Quotes About Errors

The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. . . No man is so wise but that he may learn some wisdom from his past errors, either of thought or action, and no society has made such advances as to be capable of no improvement from the retrospect of its past folly and credulity.

Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth.

He (the devil) always sends errors into the world in pairs--pairs of opposites...He relies on your extra dislike of one to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.

When you find errors in conventional wisdom-when everyone says A and A is not true-you gain competitive advantage. Only a few times do you have to find errors in conventional wisdom to make a living.

Great errors seldom originate but with men of great minds.

Testing by itself does not improve software quality. Test results are an indicator of quality, but in and of themselves, they don't improve it. Trying to improve software quality by increasing the amount of testing is like trying to lose weight by weighing yourself more often. What you eat before you step onto the scale determines how much you will weigh, and the software development techniques you use determine how many errors testing will find. If you want to lose weight, don't buy a new scale; change your diet. If you want to improve your software, don't test more; develop better.

I'm a patient person. I think that's one thing that I feel comfortable I can deal with - the downfall and the errors, as long as I see progress and people trying.

Children are our crop, our fields, our earth. They are birds let loose into darkness. They are errors renewed. Still, they are the only source from which may be drawn a life more successful, more knowing than our own. Somehow they will do one thing, take one step further, they will see the summit. We believe in it, the radiance that streams from the future, from days we will not see. Children must live, must triumph. Children must die; that is an idea we cannot accept.

If the errors of my life have profited me one great truth it is this: believe. Believe in your destiny and the star from which it shines. Believe you have been sent from God as an arrow pulled from his own bow. It is the single universal trait which the great of this earth have all shared, while the shadows are fraught with ghosts who roam the winds with mournful wails of regret on their lips. Believe as if your life depended upon it, for indeed it does.

Critics ought never to be consulted, but while errors may yet be rectified or insipidity suppressed. But when the book has once been dismissed into the world, and can be no more retouched, I know not whether a very different conduct should not be prescribed, and whether firmness and spirit may not sometimes be of use to overpower arrogance and repel brutality.

The solution to the novel's legal problem is a satisfyingly intricate one, and nobody will want his money back on the plot. But the echoes that will remain in your mind after you've finished Reversible Errors will mainly have to do with the novel's other elements.

Never for a moment believe that the great body of the citizens of any State or States can deliberately intend to do wrong. They may, under the influence of temporary excitement or misguided opinions, commit mistakes; they may be misled for a time by the suggestions of self-interest; but in a community so enlightened and patriotic as the people of the United States argument will soon make them sensible of their errors, and when convinced they will be ready to repair them.

Without the errors involved in the assumptions of ethics, man would have remained an animal. Thus has he taken himself as something higher and imposed rigid laws upon himself.

he who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors

Economists, like royal children, are not punished for their errors.

Errors, to be dangerous, must have a great deal of truth mingled with them. It is only from this alliance that they can ever obtain an extensive circulation.

From the errors of others, a wise man corrects his own.

Making every allowance for the errors of the most extreme fallibility, the history of Catholicism would on this hypothesis represent an amount of imposture probably unequaled in the annals of the human race.

Errors like straws upon the surface flow, Who would search for pearls to be grateful for often must dive below.

Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins were as scarlet, they are now white as snow: they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and the redeemer, Time.

Who would enjoy a life of no runs, no hits, no errors?

It is doubtful if a more extensive anthology of errors (William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) concerning the personality and policies of Hitler and the causes and responsibility for the Second World War has ever been assembled, even in war time.

Criticism is above all a gift, an intuition, a matter of tact and flair; it cannot be taught or demonstrated--it is an art. Critical genius means an aptitude for discerning truth under appearances or in disguises which conceal it; for discovering it in spite of the errors of testimony, the frauds of tradition, the dust of time, the loss or alteration of texts. It is the sagacity of the hunter whom nothing deceives for long, and whom no ruse can throw off the trail.

You will go on blundering, for only he who does nothing avoids errors.

The preparations for my new voyage prevented the possiblity of my paying that attention to the correction of my errors, that I should otherwise have done.

The history of human opinion is scarcely anything more than the history of human errors.

It is human to err; and the only final and deadly error, among all our errors, is denying that we have ever erred.

When truth is divided, errors multiply.

When I write a political column for the Chicago Sun-Times, when liberals disagree with me, they send in long, logical e-mails explaining all my errors. I hardly ever get well-reasoned articles from the right. People just tell me to shut up. That's the message: "Shut up. Don't write anymore about this. Who do you think you are?"

Perhaps sensing the dismal failure of its efforts to show that 'established by the State' means 'established by the State or the Federal Government,' the Court tries to palm off the pertinent statutory phrase as "inartful drafting.' This Court, however, has no free-floating power 'to rescue Congress from its drafting errors.'

I'm interested in the truth, and unauthorized biographies are not. Yes, I would like to correct those errors someday.

No matter what the belief, if it had modestly said, 'This is our best thought, go on, think farther!' then we could have smoothly outgrown our early errors and long since have developed a religion such as would have kept pace with an advancing world. But we were made to believe and not allowed to think. We were told to obey, rather than to experiment and investigate.

What is happening now is of a geological and biological order of magnitude. We are upsetting the entire earth system that, over some billions of years and through an endless sequence of groping, of trials and errors, has produced such a magnificent array of living forms, forms capable of seasonal self-renewal over vast periods of time.

In practice, the goal of skepticism is not the discovery of truth, but the exposure of other people's errors. It plays a useful role in science, religion, scholarship, and common sense. But we need to remember that it is a weapon serving belief or self-interest; we need to be skeptical of skeptics. The more militant the skeptic, the stronger the belief.

My first baseman is George "Catfish" Metkovich from our 1952 Pittsburgh Pirates team, which lost 112 games. After a terrible series against the New York Giants, in which our center fielder made three throwing errors and let two balls get through his legs, manager Billy Meyer pleaded, "Can somebody think of something to help us win a game?" "I'd like to make a suggestion," Metkovich said. "On any ball hit to center field, let's just let it roll to see if it might go foul."

Marx set out to resolve the contradictions and to correct the errors in classical political economy. In this he thought he had succeeded very well. Judging by the sound and the fury of the controversy surrounding his interpretations, he either succeeded too well or deluded himself to the success of his enterprise.

Anyone who can't learn from other people's mistakes simply can't learn, and that;s all there is to it. There is value in the wrong way of doing things. The knowledge gained from errors contributes to our knowledge base.

Not knowing of the eternal leads to unfortunate errors.

Errors accumulate in the sketch and compound in the model.

The errors of faith are better than the best thoughts of unbelief.

Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.

There's a reason that students don't grade their own papers. There's a reason defendants don't sentence themselves. And there's the reason the State Department doesn't get to investigate itself, determine whether or not it made errors in Benghazi. That is Congress's job.

Whatever is almost true is quite false, and among the most dangerous of errors, because being so near truth, it is more likely to lead astray.

We mustn't be content to just sit around pointing out the errors in others; we actually need to be sharing the gospel and praying for people to be converted.

The really important thing in life is not the avoidance of mistakes, but the obedience of faith. By obedience, the man is led step by step to correct his errors, whereas nothing will ever happen to him if he doesn't get going.

Mistakes and errors are the discipline through which we advance.

... there's a large core of powerlessness which is balanced against the unwritten contract that says that if you behave, you'll be okay. No wonder people pay so much attention to knowing the rules, to knowing the right people, to not making waves, to never making errors -- to not risking, trying, innovating.

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