Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

George Herbert

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 |

George Herbert

Be calm in arguing; for fierceness makes error a fault, and truth discourtesy; calmness is a great advantage.

Calmness | Error | Fault | Truth |

George Pettie

To err is human, to persist in error beastly.

Error |

Hans Reichenbach

If error is corrected whenever it is recognized as such, the path of error is the path of truth.

Error | Truth |

Gustave Le Bon

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.

Destroy | Error | Evidence | Taste | Truth |

Henry Thomas Buckle

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 |

Henry Steele Commager

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 |

Isaac Goldberg

To atone is to be at one with God, to sink self into the not-self, to achieve a mystic unity with the source of being, wiping out all error and finding peace in self-submergence.

Error | God | Peace | Self | Unity |

James Bryant Conant

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 |

James Bryant Conant

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.

Error | Little | Man |

James Bryant Conant

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.

Error | Failure | Failure |

John Keats

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 |

John Keats

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 |

José Ortega y Gasset

We must get over the error which makes us think that a man’s life takes place inside himself.

Error | Life | Life | Man | Think |

Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe

By observing a supposed objective truth out there, we become passive victims relieved of responsibility. Instead, we can use our eyes in active vision, to see with, not through. Rather than compounding our neighbor’s error through intellectual condemnation of him, we can enter actively into that relationship through our heart. Freeing him from error in our mind’s eye, we open him to deliverance in his own. There is only one heart, and it can take on any form.

Error | Heart | Mind | Relationship | Responsibility | Truth | Vision |

M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck

A hundred years ago, paradox meant error to the scientific mind; but now it is widely recognized that at a certain level, reality is paradoxical.

Error | Mind | Paradox | Reality |

Nikki Giovanni, fully Yolanda Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni

Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to error that counts.

Error | Life | Life |