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More "Fallible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... can really part them. Sooner or later, they must, by divine law, find each other again and become united spirits once more. Worldly wisdom may force them into widely different ways of life; worldly wisdom may delude them, or may make them delude themselves, into contracting an earthly and a fallible union. It matters nothing. The time will certainly come when that union will manifest itself as earthly and fallible; and the two disunited spirits, finding each other again, will become united here for the world beyond this—united, I tell you, in defiance of all human ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... said, "shall I surprise you when I say physicians are very fallible? I know that it is not the habit of the profession to admit this, but I have not come here to talk nonsense to you. You have trusted me in this matter, and admitted me largely into your confidence, and I shall ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... realize,—poverty, disease, desolation, in the midst of strangers,—and all the woes that, like hungry wolves, attack homeless, isolated women. I earnestly hope that the leprous hand of disaster and defeat may never be laid upon your future, but the most cautious human schemes are fallible—often futile—and if you should be unsuccessful in your programme, and find yourself unable to consummate your plans, I ask you now, by the memory of our friendship, by the sacred memory of the dead, to promise me ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... existed; roads, such as they were, were dangerous; and posts were not established. Events were only known by rumour, from pilgrims, or by letters carried In couriers to the parties interested: the public did not enjoy even those fallible vehicles of intelligence, newspapers. In this situation did monks, at twenty, fifty, an hundred, nay, a thousand miles distance (and under the circumstances I have mentioned even twenty miles were considerable) undertake to write ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... misrule. To "extract the invariable laws from the general order of things, and the special from the subject under treatment," is no easy matter. V. Hugo tells us that it is only for a man of genius to undertake such a task, but he himself is an example that even a man so gifted is fallible. In a letter written in the French capital on January 14, 1832, Mendelssohn says of the "so-called romantic school" that it has infected all the Parisians, and that on the stage they think of nothing but the plague, the gallows, the devil, childbeds, and the like. Nor were the romances ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... scientific and historical references and prophetic utterances. He will then accord the place of primacy to all understood scientific references of the Bible over all discoveries in the natural realm. He will do this by interpreting the few and fragmentary discoveries of finite and fallible man in the light of the statements that come to us as the Word of an infallible God, concluding that if there is any apparent inharmony, it lies in the partial discoveries or premature conclusions of scientists, rather than in any error ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... interrupted I, "he is no oracle of mine; he is as fallible as the meanest of us; I often have occasion to bless myself for going ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... than a brother, is Solomon Mahaffy—fallible and failing like the rest of us, but with a sublime capacity for friendship; and closer still, perhaps, clings little Hannibal, a boy about whose parentage nothing is known until the end of the story. Hannibal is charmed ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... discussion. That Thackeray's sketch is very vivid, very human, and in most essentials, hard to disprove, must be granted. But it is obviously conceived under the domination of the "poor Dick" of Addison, and dwells far too persistently upon Steele's frailer and more fallible aspect. No one would believe that the flushed personage in the full-bottomed periwig, who hiccups Addison's Campaign in the Haymarket garret, or the fuddled victim of "Prue's" curtain lecture at Hampton, ranked, at the date of the story, far higher than Addison as ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... crossing of the European with the Asiatic must have been common from the time of the Crusades. In Italy, a special inducement to perfect the breed was offered by the prizes at the horse-races held in every considerable town in the peninsula. In the Mantuan stables were found the in- fallible winners in these contests, as well as the best military chargers, and the horses best suited by their stately appearance for presents to great people. Gonzaga kept stallions and mares from Spain, Ireland, Africa, Thrace, and Cilicia, and for the sake of the last he cultivated the friendship ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... have formed an opinion which is based on experience, and I shall not alter it.' That is tantamount to saying that you have done with experience; it is a claim to have attained infallibility through fallible faculties. Where is the dignity of that? It's just a deification of stupidity and stubbornness and insolence ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... deathblow to confidence, not only in some special utterance, but in the teacher, for it strikes at his claim not to knowledge so much as to wisdom, to balance and insight of thought. I venture to say that recent drifts of speculation shew how rapidly the conception of a fallible Christ developes towards that of a wholly imperfect and untrustworthy Christ. And, looking again at the vast phenomenon of the Portrait in the Gospels, I hold that the line of thought which offers by very far the least difficulty, not to faith only but to ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... kind of you to couple me with her. I am flattered, I assure you!—But, personally, I prefer something lees exalted, something more human, more fallible. . . ." ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... from me to arraign the justice of my country, which, though tardy, did at length recognize my innocence. It is not for me to reflect upon judge or jury, now that eleven years have elapsed since the erroneous sentence was pronounced. Men will always be fallible, and perhaps circumstances did appear at the time a ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... if the case be in any degree doubtful, when such particular figures are equal; when such a line is a right one, and such a surface a plain one; but we can form no idea of that proportion, or of these figures, which is firm and invariable. Our appeal is still to the weak and fallible judgment, which we make from the appearance of the objects, and correct by a compass or common measure; and if we join the supposition of any farther correction, it is of such-a-one as is either useless or imaginary. ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... mankind are one organism, no individual of which can be indifferent to each and all of the others. Enlightened, far-seeing, all-benefiting selfishness will then take the place of short-sighted, suicidal, penny-wise pound-foolish cunning; and that barricade of hypocrisy, duty, that most fallible of all guides, conscience, and 'virtue' and 'vice,' those most unscientific and mischievous expressions that have ever crept into the vocabulary of human folly, will ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... when we are simply astonished that people pay any attention to us at all. We are so conscious of our short-comings, and so keenly aware of our mistakes, that it seems to us that surely no one is quite so blundering and fallible as we are. How easy it is then ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... far as practicable, under the control of the community they serve. Opinions like these have little in common with the miserable devices of demagogues, who teach the doctrine that the people are infallible; or that the aggregation of fallible parts, acting, too, with diminished responsibilities, form an infallible whole; which is a doctrine almost as absurd as that which teaches us to believe "the people are their own worst enemies;" a doctrine, which, if true, ought to induce those who ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... disputed in conversation, whether it be more laudable or desirable, that a man should think too highly or too meanly of himself: it is on all hands agreed to be best, that he should think rightly; but since a fallible being will always make some deviations from exact rectitude, it is not wholly useless to inquire towards which side it ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... that planet's path It might have baffled us for an age and drowned All our new light in darkness. But he held To what he saw. He might so easily, So comfortably have said, 'My instruments Are crude and fallible. In so fine a point Eyes may have erred, too. Why not acquiesce? Why mar the tune, why dislocate a world, For one slight clash of seeming fact with faith?' But no, though stars might swerve, he held his course, Recording only what his eyes could see Until death closed them. ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... Mrs. Frankland's suggestions. The effect of this line of talk upon her mind was very marked, nevertheless. It produced a disenchantment, rapid, sudden, abrupt, terrible. Mrs. Frankland, the oracle upon whose trustworthiness she had ventured her all, had proven herself one of the most fallible of guides. The advice given yesterday with an assurance that only a settled and undoubting conviction could possibly excuse, was to-day pettifogged away mainly on the ground of Charley's worldly prosperity. Phillida had revered the ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... upon fallible human judgment. A man believes thus and so, not necessarily because it is so, but because his head is built on a particular pattern or has had a peculiar class of phenomena filtered through it. The average human ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... at the present day, on many sides, with speculations about the "Kenosis" of the Lord which in some cases anyhow have it for their manifest goal to justify the thought that He condescended to be fallible; that He "made Himself void" of such knowledge as should protect Him from mistaken statements about, for example, the history, quality, and authority of the Old Testament Scriptures. I have said ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... power of man to find out God I will never believe. The 'religious sentiment,' or 'God-consciousness,' so much talked of now-a-days, seems to me (as I believe it will to all practical common-sense Englishmen), a faculty not to be depended on; as fallible and corrupt as any other part of human nature; apt (to judge from history) to develop itself into ugly forms, not only without a revelation from God, but too often in spite of one—into polytheisms, idolatries, witchcrafts, Buddhist asceticisms, Phoenician Moloch-sacrifices, ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... bias of his office. He faces the task of judgment, not as an infallible priest, but as a man, whose wisdom, like other men's, depends upon the measure of his God-given judgment, and flags with years. His "grey ultimate decrepitude" is fallible, Pope though he be; and he naively submits the verdict it has framed to the judgment of his former self, the vigorous, but yet uncrowned, worker in the world. This summing-up of the case is in effect the poet's own, and is rich in the familiar prepossessions of Browning's ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... whereas infallibility is an all-round attribute, compassing an entire subject, certainty goes out to one particular point on the circumference; we may then be certain without being infallible. Extremely fallible as I am in geography, I am nevertheless certain that Tunis is in Africa. Silencing discussion is an assumption, not of infallibility, but of certainty. The man who never dares assume that he is certain of anything, so certain as to ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... to disenchantment, disenchantment to bewilderment, and bewilderment to dismay: the national prophet from whom fresh miracles had been expected, was no prophet at all, but a mere mortal—and an uncommonly fallible mortal at that. Nevertheless, while many Greeks found it hard to pardon the Cretan politician for the ruin into which he had so very nearly precipitated them, there were many others who still remained under the spell of his personality. Yet it may well ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... it must show itself to be indissolubly bound up with forces which will give it the victory over prejudice, ill-will, and adverse accident. Thus alone would proof be given that the work in which we are engaged is something more than the ephemeral fruit of fallible human ingenuity—that rather those men who gave it the initial impulse and watched over its development were acting simply as the instruments of the universal force which, if they had not done the work, would have found other instruments ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... good. To any hardships which they are convinced you inflict reluctantly, and to those which occur through the dispensation of the All-wise, they will more easily be trained to submit with a good grace, than to any gratuitous sufferings devised for them by fallible man. To raise hopes on purpose to produce disappointment, to give provocation merely to exercise the temper, and, in short, to inflict pain of any kind, merely as a training for patience and fortitude—this is a kind of discipline which ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... said that Charles VII. entered into a plot, with jealous enemies of Joan, to force failure upon her. The people and the soldiers had grown to believe her infallible; the king and his favorites determined that she should be proven fallible. They deemed the country sufficiently safe, the army sufficiently strong, to enable them to go on now and claim victories of their own, without having their divine ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... occasioned by the cupidity of territory or dominion? Has not the spirit of commerce, in many instances, administered new incentives to the appetite, both for the one and for the other? Let experience, the least fallible guide of human opinions, be appealed to for an answer to ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... the inspiring Spirit are identified and confounded, I assert that whatever says less than this, says little more than nothing. For how can absolute infallibility be blended with fallibility? Where is the infallible criterion? How can infallible truth be infallibly conveyed in defective and fallible expressions? The Jewish teachers confined this miraculous character to the Pentateuch. Between the Mosaic and the Prophetic inspiration they asserted such a difference as amounts to a diversity; and between both the one and the other, and the remaining books comprised ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... as a familiar name come up in my sittings, and no message of any intimate sort has ever come from the shadow world for me. The messages are intelligent, but below rather than above the average. 