Themes

"The truth is perilous never to the true, Nor knowledge to the wise; and to the fool, And to the false, error and truth alike, Error is worse than ignorance."

"Radical errors in the first concoction of the mind are not to be cured by the excellence of functions and remedies subsequent."

"The logic now in use serves rather to fix and give stability to the errors which have their foundation in commonly received notions than to help the search after truth."

"Behold, now let my heart confess to thee what it was seeking there, when I was being gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error—not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself."

"There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men."

"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."

"While every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility, or admit the supposition that any opinion, of which they feel very certain, may be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge themselves to be liable. ... For in proportion to a man’s want of confidence in his own solitary judgment, does he usually repose, with implicit trust, on the infallibly of “the world” in general. And the world, to each individual, means the part of it with which he comes in contact; his party, his sect, his church, his class of society. ... Nor is his faith in this collective authority at all shaken by his being aware that other ages, countries, sects, churches, classes, and parties have thought, and even now think, the exact reverse. ... It never troubles him that mere accident has decided which of these numerous worlds is the object of his reliance."

"In the ideological field, the question of who will win in the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie has not been really settled yet. We still have to wage a protracted struggle against bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology. It is wrong not to understand this and to give up ideological struggle. All erroneous ideas, all poisonous weeds, all ghosts and monsters, must be subjected to criticism; in no circumstance should they be allowed to spread unchecked. However, the criticism should be fully reasoned, analytical and convincing, and not rough, bureaucratic, metaphysical or dogmatic."

"Twenty errors in practice are as nothing compared with one error in principle. Twenty errors in practice may be corrected, and the twenty-first may never be committed; but one erroneous principle is like a damaged wheel in a machine. It can never work correctly afterwards. One speculative error will produce an infinite series of practical errors. The series is inexhaustible, until the machine itself is either amended or destroyed."

"Sometimes we may learn more from a man's errors than from his virtues."

"Believe truth! Shun error!—these, we see, are two materially different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring differently our whole intellectual life. We may regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and let truth take its chance."

"On of the most frequent errors we all commit in life is the valuing a thing according to the difficulty of attaining it. And this error is universal. I do not believe that anybody is free from it."

"En un descuido puede caer el mayor sabio, pero en dos no; y de paso, que no de asiento."

"Es ist so gewiß als wunderbar, daß Wahrheit und Irrthum aus Einer Quelle entstehen; deßwegen man oft dem Irrthum nicht schaden darf, weil man zugleich der Wahrheit."

"Der Irrthum verhält sich gegen das Wahre wie der Schlaf gegen das Wachen. Ich habe bemerkt, daß man aus dem Irren sich wie erquickt wieder zu dem Wahren hinwende."

"Die Wahrheit widerspricht unserer Natur, der Irrthum nicht, und zwar aus einem sehr einfachen Grunde: die Wahrheit fordert, daß wir uns für beschränkt erkennen follen, der Irrthum schmeichelt uns. wir seien auf ein- oder die andere Weise unbegränzt."

"Es irrt der Mensch so lang er strebt."

"Nicht vor Irrthum zu bewahren, ist die Pflicht des Menschenerziehers, sondern den Irrenten zu leiten, ja, ihn seinen Irrthum aus vollen Bechern ausschlürfen zu lassen, das ist Weisheit der Lehrer. Wer seinen Irrthum nur kostet, hält lange damit Haus, er freuet sich dessen als eines seltenen Glücks; aber wer ihn ganz erschöpft, der muß ihn kennen lernen, wenn er nicht wahnsinnig ist."

"The proper method for hastening the decay of error is not by brute force, or by regulation which is one of the classes of force, to endeavour to reduce men to intellectual uniformity; but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself."

"Error is to the mind what poison is to the body."

"La propagande de l'erreur est libre: liberté de pensée!"

"[E]rror is popular because people are afraid to grow up. Clear thinking means facing the fact that life is full of difficult problems, that we cannot escape from pain, discomfort and uncertainty, that we cannot attain happiness by turning away from reality. As Sigmund Freud said, we need "education to reality.""

