Your Fear Of Error Is Your Error Quotes & Sayings

Perhaps Aristotle's most widely-read work is his esoteric treatise on aesthetics, the Poetics. According to his analysis of tragic poetry (a section on comedy was either lost or never completed), the theatrical audience experiences katharsis ("purgation") of the heightened emotions of pity and fear as the tragic hero, a basically good but flawed aristocrat, is brought down by his own "error of judgment. — The New York Times

If we linger in indecision, as does Buridan's beast, we will not perish. We will simply miss an opportunity to act decisively in the absence of certainty, and show that our fear of error is greater than our love of truth. — Terryl Givens

The terrible thing about free soloing difficult routes that are within one's capacity, is the chance that faced with ultimate danger and need for ultimate self-control, one's nerve might fail and cause an error. That's irony of it - that fear could short-circiut skill, that one would die as a direcy result of being afraid to die. — Royal Robbins

After analyzing our current crisis and studying well-established
historical precedents, I must conclude that the global bankers have
only three possible cards left to play.
The first is admitting culpability and working to restore the
American economic engine to its free-market potential. History has
taught us that the ruling class rarely admits error and never concedes
power.
The second is to foment so much civil unrest and fear that the
general population will be clamoring for a global dictator who will
provide them food, shelter, and security in exchange for their individual
freedom and sovereignty. I see the emerging militancy of the
labor union movement playing right into this scenario.
The final play is global conflict where they can try and control
the outcome by means of funding both sides. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

To know for an hour you were mine completely
Mine in body and soul, my own
I would bear unending tortures sweetly,
With not a murmur and not a moan.
A lighter sin or a lesser error
Might change through hope or fear divine;
But there is no fear, and hell has no terror,
To change or alter a love like mine. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Christianity was born for endurance; it is not an exotic, but a hardy plant, braced by the keen wind; not languid, nor childish nor cowardly. It walks with strong step and erect frame; it is kindly, but firm; it is gentle, but honest; it is calm, but not facile; decided, but not churlish. It does not fear to speak the stern word of condemnation against error, nor to raise its voice against surrounding evils, knowing that it is not of this world. — Horatius Bonar

Is freedom anything else than the power of living as we choose? Nothing else. Tell me then, you men, do you wish to live in error? We do not. No one who lives in error is free. Do you wish to live in fear? Do you wish to live in sorrow? Do you wish to live in tension? By no means. No one who is in a state of fear or sorrow or tension is free, but whoever is delivered from sorrows or fears or anxieties, he is at the same time also delivered from servitude. — Epictetus

Temperate, sincere, and intelligent inquiry and discussion are only to be dreaded by the advocates of error. The truth need not fear them ... — Benjamin Rush

My time is limited. It is thence that one fine day, when all nature smiles and shines, the rack lets loose its black unforgettable cohorts and sweeps away the blue for ever. My situation is truly delicate. What fine things, what momentous things, i am going to miss through fear, fear of falling back into the old error, fear of not finishing in time, fear of revelling, for the last time, in a last outpouring of misery, impotence and hate. The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness. — Samuel Beckett

It can be said, without fear of error, that our meditation is as good as our faith. — Thomas Merton

All men have a natural fear of making a mistake
by believing too well of a person. However, the error of believing too ill of a person is perhaps not feared, at least not in the same degree as the other. — Soren Kierkegaard

It is hard to see why we should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust. Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself? — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Fear, the strength of earth's religions, gripping every living soul, Was a monstrous human error for the making of men whole. — Laurell K. Hamilton

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

Never be afraid to offer a smile; sure the risk is that a few foolish people may misinterpret your kindness as weakness, but the reward in their error be that at least they cannot blame you because you did show your teeth. — Johnnie Dent Jr.

Yes, there is a terrible moral in 'Dorian Gray' - a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book. — Oscar Wilde

If the fear of falling into error is the source of a mistrust in Science, which in the absence of any such misgivings gets on with the work itself and actually does know, it is difficult to see why, conversely, a mistrust should not be placed in this mistrust, and why we should not be concerned that this fear of erring is itself the very error. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The American Conversation is an argument, after all, and way worse than our fear of error or anarchy or Gomorrahl decadence is our fear of theocracy or autocracy or any ideology whose project is not to argue or persuade but to adjourn the whole debate sine die. It's this logic (and perhaps this alone) that keeps protofascism or royalism or Maoism or any sort of really dire extremism from achieving mainstream legitimacy in US politics — David Foster Wallace

People are always quick to call evil what they do not know. The unknown sprouts fear. It spreads like an infection, burrowing into every facet of their lives. They need a scapegoat, someone to blame. Fingers are pointed, accusations are made, and a target lands on somebody's back. They grow angry. They turn violent.
To history, human nature must be a stubborn and tiring student. No matter how many times history tries to show it the error of its ways, it never learns from its mistakes. — Kelseyleigh Reber

Led by long years to my last hours, too late, O world, I know your joys for what they are. You promise a peace which is not yours to give and the repose that dies before it is born. The years of fear and shame to which Heaven now set a term, renew nothing in me but the old sweet error in which, living overlong a man kills his soul with no gain to his body. I say and I know having put it to the proof, that he has the better part in Heaven whose death falls nearest his birth. — Michelangelo

Wisdom: The first error is that of the southern people, and it consists in holding that these eastern and western places are real places ... give no quarter to that thought, whether it threatens you with fear, or tempts you with hopes. For this is Superstition and all who believe it will come in the end to the swamps to the south and the jungles to the far south. Part of the same error is to think that the Landlord is a real man — C.S. Lewis