'They' always seem very fallible, very human to me, and nothing 'they' do startles me. I have no patience with those who make much of the morbid side of this business. To me it is neither 'theism' nor 'diabolism,' and is neither destruction of an old religion or the basis of a new one—But all this verges on the controversial, ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... forward by avowed disciples of an opposite philosophic school. Nevertheless, as there is from our present disinterested and purely scientific point of view a presumption that philosophers like other men are fallible, and since it is certain that philosophical introspection does not materially differ from other kinds, it seems permissible just to glance at some of these alleged illusions in relation to other and more vulgar forms. Further reference to them will be made at the ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... reference to the general principles of jurisprudence, and the peculiar character of the masonic system. I ask, and should receive no deference to my own unsupported theories—as a man, I am, of course, fallible—and may often have decided erroneously. But I do claim for my arguments all the weight and influence of which they may be deemed worthy, after an attentive and unprejudiced examination. To those ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... Christian trunk. With the Protestants, the Bible, which is the Word of God, is the sole spiritual authority; all the others, the Doctors, Fathers, tradition, Popes and Councils, are human and, accordingly, fallible; in fact, these have repeatedly and gravely erred.[5330] The Bible, however, is a text which each reader reads with his own eyes, more or less enlightened and sensitive, with eyes which, in Luther's time, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... absolute, highly synthetic being, the infinitely wise and free, and therefore indefectible and holy, Me, it is plain that man, the syncretism of the creation, the point of union of all the potentialities manifested by the creation, physical, organic, mental, and moral; man, perfectible and fallible, does not satisfy the conditions of Divinity as he, from the nature of his mind, must conceive them. Neither is he God, nor can he, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... be severe; your last letter taught me as much. Well! I shall try to extract good out of your severity: and besides, though I am now sure you are a just, discriminating man, yet, being mortal, you must be fallible; and if any part of your censure galls me too keenly to the quick—gives me deadly pain—I shall for the present disbelieve it, and put it quite aside, till such time as I feel able to receive it without torture.—I am, dear ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... shall presume to say that was really so? Why imagine anything so irregular? I prefer to think that had the post-mortem been conducted by somebody else, subtle reasons for her death might have appeared. Science is fallible, and even specialists ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... butler. "You have done all that could be done; but he is a doomed man, spite of his innocence, of which I feel, every moment that I look at him, the more and more convinced. God help us; we are poor, fallible creatures, with all our scientific ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... upon the whole country, upon the whole civilized world. The kings of finance relied upon the assiduity and dexterity of sundry paid agents, operating through the stealthy, clumsy, old-fashioned channels for the exercise of power. I relied only upon myself; I had to trust to no fallible, perhaps traitorous, understrappers; through the megaphone of the press I spoke ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... believed similar calumnies against the Jews. But the months spent at Bury Castle, unconsciously to herself till it was done, had shaken and uprooted many prejudices, leaving her with the simple conviction that Jews and Christians were all fallible human beings, very much of the same stamp, some better than others, but good and bad to be found in both camps. Licorice, however, was by no means the person to whom she chose to impart such impressions. There had never been any confidence ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... was another, and, as I take it, a stronger and less fallible ground for success. This fellow has, what all Irishmen are more or less gifted with, an immense amount of vitality, a quality which undeniably makes a man companionable, however little there may be to our taste in his manner, his education, or his bearing. This same vitality ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... certainty is possible; what is, or is not, an intuition is revealed only to reflection after the event. Only if an intuition has played us false, we may be sure it was not infallible; it must either have been one of the fallible sort, or else no ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... were afraid of battle, of conflict, and yet they had thrust themselves into a fight which they must lose. Did they know that? Could they believe what the machine of the Outsiders told them, after it had been proven fallible? ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... of his mind, to his philosophy, his rare erudition, tina phota megan kai kalon edegmen [I received some great and beautiful light]. And I suppose it was when at length I saw him that I first knew him to be fallible. ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... is a normal, human temptation. The attitude, "I don't care if he is a chump; he's my chump," has nothing in its favor. Yet it becomes a point of pride in some men that they will not admit their judgments are fallible. Consequently, having chosen the wrong man for a given responsibility, they will sustain him there, come hell or high water, rather than make public ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... not see. No daggers of reproach were sheathed in those reposing eyes. Oh! how remorse and shame shrink from being arraigned before that throne of light where the immortal spirit sits enthroned—the human eye! If thus conscious guilt recoils from the gaze of man, weak, fallible, erring man, how can it stand the consuming fire of that Eternal Eye, in whose sight the heavens are not clean, and before which archangels bend, veiling their brows ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... commissioner, acting with absolute power and without appeal. For a claim exceeding twenty dollars in value, every citizen has the right to a trial by jury; but by this law the body, the life, the very soul of a man, possibly a free-born citizen, might be consigned to perpetual enslavement on the fallible judgment of a single official. An apparently slight, yet especially odious feature of the law which served in large degree to render it inoperative was that the United-States commissioner, in the event of his remanding the alleged fugitive to slavery, received a fee of ten dollars, and, if he adjudged ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... hopeless, as well as absurd. To elicit it from Patristic Commentaries, would obviously leave a door open for cavil. The ancient Fathers, (allowing that they often speak with consentient voice,) singly, were but fallible men,—however famous, as professors of Theological Science, they may have been. This, however, I venture to assume without any hesitation whatever,—that if, instead of either of these two ways of ascertaining how Holy Scripture ought to be handled, we can be so ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... distinction of race, or colour, or nation, or rank. What says the Bible? 'Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.' Who is to decide then from what depths of moral degradation the power of God's grace will fail to lift up a human being? Certainly, we mortals, fallible, helpless, sinful, as we must feel ourselves, are not capable of judging. All we have to do is to receive the plain command, and obey it. Oh, there is scope, believe me, for the exertions, not of one missionary only, but of hundreds ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... ever know a conceited man dare to praise a picture? The one thing he dreads (next to not being noticed) is to be proved fallible! If you once praise a picture, your character for infallibility hangs by a thread. Suppose it's a figure-picture, and you venture to say 'draws well.' Somebody measures it, and finds one of the proportions an eighth of an inch wrong. You are disposed of as a critic! 'Did you say he draws well?' ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... made him that 160 gracious denial which he is most glad to receive. I am confessor to Angelo, and I know this to be true; therefore prepare yourself to death: do not satisfy your resolution with hopes that are fallible: to-morrow you must die; go to your knees, and ...
— Measure for Measure - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... presbyters and preachers. This confession attributes to them the keys of heaven and hell and the power to forgive sins. [Here extracts are read.] Therefore these men must be infallible, for God would never be so foolish as to entrust fallible men with the keys of heaven and hell. I care nothing for their keys, nor for any world these keys would open or lock; I prefer ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... here comes in, and sustains the fallible conjectures of our unassisted reason. The Holy Scriptures speak of us as fallen creatures: in almost every page we shall find something that is calculated to abate the loftiness and silence the pretensions of man. "The ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... means, my Intention to arraign either the Wisdom or good Policy of our Forefathers. But all Men are, in some Degree, fallible, as well in the congregate, as in the individual; and the Shrewd may err as much, by over-reaching their Aim, as the Ignorant, by falling ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... impression that Mr. Van Berg's estimates of his lady acquaintances are not always correct. Not that I was any wiser, but then such positive assertions seem hardly the thing from people who have shown themselves so fallible." ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... indicated by the order following on the parable of the Talents,—"Those mine enemies, bring hither, and slay them before me." Nor does it seem reasonable, on the other hand, to set the limits of favouritism more narrowly. For even if, among fallible mortals, there may frequently be ground for the hesitation of just men to award the punishment of death to their enemies, the most beautiful story, to my present knowledge, of all antiquity, that of Cleobis and Bito, might ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... are black' is a particular proposition. So also is 'Men are fallible;' for here it is not clear from the form whether 'all' or ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... thinking, diverse tendencies of the Christian intellect, which repeat themselves by a law of nature. It is no more possible to make men think alike in theology than in anything else where the facts are complicated and the conclusions necessarily fallible. The history of theology is a history of "variations;" not indeed, as some have maintained, without an inner principle of movement, but with a constant repetition of oppositions underlying its necessary development. The same, contrasts ...
— Religion and Theology: A Sermon for the Times • John Tulloch
... Prohibitions, yet Truth and Religion are ever the Sufferers by them. But all prudent Men ought to behave according to the Condition they are in, and the Principles as well as Privileges they lay claim to. Reform'd Divines own themselves to be fallible: They appeal to our Reason, and exhort us to peruse the Scripture Ourselves. We live in a Country where the Press is open; where all Men are at full Liberty to expose Error and Falshood, where they can find ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... eyes of our understanding, bringing us out of darkness into His marvelous light, renewing the image of God in our soul, and sealing us unto the day of redemption. So that, in truth, what is now "in the sight of God, even the Father," not of fallible men "pure religion and undefiled," would then, have had no being: inasmuch as it wholly depends on those grand principles, "By grace ye are saved through faith"; and "Jesus Christ is of God made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... all mourners of all times address'd) Seem'd spoken to me as I went along In prayerful thought, slow musing on my way— "Believe in me"—"Let not your hearts be troubled"— And sure I could have promised in that hour, But that I knew myself how fallible, That never more should cross or care of this life Disquiet or distress me. So I came, Chasten'd in spirit, to my home again, Composed and comforted, and cross'd the threshold That day "a wiser, not a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... was not a success. Dick planned it and captained it well; but the best laid plans of youth are not less fallible than those of mice and men, and one always runs a great risk in looting an orchard in broad daylight—although it will be admitted, by those readers who were once young enough and human enough to rob orchards, that stealing cherries in the dark is as aggravating ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... familiar to the readers of Indian literature as Manitou. No idle tales are told of Him, nor would any Indian mention Him irreverently. But with Napa it is entirely different; he appears entitled to no reverence; he is a strange mixture of the fallible human and the powerful under-god. He made many mistakes; was seldom to be trusted; and his works and pranks run from the sublime to the ridiculous. In fact, there are many stories in which Napa figures that will not bear ...