"Why is error so popular?[…]In the first place, error is often more attractive than truth. Real life is apt to be a drab, humdrum, unglamorous business; but things-that-aren't-so are usually spectacularly exciting and fill us with a tingling sense of wonder and awe.[…]Another thing that makes error popular is that we like life to be nice and simple. Of course, life isn't like that; it's complex, irregular, hard to understand, and generally a messy thing to deal with. But error has a wonderful neatness.[…]A third reason for our wrong beliefs goes deeper. We believe what is comfortable to believe. If problems are troublesome, there must be an easy solution; if we are worried, there must be something that will make us feel good. This, I think, is at the bottom of the last two on my little list of errors."

"If you hastily affirm as true all that awaits confirmation as well as that which does not, you will not escape error."

"The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal." Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

"It is the abortive movement of man toward being which is his very existence, it is through the failure which he has assumed that he asserts himself as a freedom. To want to prohibit a man from error is to forbid him to fulfill his own existence, it is to deprive him of life."

"Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one, from which we must first erase. Ignorance is content to stand still with her back to the truth, but error is more presumptuous, and proceeds in the same direction."

"Esquire is neither a profession nor occupation."

"When a man is asked if he is an esquire, and he answers that he is an esquire, the general understanding is that he is a person of no profession or occupation."

"The term esquire has no relation whatever to landed property."

"These, Sir Edward Coke says, are all the names of dignity in this kingdom (alluding to the peerage, baronetage and knights), esquires and gentlemen being only names of worship.""

"Considering the laxity with which the title of Esquire has been used, as is the subject of remark by Sir Thomas Smith, in his days, as to the title of gentleman . . . the Court cannot take upon itself in this case to define, whether it has been improperly assumed."

"A yeoman is he that hath free land of forty shillings by the year; who was antiently thereby qualified to serve on juries, vote for knights of the shire, and do any other act, where the law requires one that is probus et legalis homo."

"Upon the best English authorities, yeoman is a title of courtesy."

"( Esquires and gentlemen are confounded together by Sir Edward Coke, who observes, that every esquire is a gentleman, and a gentleman is defined to be one qui arma gerit. … It is indeed a matter somewhat unsettled, what constitutes the distinction, or who is a real esquire; for it is not an estate, however large, that confers this rank upon its owner."

"I know of no privileged class of society, and I do not know an esquire has any privileges a yeoman has not."

"On a hill there growes a flower, Faire befall the dainty sweete: By that flower there is a Bower Where the heavenly Muses meete."

"I have always believed that opera is a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts."

"Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses."

"I see Calliope speede her to the place, Where my Goddesse shines: And after her the other Muses trace, With their Violines. Bene they not Bay braunches, which they doe beare, All for Elisa, in her hand to weare? So sweetely they play, And sing all the way, That it a heaven is to heare."

"O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention! A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!"

"There is no place for grief in a house which serves the Muse."

"The mother of the Muses, we are taught, Is Memory: she has left me; they remain, And shake my shoulder, urging me to sing About the summer days, my loves of old."

"The soft, lute-finger’d Muses chaunting clear,"

"It is through the Muses and far-shooting Apollo that there are singers and harpers upon the earth; but princes are of Zeus, and happy is he whom the Muses love: sweet flows speech from his mouth. For though a man have sorrow and grief in his newly-troubled soul and live in dread because his heart is distressed, yet, when a singer, the servant of the Muses, chants the glorious deeds of men of old and the blessed gods who inhabit Olympus, at once he forgets his heaviness and remembers not his sorrows at all ; but the gifts of the goddesses soon turn him away from these."

"Inspiration is the windfall from hard work and focus. Muses are too unreliable to keep on the payroll."

"Their name, their years, spelt by th’ unletter’d muse, The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic moralist to die."

"When inspiration does not come, I go for a walk, go to the movie, talk to a friend, let go... The muse is bound to return again, especially if I turn my back!"

"To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start."

"Whether on Ida’s shady brow Or in the chambers of the East, The chambers of the Sun, that now From antient melody have ceas’d;Whether in Heav’n ye wander fair, Or the green corners of the earth, Or the blue regions of the air Where the melodious winds have birth;Whether on chrystal rocks ye rove, Beneath the bosom of the sea, Wand’ring in many a coral grove, Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry!How have you left the antient love That bards of old enjoy’d in you! The languid strings do scarcely move! The sound is forc’d, the notes are few!"