Fallibility Quotes

“It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”
― Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.”
― Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson

“Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.”
― Meister Eckhart

“Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little or too much;
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides,
Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;
Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,
Correct old time, and regulate the sun;
Go, soar with Plato to th’ empyreal sphere,
To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;
Or tread the mazy round his followers trod,
And quitting sense call imitating God;
As Eastern priests in giddy circles run,
And turn their heads to imitate the sun.
Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule—
Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!”
― Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

“If gold rusts, what then can iron do?”
― Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

“Intuition listens to an inner voice and responds to an instant sentiment that may checkmate reason. It is only in hindsight that its soundness or fallibility is proven. ("Blame storming")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“You make all kinds of mistakes, but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her.”
― Winston s. Churchill

“If we all were judged according to the consequences
Of all our words and deeds, beyond the intention
And beyond our limited understanding
Of ourselves and others, we should all be condemned.”
― T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

“Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

“Children understood at a very young age that doing nothing was an expression of power. Doing nothing was a choice swollen with omnipotence. It was, in fact, godly.

And this, she now realized, was the reason why the gods did nothing. Proof of their omniscience. After all, to act was to announce awful limitations, for it revealed that chance acted first, the accidents were just that--events beyond the will of the gods--and all they could do in answer was to attempt to remedy the consequences, to alter natural ends. To act, then, was an admission of fallibility.”
― Steven Erikson

“as Schulz himself has pointed out, Snoopy is capable of being 'one of the meanest' members of the entire Peanuts cast ... he is lazy, he is a 'chow-hound' without parallel, he is bitingly sarcastic, he is frequently a coward, and he often becomes quite weary of being what he is basically -- a dog. He is, in other words, a fairly drawn caricature for what is probably the typical Christian.”
― Robert L. Short, The Gospel According to Peanuts

“We are aware of the fallibility of our perception and know how easily our senses can deceive us. This should remind us to be cautious and reflective in our judgments and actions. Therefore, In navigating the uncertainties of life, let us cultivate a balance between groundedness and attunement. ( "Trompe le Pied - Trompe l'Oeil.")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Many of the points made in this book are probably wrong. It is also likely that there are considerations of critical importance that I fail to take into account, thereby invalidating some or all of my conclusions.”
― Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

“Individual humans know embarrassingly little about the world, and as history progressed, they came to know less and less. A hunter-gatherer in the Stone Age knew how to make her own clothes, how to start a fire, how to hunt rabbits and how to escape lions. We think we know far more today, but as individuals, we actually know far less. We rely on the expertise of others for almost all our needs. In one humbling experiment, people were asked to evaluate how well they understood the workings of an ordinary zip. Most people confidently replied that they understood them very well – after all, they use zips all the time. They were then asked to describe in as much detail as possible all the steps involved in the zip’s operation. Most had no idea.2 This is what Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach have termed ‘the knowledge illusion’. We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“Embracing human frailty, fallibility, and heartbreaking aloneness is crucial for any person seeking to attain self-actualization and self-realization.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Man must have light. He must live in the fierce full constant glare of light, where all shadow will be defined and sharp and unique and personal: the shadow of his own singular rectitude or baseness. All human evils have to come out of obscurity and darkness, where there is nothing to dog man constantly with the shape of his own deformity.”
― William Faulkner, The Mansion

“An inspired and infallible passage whose meaning you cannot be sure of is not much more useful than an uninspired, fallible passage.”
― Robert M. Price

“When you demand perfection within yourself, you become more fallible.”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