— Indian Why Stories • Frank Bird Linderman
... of France, produced by the Revolution, War with the contiguous Powers was inevitable; sooner or later the evil must have been encountered; and it was of little importance whether England took a share in it somewhat earlier than, by fallible judgments, might be deemed necessary, or not. The frankness with which the faults that were committed have been acknowledged entitles the writer to some regard, when, speaking from an intimate knowledge of the internal state of France ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Men are so fallible in their estimates of contemporaries that one man's statement that another is a rogue does not in the slightest change our views of that man. What we are, that we see: the epithets a man applies to another usually fit himself better, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... stocks mostly dealt in, and monthly, or quar- terly, sends an extended list to his customers. The outside broker who advertises himself freely in the newspapers, as well as by pamphlets and circulars, is to be avoided. He will invite you to participate in his system — always an in- fallible one — of operating. He will suggest "options," "put and call," the "cover" system, and other devices by which the inexperienced may be mystified and beguiled into losing their money. However astute a man may consider himself, experience proves that, with amateurs, this kind of ...
— Everybody's Guide to Money Matters • William Cotton, F.S.A.
... any other person with that absolute ownership of his fellow-men, which is claimed by Southern slaveholders—I would remark, that He has made man accountable to Himself; but slavery makes him accountable to, and a mere appendage to his fellow-man. Slavery substitutes the will of a fallible fellow-man for that infallible rule of action—the will of God. The slave, instead of being allowed to make it the great end of his existence to glorify God and enjoy Him for ever, is degraded from his exalted nature, which borders ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... this; and there are well-known characteristics of human nature that explain how such revulsions of feeling come about. It has never been found difficult to get up a case against those whom the great and powerful have made up their minds to destroy. The best men are fallible and have their weak side. Large bodies of men must contain some unworthy members. A long history can hardly be without blots, mistakes, and crimes. No man's life, if narrowly scrutinized by an unfavorable and prejudiced criticism, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... name ought infinitely to surpass; our coarse, fallible, self-indulgent sex, in the ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... it seems to me. Certainly I would not escape one sort of priestcraft to set up another in its place, whether the niche be filled by Mrs Besant or Mrs Eddy or Mr Sinnett, or any other fallible fellow-creature. Not even Imperator can strike me as infallible; and his own evident belief in that direction does not affect ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... intentionally upon other people's thoughts, by endeavoring to influence other minds to any action not first made known to them or sought by them. Corporeal and selfish influence is human, fallible, and temporary; but incorporeal impulsion is divine, infallible, and eternal. The student should be most careful not to thrust aside Science, and shade God's window which lets in light, or seek to ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... in insight as against discursive analytic knowledge: the belief in a way of wisdom, sudden, penetrating, coercive, which is contrasted with the slow and fallible study of outward appearance by a science relying wholly upon the senses. All who are capable of absorption in an inward passion must have experienced at times the strange feeling of unreality in common objects, the loss of contact with daily things, in which the solidity ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... which seemed to set him at such a distance from them. But the breeze was blowing in their faces; it lifted her hat for a second, and she drew out a pin and stuck it in again,—a little action which seemed, for some reason, to make her rather more fallible. Ah, if only her hat would blow off, and leave her altogether disheveled, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... trusting to men, but, next God, to their own orders. "Give us good men, and they will make us good laws," is the maxim of a demagogue, and is (through the alteration which is commonly perceivable in men, when they have power to work their own wills) exceeding fallible. But "give us good orders, and they will make us good men," is the maxim of a legislator, and the most infallible ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... frank, the peasant woman is scarcely to be counted as a woman at all, and after having passed by such a succession of people in petticoats digging and hoeing and making dinner, this company of coquettes under arms made quite a surprising feature in the landscape, and convinced us at once of being fallible males. ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with me,' he said. 'I suppose they are as fallible as I, and so don't judge,' he added, as he waded thigh-deep into the water, thrusting it to ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... is a cause that would be dishonored and betrayed if I contented myself with appealing only to the understanding. It is too cold, and its processes are too slow, for the occasion. I desire to thank God that since he has given me an intellect so fallible, he has impressed upon me an instinct that is sure. On a question of shame and honor, reasoning is sometimes useless, and worse. I feel the decision in my pulse; if it throws no light upon the brain, it kindles ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... subject of slavery or any other subject. (Laughter.) I would as soon have a Latin priest,—I would as soon have Archbishop Hughes,—I would as soon go to Rome as to Jerusalem or Athens,—I would as soon have the Pope at once in his fallible infallibility,—as ten or twenty, little or big, anti-slavery Doctor-of-Divinity priests, each claiming to give his infallible rendering, however differing from his peer. (Laughter.) I never yet produced this Bible, ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... is not infallible it is liable to err, for there is no medium between infallibility and liability to error. If your church and her ministers are fallible in their doctrinal teachings, as they admit, they may be preaching falsehood to you, instead of truth. If so, you are in doubt whether you are listening to truth or falsehood. If you are in doubt you can have no faith, for faith excludes doubt, and in that state you ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... only sick. And I have never yet seen a publisher's reader who had found anything in inspirational writing but words, words, words. High-sounding paraphrases and rolling sentences do not make literature; and so far as we know, only the fallible, live and loving man or woman can breathe into the nostrils of a literary production the breath of life. All the rest is ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... so late—it was almost too much to feel, and is too much to speak. So let it pass. You will never act so again, ever dearest—you shall not. If the post sins, why leave the sin to the post; and I will remember for the future, will be ready to remember, how postmen are fallible and how you live at the end of a lane—and not be uneasy about a silence if there should be one unaccounted for. For the Tuesday coming, I shall remember that too—who could forget it?... I put it in the niche of the wall, one golden lamp more of your giving, to throw light purely down to the ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... We others, pagans or Protestants, had better understand that the children of the Church, and especially the poor children, were serious through all the shows that seem to us preposterous; they had not renounced something for nothing; if they bowed that very fallible thing, Reason, to Dogma, they got faith for their reward and could gladly accept whatever symbol of it was ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... some magnificent moment, some sudden flash of splendour that made up for all the rest. How could you be bitter about people when you were all in the same box, all as ignorant, as blind, as eager to do well, as fallible, as brave, as mistaken? ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... from them. I can really answer, with an assurance and accuracy superior to the photographer himself, if you could produce him and he were honest, as to the real date. The original picture, aside from being doctored, was actually taken last May. Science is not fallible, but ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... Hutchinson, which, of course, I admire, etc. But is there not an irritating deliberation and correctness about her and everybody connected with her? If she would only write bad grammar, or forget to finish a sentence, or do something or other that looks fallible, it would be a relief. I sometimes wish the old Colonel had got drunk and beaten her, in the bitterness of my spirit. I know I felt a weight taken off my heart when I heard he was extravagant. It is quite possible to be too good for this ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "Mr. Masters is not fallible. At least, I never saw him fail in anything. If he ever made a mistake, it was when he ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... best of his ability—which in that way was pre-eminent—with all possible rivals and probable foes, was receiving addresses, and appointing dummies, and establishing foolscap guarantees against his poor fallible and flexible self—as he had the effrontery to call it—with all the gravity, grand benevolence, confidence in mankind (as fools), immensity of yearning for universal good, and intensity of planning ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... to the next chapter we shall consider this difference more closely. In the meantime it is worth while to urge the importance of cultivating scruples on the subject and a keen eye for the intrusion of human, and therefore fallible, opinion into statements of fact. A trustworthy author states the facts as facts, with the authorities for them specifically cited; and where he builds his own opinions on the facts he leaves no doubt as to where ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... Fallows, unrelaxed, stared fixedly before her; she had taken refuge in that most trying of all rejoinders, silence, and the fallible Jimmy, who waxed strong and prospered upon abuse, drooped and languished under this new and cruel ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... is curious that both should have attempted to tackle the same hopeless task in the same fruitless fashion. The "chronicle history" of Mary Tudor, had Shakespeare's self attempted it, could scarcely have been other—if we may judge by our human and fallible lights of the divine possibilities open to a superhuman and infallible intelligence—than a splendid and priceless failure from the dramatic or poetic point of view. The one chance open even to Shakespeare would have been ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... saying so,—but if you will think of it, I must be right. You were on your trial; and I as your friend was bound to await the result,—with much confidence, because I knew you; but with no conviction, because both you and I are human and fallible. If the electors at Tankerville, or any great proportion of them, express a belief that you are unfit to represent them because of what has occurred, I shall be the last to recommend you to keep your seat;—but I shall be surprised indeed if they should ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... cause and effect, and even invariable sequence became incapable of proof. But when he resolved Cause into a statement of existing conditions that can never be completely known until we have mastered the whole series of physical phenomena, and showed that all human induction is fallible because necessarily imperfect, it became clear that Mill had very little to offer in substitution for those grounds of ordinary belief that he was bent on demolishing. The word Cause is reduced, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... call the redeemed are forsaking human sects and creeds, and their hearts are flowing together. The center of this movement is not a particular geographical location, nor is its nucleus a particular set of fallible men: the center and nucleus of this world-wide movement is OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST, and its operative force is the SPIRIT OF THE LIVING GOD, which draws the faithful together in bonds of holy love and fellowship. ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... not as infallible guides, not as uniformly holding all of them the same opinions, but as most valuable helps in our examination of the evidence of the Church, who is, after all, our appointed instructor in the truths of the Gospel,—fallible in her individual members and branches, yet the sure witness and keeper of Holy Writ, and our safest guide on earth to the mind and will of God. When we have once satisfied ourselves that a doctrine is founded on Scripture, we receive it with implicit faith, and maintain it as ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... fallible mortals know! Even as he spoke, a tiny fragment of lobster shell, which had been working its way silently into the tip of his tongue, was settling down under the skin and getting ready to cause him the most acute mental distress ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... sentimental ground. It is but one utopia against another, and everything one says must be abstract and hypothetical. Subject to this criticism and caution, I will try to characterize in abstract strokes the opposite imaginative forces, and point out what to my own very fallible mind seems the best Utopian hypothesis, the most promising line ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... my best collecting places I now found a mass of rotting wood, mingled with young shoots, and overgrown with climbers, yet I always managed to add something daily to my extensive collections. I one day met with a curious example of failure of instinct, which, by showing it to be fallible, renders it very doubtful whether it is anything more than hereditary habit, dependent on delicate modifications of sensation. Some sailors cut down a good-sized tree, and, as is always my practice, I visited it daily for some time in search of insects. Among other beetles came ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... I think it means perfect consecration.... Thus far, no matter what people profess, I have never come into close contact with any life that I did not find more or less imperfect. I find, in other words, the best human beings fallible, and very fallible. The best I can say of myself is, that I see the need of immense advances in the divine life. I find it hard to be patient with myself when I see how far I am from reaching even my own poor standard; but if I do not ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... is daily growing older and wiser. Its institutions vary with its years, and mark its growing wisdom; and none more so than its modes of investigating truth, and ascertaining guilt or innocence. In its nonage, when man was yet a fallible being, and doubted the accuracy of his own intellect, appeals were made to heaven in dark and doubtful ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... thought strange that Christ should comply in things indifferent with popular errors. A few Words will put the reader in possession of my view. Speaking of the Bible, Phil. says, 'We admit that its separate parts are the work of frail and fallible human beings. We do not seek to build upon it systems of cosmogony, chronology, astronomy, and natural history. We know no reason of internal or external probability which should induce us to believe that such matters could ever have been the subjects of direct revelation.' Is that all? There ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... family, his occupations, his tastes, his religious opinions. Rowland had an odd feeling at last that she had begun to consider him very exemplary, and that she might make, later, some perturbing discovery. He tried, therefore, to invent something that would prepare her to find him fallible. But he could think of nothing. It only seemed to him that Miss Garland secretly mistrusted him, and that he must leave her to render him the service, after he had gone, of making him the object of a little firm derogation. Mrs. Hudson talked with ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... him a great deal of power,—too much. Husband's are fallible, as well as wives," said Mrs. ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... regulations, and of the principles of theology, to secure him against tyranny on the part of his superiors. But what shall be his encouragement to make himself over, without condition or stipulation, as an absolute property, to a fallible being, and that not for a season, but for life? The mind shrinks from such a sacrifice, and demands that, as religion enjoins it, religion should sanction and bless it. It instinctively desires that either the bond should be ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... said humbly, "we are all fallible. Although I never thought to find myself in the position of having to do so, I will admit that I may possibly have been mistaken in my views and treatment of you and your kind, and indeed of other creatures. If so, I apologise for any, ah—temporary inconvenience ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... well-being has a charm to make me restful, so long as my reliance is not put to shame. There is no more blessed emotion than the tranquil happiness which, in the measure of its trust, fills every trustful soul. Even when its objects are poor, fallible, weak, ignorant dying men and women, trust brings a breath of more than earthly peace into the heart. But when it grasps the omnipotent, all-wise, immortal Christ, there are no bounds but its own capacity to the blessedness which it brings into the soul, because there is none to the all-sufficient ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... or half concealed under the charm of Grecian typography. Mitford set aside this too great reverence for the ancient literati. As he saw men, and not moving statues, in the heroes of Grecian history, so he was persuaded that the writers of that history were also men, fallible and prejudiced, like those who were living and writing about him. But Mitford overcame one set of prejudices by the force which prejudices of another kind had endowed him with. He saw how party spirit had raged in modern as well as ancient ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... assembled; again the tribunal was established; again the court was set; but a tribunal and a court—how different to her! That had been composed of men seeking indeed for truth, but themselves erring and fallible creatures; the witnesses had been full of lies, the judges of darkness. But here was a court composed of heavenly witnesses—here was a righteous tribunal—and then at last a judge that could not ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... exhausting the power of chemical agents, they agree to make a joke of it. It is not so much more wonderful than some of those modern miracles, which leave us to hesitate between the two incredible alternatives that men of science are fallible, or that mankind in general, like Sir Walter Scott's grandmother, are 'awfu' leears.' Every effort is made to reduce the strain upon our credulity to that moderate degree of intensity which may fairly be required from the reader of a wild fiction. When the first characteristic wish of the proprietor—namely, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... strict churchmen, the great Dr. South denounced the Royal Society as "irreligious," and among the Puritans the eminent John Owen declared that Newton's discoveries were "built on fallible phenomena and advanced by many arbitrary presumptions against evident testimonies of Scripture." Even Milton seems to have hesitated between the two systems. At the beginning of the eighth book of Paradise ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... itself, suffers from the pain inflicted? But I said, 'After all, it is as I think; she will thank me for it some day.' I was not altogether selfish, please remember. Then, as I saw her silent wrestling, came distrust of myself; I remembered I was pitted against two, younger and no more fallible than myself. As soon as doubt of myself attacked me, I strove to look on the other side; I strove to rid myself of the old prejudices, the old superstitions, the old narrowness of faith; it was useless,—I was too old, and my prejudices had ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... after all, very fallible and very variable. A little opium, a little alcohol, a blow on the head, or some great emotion will modify their judgment to an incredible degree. Sir Harry Johnston may not be very representative as an exponent of scientific conclusions about the existence of God, ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... hopes of rising to eminence in your profession: but let me hint to you—that though you may be perfect in the knowledge how to administer the commandments of men, unless you keep in view the precepts of God, your judgment, like mine, will be fallible." ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... every good citizen ought to believe in it; and I will believe in it as long as the established jurisdiction will order me to believe in it, for it is not for a private person but for a judge to proclaim the innocence of a convicted person. Human justice is venerable even in the errors inherent in its fallible and limited nature. These errors are never irreparable; if the judges do not repair them on earth, God will repair them in Heaven. Besides I have great confidence in general Greatauk, who, though he certainly does not look it, seems ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... Every spirit is fallible but the spirit of saintless. The Church is infallible not by any talisman but by her saintliness. The Bishop of Rome or of Canterbury will be infallible only if they are saints. The saints are detached from everything and attached to Christ, so that ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... Bible is merely the work of men, if it contains only the words of men, then, like all other human work, the Bible is fallible, and must submit to criticism and examination, as all ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... praryakshanumanachareshu. The sense, therefore, is that the three, viz., direct perception, inference, and good conduct being, for these reasons, fallible, the only infallible standard that remain, is audition or the scriptures, or, as verse 14 puts it, men with understandings born ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... human ideas stands God himself—"the same yesterday, to-day and forever." So we may go through the creed; so we may study, as you have been doing, the beliefs of the church. Everywhere we see the evidences of the working, upon fallible human minds of a dim appreciation of something beyond ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... exist. At one time, indeed, Dr. McTaggart seemed disposed to accept a suggestion of mine that, on his view, each soul must be omniscient; and to admit that, while in its temporal aspect, each soul is limited and fallible in its knowledge, it is at the same time supertemporally omniscient. That is a conception difficult beyond all the difficulties of the most arbitrary and self-contradicting of orthodox patristic or scholastic speculations. But, as Dr. McTaggart does not now seem disposed to insist upon that point, ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... who, some centuries ago, formed the various creeds of the Christian world, were fallible men, and if they permitted serious errors to creep into the great mass of religious truth contained in those creeds, then the best way to prevent innovation is, not to preach humility and submission, but to bring those formularies ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... very nature of things, he must sink under the complicated weight of misery. This may happen to a character extremely amiable, the passion which governs him may be termed unhappy, but not guilty, or if it should partake the nature of guilt, fallible creatures cannot always combat with success against ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... you as arrived to that period when you have a right to think for yourselves, and to presume that every man is fallible; to study the masters with a suspicion that great men are not always exempt from great faults; to criticise, compare, and rank their works in your own estimation, as they approach to or recede from that standard of perfection which you have formed ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... they must be immediately lived. Somewhere the that of efficacious causing and the what of it must be experienced in one, just as the what and the that of 'cold' are experienced in one whenever a man has the sensation of cold here and now. It boots not to say that our sensations are fallible. They are indeed; but to see the thermometer contradict us when we say 'it is cold' does not abolish cold as a specific nature from the universe. Cold is in the arctic circle if not here. Even so, to feel that our train is moving when the train beside ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... important factor, which is undoubtedly fundamental to the efficiency of any army. At the same time I promise to be as impartial in my judgment of the Boer as of the Briton as a fighter, or, at least, as impartial as can be expected from a fallible Boer. ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... Calvinistic churches. Each began with a common principle—the necessity of an orthodox faith. But this orthodoxy meant nothing more than their own belief as opposed to that of their adversaries; a belief acknowledged to be fallible, yet maintained as certain; rejecting authority with one breath and appealing to it in the next, and claiming to rest on sure proofs of reason and Scripture, which their opponents were ready with just ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Let us assume, I say, that I took your view of it. Just see what might happen. I might accuse the wrong man. We might even convict the wrong man. The guilty man might then go on, doing incalculable evil. Guessing is dangerous and is—fallible. Scientific induction and deductions, conclusions based on irrefutable fact, fact that can be weighed and ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... the slaughtered Lamb. These expressions, then, are poetic images, meant to convey a truth in the language of association and feeling, the traditionary language of imagination. The determination of their precise significance is wholly a matter of fallible human construction and inference, and not a matter of inspired statement or divine revelation. This is so, beyond a question, because, we repeat, they are figures of speech, having no direct explanation in ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... story, without being guided by some theory, such as I have already sketched, as to the nature of the motion and the conditions that govern it. You will therefore be good enough to remember that this chronicle of the events of a tenth of a second is not a mechanical record but is presented by a fallible human historian, whose account, like that of any other contemporary observer, will be none the worse for independent confirmation. That confirmation is fortunately obtainable. In an attempt made eighteen years ago to photograph the splash of a drop of mercury, I was unable to procure plates ...
