This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Quite often, as life goes on, when we feel completely secure as we go on our way, we suddenly notice that we are trapped in error, that we have allowed ourselves to be taken in by individuals, by objects, have dreamt up an affinity with them which immediately vanishes before our waking eye; and yet we cannot tear ourselves away, held fast by some power that seems incomprehensible to us. Sometimes, however, we become fully aware and realize that error as well as truth can move and spur us on to action. Now because action is always a decisive factor, something really good can result from an active error, because the effect of all that has been done reaches out into infinity. So although creative action is certainly always best, destroying what has been done is also not without happy consequence." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong." - Thomas Jefferson
"It is the highest form of self-respect to admit our errors and mistakes and make amends for them. To make a mistake is only an error in judgment, but to adhere to it when it is discovered shows infirmity of character." - Dale E. Turner
"Suffering is born of wrong thinking. The root of pain is error in perception . There can be no error in Truth, only errors in the perception of Truth. If you yearn to end human suffering, know, then, what is Real, for this Knowledge is the only source of invincible faith." - Alan Cohen
"In man, the things which are not measurable are more important than those which are measurable. The existence of thought is as fundamental as for instance, the physiochemical equilibria of blood serum. The sepration of eh qualitative from the quantitative grew still wider when Descartes created the dualism of the body and soul. Then, the manifestations of the mind became inexplicable. The material was definitely isolated from the spiritual. Organic structures and physiological mechanisms assumed a far greater reality than thought, pleasure, sorrow and beauty. This error switched civilization to the road which led science to triumph and man to degradation." - Alexis Carrel
"A few observations and much reasoning lead to error; many observations and a little reasoning to truth." - Alexis Carrel
"I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing." - Anaïs Nin, born Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell
"Error always addresses the passions and prejudices; truth scorns such mean intrigue, and only addresses the understanding and the conscience." - Azel Backus
"The most powerful cause of error is the war existing between the senses and reason." - Blaise Pascal
"Since a choice must be made, we must see which is the least bad. You have two things to lose: truth and happiness. You have two things at stake: your reason and your happiness. And you have two things to avoid: error and misery. Since you must necessarily choose, your reason is no more affronted by choosing one rather than the other. How about your happiness? Let us weigh up the gain and loss in calling heads that God exists. If you win, you win everything. If you lose, you lose nothing. So do not hesitate: wager that God exists." - Blaise Pascal
"Error is always more busy than ignorance. Ignorance is a blank sheet on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one from which we must first erase." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one, on which we must first erase." - Charles Caleb Colton
"It is almost as difficult to make a man unlearn his errors as his knowledge. Mal-information is more hopeless that non-information; for error is always more busy than ignorance. Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one, from which we must erase. Ignorance is contented to stand still with her back to the truth; but error is more presumptuous, and proceeds in the wrong direction. Ignorance has no light, but error flows a false one. The consequence is, that error, when she retraces her steps, has farther to go before she can arrive at truth, than ignorance." - Charles Caleb Colton
"The wisest man may be wiser today than he was yesterday, and tomorrow than he is today. Total freedom from change would imply total freedom from error; but this is the prerogative of Omniscience alone." - Charles Caleb Colton
"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." - Charles Caleb Colton
"If a crooked stick is before you, you need not explain how crooked it is. Lay a straight one down by the side of it, and the work is well done. Preach the truth, and error will stand abashed in its presence." - Charles Haddon Spurgeon
"God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth." - Chuang Tzu, also spelled Chuang-tsze, Chuang Chou, Zhuangzi, Zhuang Tze, Zhuang Zhou, Chuang Tsu, Chouang-Dsi, Chuang Tse, or Chuangtze
"To error and not reform, this may indeed be called error." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"Custom without reason is but ancient error." - English Proverbs
"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." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL
"Goodness answers to the theological virtue charity, and admits no excess but error. The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall. But in charity there is no excess; neither can angel or man come in danger by it." - Francis Bacon
"Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion." - Francis Bacon
"Unless the mind be trained to selflessness and infinite compassion, one is apt to fall into the error of seeking liberation for self alone." - Gampopa, known as Sonam Rinchen from Gampo or Dagpo Lha-je from Gampo NULL
"Be calm in arguing; for fierceness makes error a fault, and truth discourtesy; calmness is a great advantage." - 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." - George Herbert
"To err is human, to persist in error beastly." - George Pettie
"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." - Gustave Le Bon
"If error is corrected whenever it is recognized as such, the path of error is the path of truth." - Hans Reichenbach
"No religion I the world is without some elements of truth. No religion is without its profound error." - Emil Brunner, fully Heinrich Emil Brunner
"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." - Henry Steele Commager
"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." - Henry Thomas Buckle
"Let us labor for that larger comprehension of truth, and that more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments." - Horace Mann
"Error is always more busy than truth." - Hosea Ballou
"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." - Isaac Goldberg
"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." - 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." - 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." - James Bryant Conant
"An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality." - John Cage, fully John Milton Cage, Jr.
"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." - 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." - John Keats
"Though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; an since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied." - John Stuart Mill
"We must get over the error which makes us think that a man’s life takes place inside himself." - José Ortega y Gasset
"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." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"Error will slip through a crack, while truth will stick in a doorway." - Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek
"The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities - perhaps the only one - in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there." - Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper