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

John Stuart Mill

Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.

Study | Truth |

Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper

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.

Dreams | Error | History | Ideas | Progress | Science | Time | Learn |

Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust

There are visual errors in time as well as in space.

Space | Time |

Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

Do little things in an extraordinary way; be the best one in your line. You must not let your life run in the ordinary way; do something that nobody else has done, something that will dazzle the world. Show that god's creative principle works in you. Never mind the past. Though your errors be as deep as the ocean, the soul itself cannot be swallowed up by them. Have the unflinching determination to move on your path unhampered by limiting thoughts of past errors.

Determination | God | Life | Life | Little | Mind | Past | Soul | Will | World |

Paul Tournier

Now, we shall be able to judge the extent of the spiritual undernourishment if we look at all these movements from another angle: not as errors but rather as attempts to find healing. I use this comparison: For a long time medical men combated fever as if it itself constituted the illness. Medicine today inclines rather to respect it, not only as a symptom of the disease but of the struggle of the organism against the disease. True, it is this struggle which makes it ill, and yet this very struggle is also the proof of its vitality and is the necessary way to healing.

Consequences | Diet | Disease | Disobedience | God | Inevitable | Intemperance | Men | Respect | Struggle | Thought | Time | Work | Wrong | Respect |

Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL

To make no mistakes is not the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.

Future | Good | Man | Power | Wisdom | Wise | Learn |

T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot

What is this self inside us, this silent observer, severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us and urge us on to futile activity, and in the end, judge us still more severely for the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?

Critic | Self |

William Law

Love is infallible; it has no errors, for all errors are the want of love.

Love |

Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

People |

Franz Kafka

All human errors are impatience, the premature breaking off of what is methodical, an apparent fencing in of the apparent thing.

Isaac Watts

Do not hover always on the surface of things, nor take up suddenly with mere appearances; but penetrate into the depth of matters, as far as your time and circumstances allow, especially in those things which relate to your own profession. Do not indulge yourselves to judge of things by the first glimpse, or a short and superficial view of them; for this will fill the mind with errors and prejudices, and give it a wrong turn and ill habit of thinking, and make much work for retraction.

Circumstances | Habit | Mind | Time | Will | Work | Wrong |

James Allen

The man who cannot endure to have his errors and shortcomings brought to the surface and made known, but tries to hide them, is unfit to walk the highway of truth.

Man |

Jim Rohn

Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don't fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.

Failure | Failure |

John Maynard Keynes

The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.

Convention | Ideas | Power |

Leo Busacaglia

Things omitted are often more deadly than errors committed.

Mordecai Menaham Kaplan

The salvation of Judaism cannot come either from Orthodoxy or from Reform. Orthodoxy is altogether out of keeping with the march of human thought. It has no regard for the world view of the contemporary mind. Nothing can be more repugnant to the thinking man of today than the fundamental doctrine of Orthodoxy, which is that tradition is infallible. Such infallibility could be believed in as long as the human mind thought of God and revelation in semi-mythological terms. Then it was conceivable that a quasi-human being could hand down laws and histories in articulate form. Being derived from a supramundane source, these laws and histories, together with the ideas based on them, could not but be regarded as free from all the errors and shortcomings of the human mind. Whenever a tradition contradicts some facts too patent to be denied, or falls below some accepted moral standard, resort is had to artificial interpretations that flout all canons of history and exegesis. The doctrine of infallibility rules out of court all research and criticism, and demands implicit faith in the truth of whatever has come down from the past. It precludes all conscious development in thought and practice and deprives Judaism of the power to survive in an environment that permits of free contact with non-Jewish civilizations.

Doctrine | Faith | God | History | Ideas | Man | Mind | Nothing | Power | Practice | Regard | Research | Revelation | Salvation | Thinking | Thought | Tradition | Truth | World | God | Thought |

Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu

Confession of errors is like a broom which sweeps away the dirt and leaves the surface brighter and clearer. I feel stronger for confession.

Pierre-Simon Laplace, Compte de Laplace, Marquis de Laplace

I am particularly concerned to determine the probability of causes and results, as exhibited in events that occur in large numbers, and to investigate the laws according to which that probability approaches a limit in proportion to the repetition of events. That investigation deserves the attention of mathematicians because of the analysis required. It is primarily there that the approximation of formulas that are functions of large numbers has its most important applications. The investigation will benefit observers in identifying the mean to be chosen among the results of their observations and the probability of the errors still to be apprehended. Lastly, the investigation is one that deserves the attention of philosophers in showing how in the final analysis there is a regularity underlying the very things that seem to us to pertain entirely to chance, and in unveiling the hidden but constant causes on which that regularity depends. It is on the regularity of the main outcomes of events taken in large numbers that various institutions depend, such as annuities, tontines, and insurance policies. Questions about those subjects, as well as about inoculation with vaccine and decisions of electoral assemblies, present no further difficulty in the light of my theory. I limit myself here to resolving the most general of them, but the importance of these concerns in civil life, the moral considerations that complicate them, and the voluminous data that they presuppose require a separate work.

Attention | Difficulty | Events | Important | Light | Present | Will |

Pierre-Simon Laplace, Compte de Laplace, Marquis de Laplace

It may be laid down as a general rule that, if the result of a long series of precise observations approximates a simple relation so closely that the remaining difference is undetectable by observation and may be attributed to the errors to which they are liable, then this relation is probably that of nature.

Observation | Rule |

Pierre-Simon Laplace, Compte de Laplace, Marquis de Laplace

Science dissipates errors born of ignorance about our true relations with nature, errors the more damaging in that the social order should rest only on those relations. TRUTH! JUSTICE! Those are the immutable laws. Let us banish the dangerous maxim that it is sometimes useful to depart from them and to deceive or enslave mankind to assure its happiness.

Ignorance | Mankind | Order | Rest |