— The Splash of a Drop • A. M. Worthington
... contradictions of the sects against each other. All claim inspiration and who can tell which inspiration is right? Can the same Spirit tell the Catholic that the books of Maccabees are canonical and tell Luther that they are not? The senses are fallible and the soul, located by Charron in a ventricle of the brain, is subject to strange disturbances. Many things almost universally believed, like immortality, cannot be proved. Man is like the lower animals. "We believe, judge, act, live ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... 'And, dear Mr. Fawdor, you were both wrong in that quotation, as you no doubt discovered long ago.' Then she gave me the sentence as it is in Cymbeline. She was right, quite right. We were both wrong. Never till her letter came had I looked to see. How vain, how uncertain, and fallible, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... short hours, and she was to be tried for her life: tried, not by the All-wise Judge, but by fallible men, and under a system most unfavorable ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... all so plain, you must see it. I told you I had crossed to the farther bank. Here is what one finds there: Taking him as God, Jesus is ineffectual. Only as an obviously fallible human man does he become beautiful; only as a man is he dignified, ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... positive philosophy are crippled by enthusiastic rhapsodies about intuition and instinct, her footsteps are still indelible, and her progress is certain and accelerating. Reason is written on her brow; she appeals to the universal gift, and denies the authoritative dictations of fallible genius, as much as a moral equality disallows the divine right of kings. Speculators among stars, speculators among sounds and colors, are the skirmishers in front of an intellectual post, whose tread reverberates but little in their rear. Accoutred with a few ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... would assert itself, the orthodox arguments make themselves felt as though in mechanical involuntary protest. But their force and vitality was gone. Between the Paul of Anglican theology and the fiery fallible man of genius—so weak logically, so strong in poetry, in rhetoric, in moral passion, whose portrait has been drawn for us by a free and temperate criticism—the rector knew, in a sort of dull way, that his choice was made. The one picture carried ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... given me his receipt and was gone, I questioned Maignan afresh and more closely, but with no result. He had not seen me place the packet in the portfolio at Calais, and that I had done so I could vouch only my own memory, which I knew to be fallible. In the meantime, though the mischance annoyed me, I attached no great importance to it; but anticipating that a word of explanation would satisfy the King, and a new cipher dispose of other difficulties, I dismissed the matter ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... as testimony, that necessitates us to conclude that there is such a city as Rome—but a reasoning, that forms a branch of mathematical science. So far is our conviction from being grounded on our confidence in human testimony that it proceeds on our knowledge of its fallible character, and therefore can find no sufficient reason for its coincidence on so vast a scale, but in the real existence of the object. That a thousand lies told by as many several and unconnected individuals should all ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... knowledge, and the fashion of our masks?" inquired Alice from her brother. "Truly, I could join belief with those who say that he obtained it not through the ordinary channels open to our frail and fallible intellects." ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... impeccable waxwork had been fixed by the Queen's love in the popular imagination, while the creature whom it represented—the real creature, so full of energy and stress and torment, so mysterious and so unhappy, and so fallible and so very human—had ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... statecraft. He may make grievous errors. He may be misled by mob prejudice or mob enthusiasm; but he is not likely to persist in a policy of crass blundering very long. King Demos may indeed rule a fallible human monarchy, but it is thanks to him, and to his high court held at the Pnyx, that Athens owes at least half of that sharpness of wit and intelligence which is ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... Always old, and must last as long as the Actual. Less fallible than Idealism, but less practically potent, from its ignorance ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... what sense the Bible may be called the word of God, and how and under what conditions the unity of the Spirit is translucent through the letter, which, read as the letter merely, is the word of this and that pious but fallible and imperfect man. Alas for the superstition, where the words themselves are made to be the Spirit! O might I live but to utter all my meditations ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... why, on the other hand, Mr. Macey's official respect should restrain him from subjecting the parson's performance to that criticism with which minds of extraordinary acuteness must necessarily contemplate the doings of their fallible fellow-men. ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... arrogating His divine attribute—infallibility—for any human authority, however exalted; or claim it for any amount of proof, presumptive or positive. 'It is because humanity even when most cautious and discriminating is so mournfully fallible and prone to error, that in judging its own frailty, we require the aid and reverently invoke the guidance of Jehovah.' In your solemn deliberations bear in mind this epitome of an opinion, entitled to more than a passing ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... their gold by slightly working them. Sand is commonly met with at the depth of three or four fathoms, and beneath this a stratum of napal or steatite, which is considered as a sign that the metal is near; but the least fallible mark is a red stone, called batu kawi, lying in detached pieces. It is mostly found in red and white clay, and often adhering to small stones, as well as in homogeneous lumps. The gold is separated from the clay by means of water poured on a hollow board, in the management ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... speciosa miracula, would fail to convince him on the affirmative side. There seems to be no good reason why one observer should set so much store by his own impressions of sense, while he regards those of all other witnesses as fallible. On the other hand, the writer feels unable to set wholly aside the concurrent testimony of the most diverse people, in times, lands and conditions of opinion the most various. The reported phenomena fall into regular groups, like the symptoms of a disease. ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... had been formed on the same principles on which friendships are formed still—a similarity of disposition, some mental and moral resemblances and idiosyncrasies? They were like-minded, so far as a fallible nature and the nature of a stainless humanity could be assimilated. We can think of him as gentle, retiring, amiable, forgiving, heavenly-minded; an imperfect and shadowy, it may be, but still a faithful reflection and transcript of incarnate loveliness. May ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... Marx was human and fallible. If "Capital" had never been written, there would still have been a Socialist movement, and if it could be destroyed by criticism, the Socialist movement would remain. Socialism is the product of economic conditions, not of ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... expect in the circumstances, but I know it does not give a faithful record of how we did arrive: in fact it is simply not true. As remarked before, the one thing that matters in describing an event of this kind is the exact truth, as near as the fallible human mind can state it; and my own impression of our mental condition is that of supreme gratitude and relief at treading the firm decks of a ship again. I am aware that experiences differed considerably according to the boats occupied; that those who were uncertain of the fate of their relatives ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... the United States. Of fallible because human origin, it is imperfect. A rule of political action in a progressive world, it was by its founders properly made subject to amendment. At the first session of the first Congress ten amendments were adopted; two have been added since; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Church, those truths have been mingled or associated with errors so injurious and degrading, that no blind faith is to be rested on any human authority. Let us uphold the majesty of divine revelation, and vindicate our right and our duty to interpret the sacred page—not by the traditions of fallible men, not by the metaphysics of the schools, not by the "special influences" which an enthusiastic mind may construe into divine teaching, and which may be pleaded, with equal truth or falsehood, for every form of error; but by a sober reference to those moral ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... not intentionally upon other people's thoughts, by endeavoring to influence other minds to any action not first made known to them or sought by them. Corporeal and selfish influence is human, fallible, and temporary; but incorporeal impulsion is divine, infallible, and eternal. The student should be most careful not to thrust aside Science, and shade God's window which lets in light, or seek ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... Mrs. Hutchinson, which, of course, I admire, etc. But is there not an irritating deliberation and correctness about her and everybody connected with her? If she would only write bad grammar, or forget to finish a sentence, or do something or other that looks fallible, it would be a relief. I sometimes wish the old Colonel had got drunk and beaten her, in the bitterness of my spirit. I know I felt a weight taken off my heart when I heard he was extravagant. It is quite possible to be too good for this evil world; and unquestionably, Mrs. Hutchinson ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... else it could never have been thought strange that Christ should comply in things indifferent with popular errors. A few Words will put the reader in possession of my view. Speaking of the Bible, Phil. says, 'We admit that its separate parts are the work of frail and fallible human beings. We do not seek to build upon it systems of cosmogony, chronology, astronomy, and natural history. We know no reason of internal or external probability which should induce us to believe that such matters could ever have been the subjects of direct revelation.' ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... to town next week to her grandmother's and I want you girls to make friends with her. It seems to me that she is very nice—but that is only a fallible man's judgment, and Heaven forbid that I should attempt to forestall Miss Cudberry's decision on such a question. Anyhow she has plenty of energy and, among other things, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... hydraulic press in the attempt to compress it, and exhausting the power of chemical agents, they agree to make a joke of it. It is not so much more wonderful than some of those modern miracles, which leave us to hesitate between the two incredible alternatives that men of science are fallible, or that mankind in general, like Sir Walter Scott's grandmother, are 'awfu' leears.' Every effort is made to reduce the strain upon our credulity to that moderate degree of intensity which may fairly be required from the reader of a wild fiction. When the first characteristic ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... (writes Mr. Tyrrell in his "Much-abused Letter") is but a means, a way, a creature, to be used where it helps, to be left where it hinders.... Who have taught us that the consensus of theologians cannot err, but the theologians themselves? Mortal, fallible, ignorant men like ourselves! ... Their present domination is but a passing episode in the Church's history.... May not history repeat itself? [as in the transition from Judaism to Christianity]. Is God's arm shortened that He should not again out of the very stones raise ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... from premisses which are very commonly received. Nothing is more usual than to confound religious truth with the voice of ecclesiastical authority. Dr. Frohschammer, having fallen into this vulgar mistake, argues that because the authority is fallible the truth must be uncertain. Many Catholics attribute to theological opinions which have prevailed for centuries without reproach a sacredness nearly approaching that which belongs to articles of faith: ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... belief. But perhaps my fine discovery is a piece of art, and belongs to a character cowardly, intolerant of certain feelings, and apt to self-deception. I don't think so, however; and when I feel what a weak and fallible vessel I was thrust into this hurly-burly, and with what marvellous kindness the wind has been tempered to my frailties, I think I should be a strange kind of ass ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... again that ghastly conclusion stares me in the face. But now I remember that a shrewd debater sometimes gains a point by denying the premise which he is expected to concede. Can it be done in this case? Certainly! Human judgment, you know, is fallible. Not that mine can be at fault now; but it may have been so heretofore. All men have erred; but no man errs. There is the point! I was in error when I said women were angels. They are, they must be, mortal. There ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... attainable it might be well to constrain men to accept it. But the lords of this world are fallible men; and though as units they ought to be and perhaps are better than those others who have fewer advantages, they are much more likely as units to go astray in opinion than the bodies of men whom they would seek ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... consciousness and is nowhere asserted in the Bible, which is transcendently more merciful and comforting than many theological systems of belief, however powerfully sustained by dialectical reasoning and by the most excellent men. Human judgments or reasonings are fallible on moral questions which have two sides; and reasonings from texts which present different meanings when studied by the lights of learning and science are still more liable to be untrustworthy. It would seem to be the supremest necessity for theological ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... warrants us in concluding that for this reason no such disposition is possible. The only question would appear to be, whether the test which is here proposed as an unconditional criterion of truth should be allowed any the smallest degree of credit. Seeing, on the one hand, how very fallible the test in question is known to have proved itself in many cases of much less speculative difficulty—seeing, too, that even now "the philosophy of the condition proves that things there are which may, nay must, be true, of which nevertheless the mind is unable to construe ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... their own orders. "Give us good men, and they will make us good laws," is the maxim of a demagogue, and is (through the alteration which is commonly perceivable in men, when they have power to work their own wills) exceeding fallible. But "give us good orders, and they will make us good men," is the maxim of a legislator, and the ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... carefully avoided, and, with no great pretensions in the way of acquisitions, the schools of the Peak were made to be useful, and at least innocent. One thing the governor strictly enjoined; and that was, to teach these young creatures that they were fallible beings, carefully avoiding the modern fallacy of supposing that an infallible whole could be formed ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... factor, which is undoubtedly fundamental to the efficiency of any army. At the same time I promise to be as impartial in my judgment of the Boer as of the Briton as a fighter, or, at least, as impartial as can be expected from a fallible Boer. ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... concerned in breaking public treaties, and rejecting overtures for peace, would have relented, if with my feelings they had beheld this single victim of the millions that have been imolated, to the calculations of their fallible policy. ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... correspond with this; and there are well-known characteristics of human nature that explain how such revulsions of feeling come about. It has never been found difficult to get up a case against those whom the great and powerful have made up their minds to destroy. The best men are fallible and have their weak side. Large bodies of men must contain some unworthy members. A long history can hardly be without blots, mistakes, and crimes. No man's life, if narrowly scrutinized by an unfavorable and prejudiced criticism, but will afford ground for accusation. Then, too, facts ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... daughter tenderly, Mrs. Bright said: "You cannot temporise with forbidden fruit, Honey. Eve did, you know. You are but human, therefore fallible, however good you are trying to be. The time will come when the heart, torn with longing, becomes too weak to resist. Specious arguments are insidious and irresistible, and you will go down. Let him that thinketh he standeth take ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... has recently begun to veer away from the vision of an eighteenth century demigod in a wig,—an old-fashioned statue in dusky bronze, stern and forbidding. We are swinging around toward the idea of a loveable, fallible, very human personality with humor, a hot temper, and a genuine love ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... symptoms? Such experiments would be quite as interesting and important as any yet undertaken by the vivisectors. They might open a line of investigation which would finally make, for instance, the ascertainment of the guilt or innocence of an accused person a much exacter process than the very fallible methods of our criminal courts. But instead of proposing such an investigation, our vivisectors offer us all the pious protestations and all the huffy recriminations that any common unscientific mortal offers when he is accused ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... beset at the present day, on many sides, with speculations about the "Kenosis" of the Lord which in some cases anyhow have it for their manifest goal to justify the thought that He condescended to be fallible; that He "made Himself void" of such knowledge as should protect Him from mistaken statements about, for example, the history, quality, and authority of the Old Testament Scriptures. I have said once and again elsewhere[21] that such an application ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... turned the pages, the orthodox protest would assert itself, the orthodox arguments make themselves felt as though in mechanical involuntary protest. But their force and vitality was gone. Between the Paul of Anglican theology and the fiery fallible man of genius—so weak logically, so strong in poetry, in rhetoric, in moral passion, whose portrait has been drawn for us by a free and temperate criticism—the rector knew, in a sort of dull way, that his choice was made. The one picture carried ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the Bees always erected domes on every planet they colonized, Arthur, but precedent is a fallible tool. And it's even more firmly established that there's no possibility of our rationalizing the motivations of a culture as alien as the Hymenops'—we've been over that argument a hundred ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... that 160 gracious denial which he is most glad to receive. I am confessor to Angelo, and I know this to be true; therefore prepare yourself to death: do not satisfy your resolution with hopes that are fallible: to-morrow you must die; go to your knees, and make ...