If I am mistaken in my opinion that the human soul is immortal, I willingly err; nor would I have this pleasant error extorted from me; and if, as some minute philosophers suppose, death should deprive me of my being, I need not fear the raillery of those pretended philosophers when they are no more. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

The Christian religion alone has been able to cure these twin vices, not by using one to expel the other according to worldly wisdom, but by expelling both through the simplicity of the Gospel. For it teaches the righteous, whom it exalts, even to participation in divinity itself, that in this sublime state they still bear the source of all corruption, which exposes them throughout their lives to error, misery, death and sin; and it cries out to the most ungodly that they are capable of the grace of their redeemer. Thus, making those whom it justifies tremble and consoling those whom it condemns, it so nicely tempers fear with hope through this dual capacity, common to all men, for grace and sin, that it causes infinitely more dejection than mere reason, but without despair, and infinitely more exaltation than natural pride, but without puffing us up. — Blaise Pascal

Idle Jeffrey, when asking his cousin for money: "I fear I have not a mercenary tendency."

The Chancellor of the Exchequer and his cousin, Plantagenet Palliser: "Men must have mercenary tendencies or they would not have bred. The man who plows, so he may live, does so because, luckily, he has mercenary tendencies."

Jeffrey: "Just so, but you see I am less lucky than the plowman."

Palliser: "There is no vulgar error so vulgar, that is to say common or erroneous, as that by which men have been taught to say that mercenary tendencies are bad. The desire for wealth is the source of all progress. Civilization comes from what men call greed. Let your mercenary tendencies be combines with honesty, and they cannot take you astray. — Anthony Trollope

Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason's imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work. — Louis Aragon

Your pretended fear lest error should step in, is like the man that would keep all the wine out of the country lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy, to deny a man the liberty he hath by nature upon a supposition that he may abuse it. — Oliver Cromwell

I felt a new wave of irritation, squelched it as I kicked into scientist mode. First rule: block mind-set. Don't suspect, don't fear, don't hope for any outcome. Observe, weigh, measure, and record.
Second rule: block emotion. Leave sorrow, pity, and outrage for later. Anger or grief can lead to error and misjudgment. Mistakes do your victim no good. — Kathy Reichs

Or can it be thought that they who heap up an useless mass of wealth, not for any use that it is to bring them, but merely to please themselves with the contemplation of it, enjoy any true pleasure in it? The delight they find is only a false shadow of joy. Those are no better whose error is somewhat different from the former, and who hide it, out of their fear of losing it; for what other name can fit the hiding it in the earth, or rather the restoring to it again, it being thus cut off from being useful, either to its owner or to the rest of mankind? And yet the owner having hid it carefully, is glad, because he thinks he is now sure of it. It if should be stole, the owner, though he might live perhaps ten years after the theft, of which he knew nothing, would find no difference between his having or losing it; for both ways it was equally useless to him. — Thomas More

To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error. — Marilynne Robinson

I'm figuring out what I want by trial and error, and maybe that's not the best way, but it's all I've got. All I know is that I need to be my own person, someone shaped by my desire, not fear of disappointing the people who are supposed to love me. — Cora Carmack

Action and reaction, ebb and flow, trial and error, change - this is the rhythm of living. Out of our over-confidence, fear; out of our fear, clearer vision, fresh hope. And out of hope, progress.
Bruce Barton — Bruce Barton

Free thought means fearless thought. It is not deterred by legal penalties, nor by spiritual consequences. Dissent from the Bible does not alarm the true investigator, who takes truth for authority not authority for truth. The thinker who is really free, is independent; he is under no dread; he yields to no menace; he is not dismayed by law, nor custom, nor pulpits, nor society-whose opinion appals so many. He who has the manly passion of free thought, has no fear of anything, save the fear of error. — George Holyoake

The income tax is the biggest single intrusion suffered by the American people. It forces every worker to be a bookkeeper, to open his records to the government, to explain his expenses, to fear conviction for a harmless accounting error. Compliance wastes billions of dollars. It penalizes savings and creates an enormous drag on the U.S. economy. It is incompatible with a free society, and we aren't libertarians if we tolerate it. — Harry Browne

Thinking, even when thinking is difficult, versus nonthinking Awareness, even when awareness is challenging, versus unawareness Clarity, whether or not it comes easily, versus obscurity or vagueness Respect for reality, whether pleasant or painful, versus avoidance of reality Respect for truth versus rejection of truth Independence versus dependence Active orientation versus passive orientation Willingness to take appropriate risks, even in the face of fear, versus unwillingness Honesty with self versus dishonesty Living in and being responsible to the present versus retreating into fantasy Self-confrontation versus self-avoidance Willingness to see and correct mistakes versus perseverance in error Reason versus irrationalism — Nathaniel Branden

The greater number of a man's errors come before him disguised under the specious form of necessity; then, after error has been committed in a moment of excitement, of delirium, or of fear, we see that we might have avoided and escaped it. — Alexandre Dumas

While criticism or fear of punishment may restrain us from doing wrong, it does not make us wish to do right. Disregarding this simple fact is the great error into which parents and educators fall when they rely on these negative means of correction. The only effective discipline is self-discipline, motivated by the inner desire to act meritoriously in order to do well in one's own eyes, according to one's own values, so that one may feel good about oneself may have a good conscience. — Bruno Bettelheim