He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors-though never the same error more than once-is more reliable than someone who has never made any.
Complex organisms cannot be construed as the sum of their genes, nor do genes alone build particular items of anatomy or behavior by themselves. Most genes influence several aspects of anatomy and behavior as they operate through complex interactions with other genes and their products, and with environmental factors both within and outside the developing organism. We fall into a deep error, not just a harmful oversimplification, when we speak of genes "for" particular items of anatomy or behavior.
A new truth is a truth, an old error is an error.
All extremes are error. The reverse of error is not truth, but error still. Truth lies between extremes.
The difference between the successful and the troubled is not error-free living; it is that by discovering and implementing a life calling, the successful stand on their pile of trash while the troubled sit under theirs.
Total freedom from error is what none of us will allow to our neighbors; however we may be inclined to flirt a little with such spotless perfection ourselves.
You learn out of bitter experience, trial and error. Life teaches you that. As sincere as you all are, you can't learn it all in school.
The wisest man may be wiser to-day than he was yesterday, and to-morrow than he is to-day. Total freedom from change would imply total freedom from error; but this is the prerogative of Omniscience alone.
Relations are errors that Nature makes. Your spouse you can put on the shelf. But your friends, dear friends, are the quaint mistakes You always commit yourself.
The most precise and thoughtful scholar is limited in what he knows and wrong in some things that he affirms; the most devoted saint is stained with sin and full of error; the bravest heart among us will fail and break; but Christ is altogether lovely, holy, and unfailing.
Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.
Life is an error-making and an error-correcting process.
He who cannot learn by others' mistakes is stupid. He who cannot learn by his own errors is a fool.
In the margin for error lies all our room for maneuver.
Truth is one, but error proliferates. Man tracks it down and cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth. But the ultimate atom will always essentially be an error, a miscalculation.
Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.
Children, then, acquire social skills not so much from adults as from their interactions with one another. They are likely to discover through trial and error which strategies work and which do not, and later to reflect consciously on what they have learned.
Every error pronounces judgment on itself when it attempts to apply its rules to the standard of truth.
The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into antiquity.
As far as Martin [Luther] himself is concerned, O good God, what have we overlooked or not done? What fatherly charity have we omitted that we might call him back from such errors?