— Measure for Measure - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... believes that the Holy Spirit has given him light; and, confident that it is the truth, he announces it to the people. But you would not say that that man is inspired. There may be much of what is fallible and human with what is truthful and divine. Suppose, however, that on some Sabbath morning, he could with authority stand up and say that what is now about to be declared is not his, but God's—that he is in ignorance ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... Behind their human ideas stands God himself—"the same yesterday, to-day and forever." So we may go through the creed; so we may study, as you have been doing, the beliefs of the church. Everywhere we see the evidences of the working, upon fallible human minds of a dim appreciation of something beyond full ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... at the mercy of my vile husband," Mrs. Vimpany said, "with your husband but too surely gained as an accomplice, my good resolutions failed me. Is it only in books that a true repentance never stumbles again? Or am I the one fallible mortal creature in the world? I am ashamed of myself. But, oh, Lady Harry, I was so frightened for you! Try to forgive me; I am so fond of you, and so glad to see you here in safety. Don't go back! For God's sake, don't ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... feeling at last that she had begun to consider him very exemplary, and that she might make, later, some perturbing discovery. He tried, therefore, to invent something that would prepare her to find him fallible. But he could think of nothing. It only seemed to him that Miss Garland secretly mistrusted him, and that he must leave her to render him the service, after he had gone, of making him the object of a little firm derogation. Mrs. Hudson talked with ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... abominable, seems to be conclusively indicated by the order following on the parable of the Talents,—"Those mine enemies, bring hither, and slay them before me." Nor does it seem reasonable, on the other hand, to set the limits of favouritism more narrowly. For even if, among fallible mortals, there may frequently be ground for the hesitation of just men to award the punishment of death to their enemies, the most beautiful story, to my present knowledge, of all antiquity, that of Cleobis and Bito, might suggest to them the fitness on some occasions, of distributing without any ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... by a reference to the general principles of jurisprudence, and the peculiar character of the masonic system. I ask, and should receive no deference to my own unsupported theories—as a man, I am, of course, fallible—and may often have decided erroneously. But I do claim for my arguments all the weight and influence of which they may be deemed worthy, after an attentive and unprejudiced examination. To those who may at first be ready—because ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... its subsequent laborious restoration. At a time when the Indians regarded the Veda as a verbal revelation, certain and divine in every syllable, the Chinese were painfully recovering and re-piecing their ancient chronicles and poems from imperfect manuscripts and fallible memories. The process obliged them to enquire at every step whether the texts which they examined were genuine and complete: to admit that they might be defective or paraphrases of a difficult original. Hence the Chinese have sound principles of criticism unknown to the Hindus and ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... and unfailing entertainment—but often with a flash of insight she told Anthony that some one of his friends was merely using him, and consequently had best be left alone. Anthony customarily demurred, insisting that the accused was a "good one," but he found that his judgment was more fallible than hers, memorably when, as it happened on several occasions, he was left with a succession of restaurant checks for which to ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... axiom, and it was equally obvious that the only possible way of doing this was that the king should not be allowed to do anything. Hence he was made the mouthpiece of his ministers, and it is not the king, but they, who, being fallible men, may occasionally err. The monarch, in losing power to do anything has gained power to influence everything. The ministers hold office through the approval of the House of Commons. Members of that house are elected by the people. Thus stands government ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... to the Danger of Religious Errors arising within the Church, in the primitive as well as in all later Ages.' He here makes excellent use of the fruitful principle of Butler's great work, by showing that, however desirable, a priori, an infallible guide would seem to fallible man, God in fact has every where denied it; and that, in denying it in relation to religion, he has acted only as he always ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... relentless in that of conviction—fair! Lex,—to abide by the law, in spirit only if our inmost conviction warrants that course, but in letter absolutely where there is the smallest hint of doubt; secure in the knowledge that, however fallible it be, it is the best that man has yet been able to do in imitation of the immutable decrees of God. Integritas,—to be true to the oaths we have sworn, faithful to the promises we have made, loyal to the office intrusted to us by the people, to whom and for whom we ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... ye leaders of nations! If you possess the truth, show it to us, and we will receive it with gratitude, for we seek it with ardor, and have a great interest in finding it. We are men, and liable to be deceived; but you are also men, and equally fallible. Aid us then in this labyrinth, where the human race has wandered for so many ages; help us to dissipate the illusion of so many prejudices and vicious habits. Amid the shock of so many opinions which dispute for our acceptance, assist us in discovering the ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... follow that there may bee some Mountaines in the Moone so high, that they are able to cast a shadow a 100 miles off. An opinion that sounds like a prodigie or a fiction; wherefore 'tis likely that either those appearances are caused by somewhat else besides mountaines, or else those are fallible observations, from whence may follow such ...
— The Discovery of a World in the Moone • John Wilkins
... fitness of things quite as much as the Squire's, or why, on the other hand, Mr. Macey's official respect should restrain him from subjecting the parson's performance to that criticism with which minds of extraordinary acuteness must necessarily contemplate the doings of their fallible fellow-men. ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... the same Christian trunk. With the Protestants, the Bible, which is the Word of God, is the sole spiritual authority; all the others, the Doctors, Fathers, tradition, Popes and Councils, are human and, accordingly, fallible; in fact, these have repeatedly and gravely erred.[5330] The Bible, however, is a text which each reader reads with his own eyes, more or less enlightened and sensitive, with eyes which, in Luther's time, possessed the light and sensibility of the sixteenth century, and which, at the present ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... rated high up in the millions, but he was fallible like the rest. His wealth, compared to Rimrock's was as a hundred dollars to one, but it was spread out a hundred times as far; and with his next dividend, which was due in December, Rimrock would have nearly a million in cash. To Stoddard, at the same time, ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... people what God has spoken on the subject of slavery or any other subject. (Laughter.) I would as soon have a Latin priest,—I would as soon have Archbishop Hughes,—I would as soon go to Rome as to Jerusalem or Athens,—I would as soon have the Pope at once in his fallible infallibility,—as ten or twenty, little or big, anti-slavery Doctor-of-Divinity priests, each claiming to give his infallible rendering, however differing from his peer. (Laughter.) I never yet produced this ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... England, France, Italy, Germany and America I have been familiarly acquainted with it, have studied its principles and its details under many varying forms, and never found it less interesting because it was not mysterious. Human, fallible beings are the inhabitants of monasteries either for males or females, with individual peculiarities and different sympathies—by no means machines, but free and intelligent agents, each with a character as individual as that of separate ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... good citizen ought to believe in it; and I will believe in it as long as the established jurisdiction will order me to believe in it, for it is not for a private person but for a judge to proclaim the innocence of a convicted person. Human justice is venerable even in the errors inherent in its fallible and limited nature. These errors are never irreparable; if the judges do not repair them on earth, God will repair them in Heaven. Besides I have great confidence in general Greatauk, who, though he certainly does not look it, seems to ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... his mind. These creatures were afraid of battle, of conflict, and yet they had thrust themselves into a fight which they must lose. Did they know that? Could they believe what the machine of the Outsiders told them, after it had been proven fallible? ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... degree, the law of a great nation, let us, in dealing with what he has left us, verify the saying of Bacon, "Death openeth the good fame and extinguished envy." Remembering that he was a man of like passions and equally fallible with ourselves, let us review his life in a spirit of generous candor, applaud what is good, and try to profit by it; and if we find aught of ill, let us, so far as justice and truth will permit, cover it with the vail of charity and bury ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... preachers. This confession attributes to them the keys of heaven and hell and the power to forgive sins. [Here extracts are read.] Therefore these men must be infallible, for God would never be so foolish as to entrust fallible men with the keys of heaven and hell. I care nothing for their keys, nor for any world these keys would open or ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Sacraments as having a mechanical efficacy irrespective of their conscious effect upon the mind of the receiver was an idolatrous superstition; that the Church was a human institution, which had varied in form in different ages, and might vary again; that it was always fallible; that it might have Bishops in England, and dispense with Bishops in Scotland and Germany; that a Bishop was merely an officer; that the apostolical succession was probably false as a fact—and, if a fact, implied nothing but historical continuity. ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... comes a time in our lives when we are simply astonished that people pay any attention to us at all. We are so conscious of our short-comings, and so keenly aware of our mistakes, that it seems to us that surely no one is quite so blundering and fallible as we are. How easy it is then to bear ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... that the proposed increase in the Maynooth endowment and the establishment of non-sectarian colleges were at variance with views he had written and uttered upon the relations of the Church and State. "I am sensible how fallible my judgment is," said Mr. Gladstone, "and how easily I might have erred; but still it has been my conviction that although I was not to fetter my judgment as a member of Parliament by a reference to abstract theories, yet, ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... divine law, find each other again and become united spirits once more. Worldly wisdom may force them into widely different ways of life; worldly wisdom may delude them, or may make them delude themselves, into contracting an earthly and a fallible union. It matters nothing. The time will certainly come when that union will manifest itself as earthly and fallible; and the two disunited spirits, finding each other again, will become united here for the world beyond this—united, I tell ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... runs through the ages. I hope that it will appear as the result of our studies, that one may continue to reverence the Scriptures as containing a unique and special revelation from God to men, and yet clearly see and frankly acknowledge the facts concerning their origin, and the human and fallible elements in them, which are not concealed, but lie upon their ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... our fellows; it forms no part of the Creator's methods with us or this particular mote in the beam of the Universe. Man has never received Justice, as he understands it, and never will; and his own poor, flagrant, fallible travesty of it, erected to save him from himself, and called Law, more nearly approximates to Justice than the treatment which has ever been apportioned to humanity. Before this eternal spectacle of illogical austerity, therefore, man, in ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... the stars, rolling the worlds, reflecting [1] all space and Life,—but not life in matter. Wisely governing, informing the universe, this Mind is Truth,— not laws of matter. Infinitely just, merciful, and wise, this Mind is Love,—but not fallible love. [5] ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... result. It is 'found' when it is attributed to us, so that the expression substantially means that the possessors of these graces will win the reputation of being really wise, not only in the fallible judgment of men, but before the pure eyes of the all-seeing God. Really wise policy coincides ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... finance relied upon the assiduity and dexterity of sundry paid agents, operating through the stealthy, clumsy, old-fashioned channels for the exercise of power. I relied only upon myself; I had to trust to no fallible, perhaps traitorous, understrappers; through the megaphone of the press I spoke directly to ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... is news. In view of news, what is the first thing necessary? Answer, belief. It is impossible to work news; therefore the gospel is not of works. In the law, the first requirement is to do;—but in the gospel the first requirement is to believe. The law-covenant is therefore temporary, fallible and uncertain; but the gospel-covenant is eternal, infallible, and in all things well ordered and sure. The first rests on the obedience of the creature, but the second on the promises of Jehovah. Paul therefore calls it a better covenant ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... Faith is founded upon fallible human judgment. A man believes thus and so, not necessarily because it is so, but because his head is built on a particular pattern or has had a peculiar class of phenomena filtered through it. The average human head, like an egg, or a crock of clabber, absorbs the flavor of its surroundings. ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... his transgressions and guilt in the blood of the slaughtered Lamb. These expressions, then, are poetic images, meant to convey a truth in the language of association and feeling, the traditionary language of imagination. The determination of their precise significance is wholly a matter of fallible human construction and inference, and not a matter of inspired statement or divine revelation. This is so, beyond a question, because, we repeat, they are figures of speech, having no direct explanation in the records where they occur. The Calvinistic ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... aside) talk and write as if they were all settled by the direct act of Heaven; not as if they had been, as we know they were, a matter of temporary accommodation and adjustment among disputing mortals as fallible as you ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... ignorance is a deathblow to confidence, not only in some special utterance, but in the teacher, for it strikes at his claim not to knowledge so much as to wisdom, to balance and insight of thought. I venture to say that recent drifts of speculation shew how rapidly the conception of a fallible Christ developes towards that of a wholly imperfect and untrustworthy Christ. And, looking again at the vast phenomenon of the Portrait in the Gospels, I hold that the line of thought which offers by very far the least difficulty, not to faith only but to reason, is that ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... growing older and wiser. Its institutions vary with its years, and mark its growing wisdom; and none more so than its modes of investigating truth, and ascertaining guilt or innocence. In its nonage, when man was yet a fallible being, and doubted the accuracy of his own intellect, appeals were made to heaven in dark and ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... since it has been brought forward by avowed disciples of an opposite philosophic school. Nevertheless, as there is from our present disinterested and purely scientific point of view a presumption that philosophers like other men are fallible, and since it is certain that philosophical introspection does not materially differ from other kinds, it seems permissible just to glance at some of these alleged illusions in relation to other and more vulgar forms. Further reference to them will ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... everything yet; and perhaps the critic is a shallower fool than he judges to be the patient delvers into the unknown beyond. The evidence on which our deductions have been based through the ages may suddenly be proven fallible after all. It may be that there is no such thing as matter. Chemists and physicists now admit that is possible. The spiritual may be far more real than the material, in spite of the cocksure conceit of the ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... order of things, and the special from the subject under treatment," is no easy matter. V. Hugo tells us that it is only for a man of genius to undertake such a task, but he himself is an example that even a man so gifted is fallible. In a letter written in the French capital on January 14, 1832, Mendelssohn says of the "so-called romantic school" that it has infected all the Parisians, and that on the stage they think of nothing but the plague, the gallows, the devil, childbeds, and the like. Nor were the romances ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... renowne, Who have sustaind one day in doubtful fight, (And if one day, why not Eternal dayes?) What Heavens Lord had powerfullest to send Against us from about his Throne, and judg'd Sufficient to subdue us to his will, But proves not so: then fallible, it seems, Of future we may deem him, though till now Omniscient thought. True is, less firmly arm'd, 430 Some disadvantage we endur'd and paine, Till now not known, but known as soon contemnd, Since now we find this our Empyreal forme Incapable of mortal injurie ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... Protestants, had better understand that the children of the Church, and especially the poor children, were serious through all the shows that seem to us preposterous; they had not renounced something for nothing; if they bowed that very fallible thing, Reason, to Dogma, they got faith for their reward and could gladly accept whatever symbol ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... after the cross-examination of the aged butler. "You have done all that could be done; but he is a doomed man, spite of his innocence, of which I feel, every moment that I look at him, the more and more convinced. God help us; we are poor, fallible creatures, with all our scientific machinery for getting ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... Man's Soul," must indeed be always controlled by the determination to keep the high, paramount, universal end always in view; by the vigilant endeavor to repress the exaggeration, to denounce the follies and the falsehoods which infect even the best attempts of narrow and fallible, though good and faithful, servants of their Lord. But, if once we have this principle fixed in our minds, it surely becomes a solace to remember that the soul of man is won by a thousand different approaches—that thus the instruments which often seem most unworthy may ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... his native land, remained a Frenchman; and Washington can be to no nation on earth what he is to the American. Their influence may and does extend far beyond their respective national horizons, yet they can never furnish a universal model for imitation. We regard them as extraordinary but fallible and imperfect men, whom it would be very unsafe to follow in every view and line of conduct. Very frequently the failings and vices of great men are in proportion to their virtues and powers, as the tallest bodies cast the longest shadows. Even the three leading apostles are models ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... accurate observation and a right application of principles, would be perceived to be, not a mere human opinion, but, in reality, an exposition of the will and intentions of a beneficent Creator, and would therefore be felt as carrying with it an authority to which, as the mere dictum of a fallible fellow-creature, it could never be considered ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... the leadings and teachings of fallible man were substituted for the Holy Spirit and Word. A thousand errors were brought in, the Word of God rejected. The faith once delivered to the saints was lost, sin and iniquity abounded and their love ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... and sustains the fallible conjectures of our unassisted reason. The Holy Scriptures speak of us as fallen creatures: in almost every page we shall find something that is calculated to abate the loftiness and silence the pretensions of man. "The imagination of man's ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... If religious enthusiasm had broken the spell of ecclesiastical tradition its own extravagance broke the spell of religious enthusiasm; and the new generation turned in disgust to try forms of political government and spiritual belief by the cooler and less fallible test of reason. ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... is a fallible man, like other fallible man. He has shown at least this, that he is ready to stand by his convictions, living and dying; and he holds this conviction fixed and immutable, that there is a crisis coming ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... corrigible corrosible corruptible credible decoctible deducible defeasible defensible descendible destructible digestible discernible distensible divisible docible edible effectible eligible eludible enforcible evincible expansible expressible extendible extensible fallible feasible fencible flexible forcible frangible fusible gullible horrible illegible immiscible impassible intelligible irascible legible miscible negligible partible passible (susceptible) perceptible permissible ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton
... seemingly perfect mechanism which rode so steadily through the air; of the quick response that ingenious arrangement of inanimate matter would make to an eternal and inexorable law if a few frail wires should part; of the equally quick, but less phlegmatic response of another fallible mechanism, capable of registering horror, capable—it is said—of passing its past life in review in the space of a few seconds, and then—capable of becoming equally ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... victory nor far-reaching fame can suppress;" their secret motives and purposes which "cause them to injure one another when they touch and are close together." After all, generals and statesmen are but fallible men, the most magnanimous of whom are watchful of their rivals, and love not those who despitefully use them. In the vindication of his claims that he has rendered some service to his country, General Smith has made several valuable contributions[1] to ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... his head. "It don't do to start regretting. This war is managed by the Almighty, and if it's his purpose that we should win He will show us how. I regard our fallible reasoning and desperate conclusions as part of His way of achieving His purpose. But about that draft. I'll answer you in the words of a young Quaker woman who against the rules had married a military man. The elders asked her if she was sorry, and she replied that she couldn't truly say ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... an expert detects counterfeit money. Lemon's soul was in Punch, and he had a keen memory for every line that had appeared in its columns. He edited a book of humorous anecdotes, but even he overlooked numerous doubles, and left not a few errors for the detection of the critics;" in fact, was fallible too, as in the nature of things he was bound to be. And Shirley Brooks, although with his wide knowledge of comic literature and "happy thoughts" he was successful too, had nevertheless humiliation ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... critics here; and we shall find our burden much lightened by being allowed to take reality in this relative and provisional way. Every science must make some assumptions. Erkenntnisstheoretiker are but fallible mortals. When they study the function of cognition, they do it by means of the same function in themselves. And knowing that the fountain cannot go higher than its source, we should promptly confess that our results in this field are affected by our own ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... all, and persecuting spirit, which were exhibited in the Lutheran and Calvinistic churches. Each began with a common principle—the necessity of an orthodox faith. But this orthodoxy meant nothing more than their own belief as opposed to that of their adversaries; a belief acknowledged to be fallible, yet maintained as certain; rejecting authority with one breath and appealing to it in the next, and claiming to rest on sure proofs of reason and Scripture, which their opponents were ready with just as much ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... powers given and taken away; that an individual or a class may be mistaken and may desert the common cause and the general interest, but the people, necessarily sincere, and true, and incorrupt, cannot go wrong; that there is a right of resistance to all governments that are fallible, because they are partial, but none against government of the people by the people, because it has no master and no judge, and decides in the last instance and alone; that insurrection is the law of all unpopular societies founded on a false principle and a broken contract, and submission ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Staupitz, he laid before the legate next day a short and formal statement of defence. He could not retract unless convicted of error, and to all that he had said he must hold as being Catholic truth. Nevertheless he was only human, and therefore fallible, and he was willing to submit to a legitimate decision of the Church. He offered, at the same time, publicly to justify his theses, and he was ready to hear the judgment of the learned doctors ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... indefinitely, nothing remained but to build an immortal reputation, and to save from the general wreck all that could be saved. To put a good face upon it, let it suffice, not to say all that we think to ourselves, but rely more on our nature than on our fallible reason, which might make us think we could approach death with indifference. The glory of dying with courage, the hope of being regretted, the desire to leave behind us a good reputation, the assurance of being enfranchised from the miseries of life and being no longer ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... Christianity was, then Jose was forced to admit that he did not. He, weak, frail, fallible, remit sins? Preposterous! What was the true remission of sins but their utter destruction? He change the wafer and wine into the flesh and blood of Jesus? Nay, he was no spiritual thaumaturgus! He could not do even the least of the works of the Master, despite his priestly character! Yet, it ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... facts themselves. They come to us through the minds of those who recorded them, neither machines nor angels, but fallible creatures, with human passions and prejudices. Tacitus and Thucydides were perhaps the ablest men who ever gave themselves to writing history; the ablest, and also the most incapable of conscious falsehood. Yet even now, after all these centuries, the truth of what they ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... deeper perplexities. Why should the Pope need assessors and advisers? Can Infallibility not walk alone, that it uses crutches? Can an infallible man not know truth from error till first he has collected the votes of fallible bishops? Why should Infallibility seek help, which it cannot in the nature ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... to bid an incontinent farewell to reason, or to despise the arts and sciences, or to deny reason's certitude? (85) But, in the meanwhile, we cannot wholly absolve them from blame, inasmuch as they invoke the aid of reason for her own defeat, and attempt infallibly to prove her fallible. (86) While they are trying to prove mathematically the authority and truth of theology, and to take away the authority of natural reason, they are in reality only bringing theology under reason's dominion, and proving that her authority ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part III] • Benedict de Spinoza
