Errors Quotes - Page 30

• All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing. A day will come when science will turn upon its error and no longer hesitate to shorten our woes. A day will come when it will dare and act with certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour, knowing that it has reached its term.

  Maurice Maeterlinck

  Death, Knowledge, Science

  Maurice Maeterlinck (1913). “Our Eternity”

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• But 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.

  Francis Bacon

  Knowledge, Science, Men

  Francis Bacon (1765). “The works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, and Lord High Chancellor of England, in five volumes”, p.81

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The body of science is not, as it is sometimes thought, a huge coherent mass of facts, neatly arranged in sequence, each one attached to the next by a logical string. In truth, whenever we discover a new fact it involves the elimination of old ones. We are always, as it turns out, fundamentally in error.

  Lewis Thomas

  Science, Facts, Body

  7 Copy quote

• Ultimately there can be no disagreement between history, science, philosophy, and theology. Where there is disagreement, there is either ignorance or error.

  Mortimer Adler

  Philosophy, Ignorance, Science

  7 Copy quote

• Buffon, who, with all his theoretical ingenuity and extraordinary eloquence, I suspect had little actual information in the science on which he wrote so admirably For instance, he tells us that the cow sheds her horns every two years; a most palpable error. ... It is wonderful that Buffon who lived so much in the country at his noble seat should have fallen into such a blunder I suppose he has confounded the cow with the deer.

  James Boswell

  Country, Writing, Science

  James Boswell (1863). “The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: Comprehending an Account of His Studies and Numerous Works, in Chronological Order; a Series of His Epistolary Correspondence and Conversations with Many Eminent Persons; and Various Original Pieces of His Composition Never Before Published: the Whole Exhibiting a View of Literature and Literary Men in Great-Britain, for Near Half a Century During which He Flourished”, p.54

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• If there is something very slightly wrong in our definition of the theories, then the full mathematical rigor may convert these errors into ridiculous conclusions.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Science, May, Definitions

  8 Copy quote

• A new truth is a truth, an old error is an error.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Truth, Science, Truth Is

  Benjamin Franklin (1849). “Poor Richard's almanac for 1850-52”, p.33

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man. Every careful measurement in science is always given with the probable error ... every observer admits that he is likely wrong, and knows about how much wrong he is likely to be.

  Bertrand Russell

  Truth, Science, Men

  "The Scientific Outlook".

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is not so difficult a task as to plant new truths, as to root out old errors

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Truth, Science, Roots

  Charles Caleb Colton (1824). “Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think”, p.69

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is sometimes well for a blatant error to draw attention to overmodest truths.

  Jean Rostand

  Truth, Mistake, Science

  Jean Rostand (1962). “The substance of man”

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Many errors, of a truth, consist merely in the application of the wrong names of things. For if a man says that the lines which are drawn from the centre of the circle to the circumference are not equal, he understands by the circle, at all events for the time, something else than mathematicians understand by it.

  Baruch Spinoza

  Truth, Science, Men

  6 Copy quote

• Remember that [scientific thought] is the guide of action; that the truth which it arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.

  William Kingdon Clifford

  Truth, Science, Progress

  William Kingdon Clifford, Leslie Stephen, Frederick Pollock (2011). “Lectures and Essays”, p.157, Cambridge University Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Science, my boy, is composed of errors, but errors that it is right to make, for they lead step by step to the truth.

  Jules Verne

  Truth, Science, Boys

  Jules Verne (1998). “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”, p.146, Oxford University Press, USA

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Truth, Science, Men

  Friedrich Nietzsche (1977). “The Portable Nietzsche”, p.27, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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 for truth. So it does more harm than good.

  Francis Bacon

  Truth, Science, Giving

  Francis Bacon (2012). “The Great Instauration”, p.29, Simon and Schuster

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• There are infinite possibilities of error, and more cranks take up fashionable untruths than unfashionable truths.

  Bertrand Russell

  Truth, Science, Infinite

  5 Copy quote

• Wherever modern Science has exploded a superstitious fable or even a picturesque error, she has replaced it with a grander and even more poetical truth.

  George Perkins Marsh

  Truth, Science, Fables

  George Perkins Marsh, Stephen C. Trombulak (2001). “So Great a Vision: The Conservation Writings of George Perkins Marsh”, p.80, UPNE

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• [I]f in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics, in so far as disposed through it we are able to reach certainty in other sciences and truth by the exclusion of error.

  Roger Bacon

  Truth, Science, Doubt

  Opus Majus bk. 1, ch. 4 (ca. 1267) (translation by Robert Burke)

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Mathematics are Friends to Religion, inasmuch as they charm the Passions, restrain the Impetuosity of the Imagination, and purge the Mind from Error and Prejudice. Vice is Error, Confusion, and false Reasoning; and all Truth is more or less opposite to it. Besides, Mathematical Studies may serve for a pleasant Entertainment for those Hours which young Men are apt to throw away upon their Vices; the Delightfulness of them being such as to make Solitude not only easy, but desirable.

  John Arbuthnot

  Passion, Science, Men

  Martin Strong, John Arbuthnot (1745). “An Essay on the Usefulness of Mathematical Learning: In a Letter from a Gentleman in the City, to His Friend at Oxford”, p.8

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Extemporaneous speaking should be practised [sic] and cultivated. It is the lawyer's avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech. And yet there is not a more fatal error to young lawyers than relying too much on speech-making. If any one, upon his rare powers of speaking, shall claim an exemption from the drudgery of the law, his case is a failure in advance.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Law, People, Faithful

  4 Copy quote

• Finding that no religion was based upon facts, but that all of them were in opposition to facts, and could not therefore be true, I began to reflect upon what must be the condition of mankind, trained from infancy to believe in these errors, and to make them the rule of their conduct.

  Robert Owen

  Believe, Religion, Atheism

  "Debate on the Evidences of Christianity".

  55 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have spent much time in the study of the abstract sciences; but the paucity of persons with whom you can communicate on such subjects disgusted me with them. When I began to study man, I saw that these abstract sciences are not suited to him, and that in diving into them, I wandered farther from my real object than those who knew them not, and I forgave them for not having attended to these things. I expected then, however, that I should find some companions in the study of man, since it was so specifically a duty. I was in error. There are fewer students of man than of geometry.

  Blaise Pascal

  Real, Communication, Science

  4 Copy quote

• To be born in imbecility, in the midst of pain and crisis; to be the plaything of ignorance, error, need, sickness, wickedness, and passions; to return step by step to imbecility, from the time of lisping to that of doting; to live among knaves and charlatans of all kinds; to die between one man who takes your pulse and another who troubles your head; never to know where you come from, why you come and where you are going! That is what is called the most important gift of our parents and nature. Life.

  Denis Diderot

  Pain, Fear, Ignorance

  14 Copy quote

• If I want my daughter to try something, I eat it in front of her repeatedly without forcing the issue and, with some trial and error, the world is our oyster!

  Alexandra Guarnaschelli

  Daughter, Mother, Oysters

  4 Copy quote

• When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did [Claude Elwood] Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you.

  Richard Hamming

  Small Problems, Tree, Trying

  5 Copy quote