This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"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." - M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
"Ultimately, there can be no disagreement between history, science, philosophy, and theology. Where there is disagreement, there is either ignorance or error." - Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler
"Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to error that counts." - Nikki Giovanni, fully Yolanda Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni
"Error is always talkative." - Oliver Goldsmith
"Every absurdity has a champion to defend it; for error is always talkative." - Oliver Goldsmith
"If the head and body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul. The great error in our day in the treatment of the human body is the physicians separate the soul from the body." - Plato NULL
"Atheism is a disease of the soul, before it becomes an error of the understanding." - Plato NULL
"Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes." - Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
"I count him a great man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor or difficulty; he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light and in large relations, whilst they must make painful corrections and keep vigilant eye on many sources of error." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It is neither possible for man to know the truth fully nor to avoid the error of pretending that he does." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
"Laughable error and profound discovery are born of the same freedom." - Robert Grudin
"Error struggling on towards the living truth is more fruitful than dead truth." - Romain Rolland
"An obstinate man does not hold opinions, but they hold him; for when he is once possest with an error it is like a devil, only cast out with great difficulty. Whatsoever he lays hold on, like a drowning man, he never loses, though it do but help to sink him the sooner. His ignorance is abrupt and inaccessible, impregnable both by art and nature, and will hold out to the last, though it has nothing but rubbish to defend." -
"The thing is not only to avoid error, but to attain immense masses of truth." - Thomas Carlyle
"Custom is generally too hard for Conscience. Custom is the Guide of the Ignorant. Custom without Reason, is but an ancient Error." - Thomas Fuller
"Old custom without truth is but an old error." - Thomas Fuller
"It is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a constant tendency to increased perfection. That process undoubtedly involves a constant remodeling of the organism in adaption to new conditions; but it depends on the nature of those conditions whether the direction of the modifications effected shall be upward or downward." - Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
"Love truth, but pardon error." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"The humblest citizen of all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of Error." - William Jennings Bryan
"The error of our eye directs our mind: what error leads must err." - William Shakespeare
"Great services are not canceled by one act or by one single error." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
"We have seen that no religion stands on the basis of things known; none bounds its horizon within the field of human observation; and, therefore, as it can never present us with indisputable facts, so must it ever be at once a source of error and contention. " - Frances Wright, known as Fanny Wright
"The greatest error of all the rest is the mistaking or misplacing of the last or farthest end of knowledge: for men have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true account of their gift of reason, to the benefit and use of men: as if there were sought in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit; or a tarrasse, for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower of state, for a proud mind to raise itself upon; or a fort or commanding ground, for strife and contention; or a shop, for profit or sale; and not a rich storehouse, for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate." - Francis Bacon
"A very popular error - having the courage of one's convictions. Rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack upon one's convictions. " - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value of life is ultimately decisive." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Insincerity is always weakness; sincerity even in error is strength." - George Henry Lewes
"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. " - Hannah Arendt
"Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense." - Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
"A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value. " - Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
"There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as [we] are free to ask what [we] must, free to say what [we] think, free to think what [we] will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress." - Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer
"Every error is truth abused. " - Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
"Some degree of abuse is inseparable from the proper use of every thing; and in no instance is this more true than in that of the press. It has accordingly been decided, by the practice of the states, that it is better to leave a few of its noxious branches to their luxuriant growth, than, by pruning them away, to injure the vigor of those yielding the proper fruits. And can the wisdom of this policy be doubted by any one who reflects that to the press alone, checkered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression?" - James Madison
"When a scientist is ahead of his times, it is often through misunderstanding of current, rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won't one day, from some perspective, appear prophetic. " - Jean Rostand
"There is a strong temptation to assume that presenting subject matter in its perfected form provides a royal road to learning. What more natural than to suppose that the immature can be saved time and energy, and be protected from needless error by commencing where competent inquirers have left off? The outcome is written large in the history of education. Pupils begin their study of science with texts in which the subject is organized into topics according to the order of the specialist. Technical concepts, with their definitions, are introduced at the outset. Laws are introduced at a very early stage, with at best a few indications of the way in which they were arrived at. The pupils learn a "science" instead of learning the scientific way of treating the familiar material of ordinary experience." - John Dewey
"Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. 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 afterwards carefully avoid." - John Keats
"Truth is an affair of history and is affected by all the relativities of history. Truth is an affair of the human subject. Truth, therefore, is an affair of experience. The question of truth as possessed brings into the whole problem the question the human person who must personally possess truth... And in the perception of truth the human intelligence has a function that must be conceived as being creative. This is the truth in the philosophical error of idealism. Somehow the mind creates truth in a sense. There is a truth here as there is in all errors." - John Courtney Murray
"It is my guiding confession that I believe the greatest error in economics is in seeing the economy as a stable, immutable structure." - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
"Now, in a widening sphere of decisions, the costs of error are so exorbitant that we need to act on theory alone, which is to say on prediction alone. It follows that the reputation of scientific prediction needs to be enhanced. But that can happen, paradoxically, only if scientists disavow the certainty and precision that they normally insist on. Above all, we need to learn to act decisively to forestall predicted perils, even while knowing that they may never materialize. We must take action, in a manner of speaking, to preserve our ignorance. There are perils that we can be certain of avoiding only at the cost of never knowing with certainty that they were real." - Jonathan Schell, fully Jonathan Edward Schell
"Every error is caused by emotions and education (implicit and explicit); intellect by itself (not disturbed by anything outside) could not err." - Kurt Gödel, also Goedel
"He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires." - Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
"Experience is never at fault; it is only your judgment that is in error in promising itself such results from experience as are not caused by our experiments. For having given a beginning, what follows from it must necessarily be a natural development of such a beginning, unless it has been subject to a contrary influence, while, if it is affected by any contrary influence, the result which ought to follow from the aforesaid beginning will be found to partake of this contrary influence in a greater or less degree in proportion as the said influence is more or less powerful than the aforesaid beginning. " - Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
"I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of of our fossils, radioactive at that." - Lewis Thomas
"If you attack error in another, you will hurt yourself. You cannot know your brother when you attack him. Attack is always made upon a stranger. You are making him a stranger by misperceiving him, and so you cannot know him. It is because you have made him a stranger that you are afraid of him. Perceive him correctly so that you can know him. " - A Course In Miracles, aka ACIM
"As in the experimental sciences, truth cannot be distinguished from error as long as firm principles have not been established through the rigorous observation of facts." - Louis Pasteur
"To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth." - Ludwig Wittgenstein, fully Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
"The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience, while the error of age is to believe experience is a substitute for intelligence." - Lyman Bryson