“Even as to himself, a man cannot pretend to know what he is in himself from the knowledge he has by internal sensation. For as he does not as it were create himself, and does not come by the conception of himself a priori but empirically, it naturally follows that he can obtain his knowledge even of himself only by the inner sense, and consequently only through the appearances of his nature and the way in which his consciousness is affected. At the same time, beyond these characteristics of his own subject, made up of mere appearances, he must necessarily suppose something else as their basis, namely, his ego, whatever its characteristics in itself may be... Now man really finds in himself a faculty by which he distinguishes himself from everything else, even from himself as affected by objects, and that is reason. This being pure spontaneity is even elevated above the understanding. For although the latter is a spontaneity and does not, like sense, merely contain intuitions that arise when we are affected by things (and are therefore passive), yet it cannot produce from its activity any other conceptions than those which merely serve to bring the intuitions of sense under rules, and thereby to unite them in one consciousness, and without this use of the sensibility it could not think at all; whereas, on the contrary, reason shows so pure a spontaneity in the case of what I call "ideas" [Ideal Conceptions] that it thereby far transcends everything that the sensibility can give it, and exhibits its most important function in distinguishing the world of sense from that of understanding, and thereby prescribing the limits of the understanding itself.”
― Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals: & The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics

“Fallibility in a leader is very trying. Isn’t it? They spill so much of other people’s blood.”
― James Clavell, Tai-Pan

“Crucial decisions are made, today as thousands of years ago, in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions of authority...[it is] quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“Children understood at a very young age that doing nothing was an expression of power. Doing nothing was a choice swollen with omnipotence. It was, in fact, godly.

And this, she now realized, was the reason why the gods did nothing. Proof of their omniscience. After all, to act was to announce awful limitations, for it revealed that chance acted first, the accidents were just that—events beyond the will of the gods—and all they could do in answer was to attempt to remedy the consequences, to alter natural ends. To act, then, was an admission of fallibility”
― Steven Erikson, Dust of Dreams

“It is a necessary condition of rationality that a man shall formulate his beliefs in such a way that it is clear what evidence would be evidence against them and that he shall lay himself open to criticism and refutation ... But to foreclose on tolerance is precisely to cut oneself off from such criticism and refutation. It is gravely to endanger one's own rationality by not admitting one's own fallibility.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre

“I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet

“Failures are like alarm clocks. Alarm clocks wake us up from our dreams and remind us that we have to go to work. Failures wake us up from our dreams and remind us that we have to live as we really are; mortal and fallible living beings.”
― Giannis Delimitsos, NOVEL PHILOSOPHY: New ideas about Ethics, Epistemology, Science and the sweet Life

“The trait [Morey] looked for was awareness that they were seeking answers to questions with no certain answers--that they were inherently fallible. "I always ask them, 'Who did you miss?'" he said. Which future superstar had they written off, or which future bust had they fallen in love with? "If they don't give me a good one, I'm like, 'Fuck 'em.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“Humanity demands from their leaders the courage to sin. To take account of reality means to take account of the devil. And to take account of the devil without degenerating and slipping into him is a difficult skill; it is the true problem of an ethic of balance, of the true center, not the ethic of simply negating what resists the demands of honesty, conviction, and love.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“Failures are like alarm clocks. Alarm clocks wake us up from our dream and remind us that we have to go to work. Failures wake us up from our dream and remind us that we have to live as we really are; mortals and fallible.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“These scholars were not pulling the language of the scriptures into the English they knew and used at home. The words of the King James Bible are just as much English pushed towards the condition of a foreign language as a foreign language translated into English. It was, in their words, more important to make English godly than to make the words of God into the sort of prose that any Englishmen would have written, and that secretarial relationship to the original languages of the scriptures shaped the translation. Of course, individual English words and phrases are held up to and examined to the point of a knife.”
― Adam nicolson, God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible

“Frodo stirred. And suddenly his heart went out to Faramir. ‘The storm has burst at last,’ he thought. ‘This great array of spears and swords is going to Osgiliath. Will Faramir get across in time? He guessed it, but did he know the hour? And who can now hold the fords when the King of the Nine Riders comes? And other armies will come. I am too late. All is lost. I tarried on the way. All is lost. Even if my errand is performed, no one will ever know. There will be no one I can tell. It will be in vain.’ Overcome with weakness he wept. And still the host of Morgul crossed the bridge.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers