to fall into the error of seeking liberation for self alone.
Compassion | Error | Mind | Self |
If error is corrected whenever it is recognized as such, the path of error is the path of truth.
The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce[s] them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.
The great enemy of knowledge is not error, but inertness. All that we want is discussion; and then we are sure to do well, no matter what our blunders may be. One error conflicts with another, each destroys its opponent, and truth is evolved.
Discussion | Enemy | Error | Knowledge | Truth |
The justification and the purpose of freedom of speech is not to indulge those who want to speak their minds. It is to prevent error and discover truth. There may be other ways of detecting error and discovering truth than that of free discussion, but so far we have not found them.
Discussion | Error | Freedom of speech | Freedom | Justification | Purpose | Purpose | Speech | Truth |
When young, we trust ourselves too much and we trust others too little when old. Rashness is the error of youth, timid caution of age. Manhood is the isthmus between the two extremes; the ripe and fertile season of action, when alone we can hope to find the head to contrive, united with the hand to execute.
Action | Age | Caution | Error | Hope | Little | Rashness | Trust | Youth |
The enthusiast has been compared to a man walking in a fog; everything immediately around him, or in contact with him, appears sufficiently clear and luminous; but beyond the little circle of which he himself is the center, all is mist and error and confusion.
The blindness of bigotry, the madness of ambition, and the miscalculations of diplomacy seek their victims principally amongst the innocent and the unoffending. The cottage is sure to suffer for every error of the court, the cabinet, or the camp. When error sits in the seat of power and of authority, and is generated in high places, it may; be compared to that torrent which originates indeed in the mountain, but commits its devastation in the vale.
Ambition | Authority | Bigotry | Diplomacy | Error | Madness | Power |
John Cage, fully John Milton Cage, Jr.
An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.
Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterward carefully avoid.
Discovery | Error | Experience | Failure | Sense | Success | Discovery |
Albeit failure in any cause produces a correspondent misery in the soul, yet it is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterward carefully eschew.
Cause | Discovery | Error | Experience | Failure | Sense | Soul | Success | Discovery | Failure |