... to be led; superstitious, heedful of omens; unsympathetic and reserved where he did not love; intolerant of opposition to his will. But he was a good husband, a good father, a good churchman—no man so good was ever so bad a king; no man so fallible believed so honestly in his infallibility. For Charles was honest to his own convictions. His very duplicity was due sometimes to schooling in "kingcraft," but oftener to inability to see two sides of a question. Now he saw one, and now the other, but never both sides ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... he held out that false hope. It could never be! The one unpardonable sin, in the judgment of fallible human creatures like herself, was the sin that Sydney Westerfield had committed. Is there something wrong in human nature? or something wrong in human laws? All that is best and noblest in us feels the influence of love—and ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... clearly fall in the category of private revelation. Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition are infallible; private revelation is fallible. However, her visions are neither mere human meditations nor pious fiction. Her account of events in the lives of Jesus and Mary were revealed to her by God. Although God cannot err in anything He does, errors can be introduced into private revelation ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... and the Son, as opening the eyes of our understanding, bringing us out of darkness into His marvelous light, renewing the image of God in our soul, and sealing us unto the day of redemption. So that, in truth, what is now "in the sight of God, even the Father," not of fallible men "pure religion and undefiled," would then, have had no being: inasmuch as it wholly depends on those grand principles, "By grace ye are saved through faith"; and "Jesus Christ is of God made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... since the answer must ever be adapted not merely to the question considered in the abstract, but as it springs from its context in the questioner's mind; we are not wrong, on this score alone, in arguing from the character of the revelation to the character of the mind to which it was addressed. Fallible men may often speak and write above or beside the intelligence of their hearers and readers; but not so He who reads the heart He has made. Now these revelations were not addressed to the Church through Mother Juliana; but, as she says, were addressed to herself and were primarily for ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... specious individuality was given by a moustache with ends waxed up to the eyes and by a monocle with a tortoise shell rim. He was dressed (his valet had misjudged things—and valets like the rest of us are fallible) in what was yesterday a fairly ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... used to hear when the High Church party were more formidable than they are at present—much about "the right of private judgment." Why, the eloquent Protestant would say, should I pin my faith upon the Church? the Church is but a congregation of fallible men, no better able to judge than I am. I have a right to my own opinion. It sounds like a paradox to say that free discussion is interfered with by a cause which, above all others, would have been expected to further it; but this in fact has been the effect, because it tends ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... system of nations, as were before occasioned by the cupidity of territory or dominion? Has not the spirit of commerce, in many instances, administered new incentives to the appetite, both for the one and for the other? Let experience, the least fallible guide of human opinions, be appealed to for an ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... three dogmatists, all of whom greatly interested their own generation, and whose personality, especially in the case of the first and the last of the trio, still interests us,—Johnson, Coleridge, and Carlyle. Each was an oracle in his way, but unfortunately oracles are fallible to their descendants. The author of "Taxation no Tyranny" had wholesale opinions, and pretty harsh ones, about us Americans, and did not soften them in expression: "Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging." ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... he, striking his forehead; "and yet she is dearer to me than my own life;"—and, unable to suppress his feelings, he burst into an agony of tears. Suddenly starting up, he said, "Doctor, I have the highest respect for your skill; but you are fallible, like all men. It is my opinion, that a sea voyage and change of climate will restore my wife. If you will go with us, so much the better; if not, I will seek some other physician to ...
— Rich Enough - a tale of the times • Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee
... religion of the soul, the soul itself is free, and, while it suffers under torture, it enjoys the divinity, and feels felicity in his presence. But if all these things are so, it cannot be within the province either of individual magistrates or of governments, consisting of fallible men, to fetter the consciences of those who may live under them. And any attempt to this end is considered by the Quakers as a direct usurpation of the prerogative ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... "our senses are fallible. We know this world only through our senses, consequently it is possible that the world does not exist. Let us open the door to madness, then; let us accept as possible the most absurd chimeras, let ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... others; so no one can be blamed for, much less prevented from, placing both parties on their trial, with permission to end themselves, free from intimidation, before intimidation, before a sworn jury of equal condition with themselves—the condition of weak and fallible men. ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... of a conformity to Nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other, and those no small benefits, from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... becomes infallible, and the infallible remains fallible. Read and believe: these are MYSTERIES! In the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... family is constantly resident, and nothing trusted to others, the state of the individuals might be compared with advantage to that of free servants. But the best is impossible, and the worst but too probable; since the unchecked power of a fallible being may exercise itself without censure ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... weak, fallible mortal, subject, like every one else, to suffering and disease, overcome by his passion, who had even been guilty of an act which, had it been committed by the son of a Ratisbon family, would have seemed to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... did she doubt the reality of her love. She had conceived one of those deep, uplifting passions possible only to a young girl. But her cynical experience warned her that the reality of that passion's object was not proven by any test besides the fallible one of her own poetizing imagination. The reality of the ideal she had constructed might be a vanishable quantity even though the love of it was not. So to the interview that ensued she brought, not the partiality of a loving heart, nor even the impartiality of one sitting ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... some means and solid discrimination. At Brown's you could get cuts from the joint, a porter-house steak, apple tart, and a good boiled pudding as nowhere else in the world. You went in through the swinging doors an ordinary and fallible human being, and you came out feeling you had been fed on the very stuff which made the Empire. You were slightly stupefied, but you ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... and was gone, I questioned Maignan afresh and more closely, but with no result. He had not seen me place the packet in the portfolio at Calais, and that I had done so I could vouch only my own memory, which I knew to be fallible. In the meantime, though the mischance annoyed me, I attached no great importance to it; but anticipating that a word of explanation would satisfy the King, and a new cipher dispose of other difficulties, I dismissed the ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... church is not infallible it is liable to err, for there is no medium between infallibility and liability to error. If your church and her ministers are fallible in their doctrinal teachings, as they admit, they may be preaching falsehood to you, instead of truth. If so, you are in doubt whether you are listening to truth or falsehood. If you are in doubt you can have no faith, for faith ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... the nation in its Navy so strangely mingled with moments of neglect, caused by a particularly thick-headed idealism, is perfectly justified. It is also very proper: for it is good for a body of men conscious of a great responsibility to feel themselves recognised, if only in that fallible, imperfect and often irritating way in which recognition is sometimes offered ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... the midst of strangers,—and all the woes that, like hungry wolves, attack homeless, isolated women. I earnestly hope that the leprous hand of disaster and defeat may never be laid upon your future, but the most cautious human schemes are fallible—often futile—and if you should be unsuccessful in your programme, and find yourself unable to consummate your plans, I ask you now, by the memory of our friendship, by the sacred memory of the dead, to promise me that you will immediately write and acquaint ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... were veiled or half concealed under the charm of Grecian typography. Mitford set aside this too great reverence for the ancient literati. As he saw men, and not moving statues, in the heroes of Grecian history, so he was persuaded that the writers of that history were also men, fallible and prejudiced, like those who were living and writing about him. But Mitford overcame one set of prejudices by the force which prejudices of another kind had endowed him with. He saw how party spirit had ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... she would have sacrificed much rather than see it fail. She did not on that account blame Giovanni for his discouraging view when Orsino had consulted him. Giovanni was the passion of her life and was not fallible in his impulses, though his judgment might sometimes be at fault in technical matters for which he cared nothing. But her love for her son was as great and sincere in its own way, and her pride in him was such as to make his success a ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... utterances. He will then accord the place of primacy to all understood scientific references of the Bible over all discoveries in the natural realm. He will do this by interpreting the few and fragmentary discoveries of finite and fallible man in the light of the statements that come to us as the Word of an infallible God, concluding that if there is any apparent inharmony, it lies in the partial discoveries or premature conclusions of scientists, rather than in any error of statement in the Bible. In other words, he will interpret ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... we fallible mortals know! Even as he spoke, a tiny fragment of lobster shell, which had been working its way silently into the tip of his tongue, was settling down under the skin and getting ready to cause him the most acute mental distress which he had ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... and in what sense the Bible may be called the word of God, and how and under what conditions the unity of the Spirit is translucent through the letter, which, read as the letter merely, is the word of this and that pious but fallible and imperfect man. Alas for the superstition, where the words themselves are made to be the Spirit! O might I live but to utter all my meditations on ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... distiller, the gardener, the clear-starcher, and the perfumer, and how to make pickles, puff paste, butter, blacking, &c. together with my Lady Bountiful's sovereign remedy for an inward bruise, and other ever-failing nostrums,—Dr. Killemquick's wonder-working essence, and fallible elixir, which cures all manner of incurable maladies directly minute, Mrs. Notable's instructions how to make soft pomatum, that will soon make more hair grow upon thy head, "than Dobbin, thy thill-horse, hath upon his tail," and many others equally invaluable!!!—the ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... believes in an infallible teacher of revelation cannot consistently listen to any fallible teacher with a view of getting more correct information than his infallible teacher gives him. To do so would be absurd, for it would be to believe and at the same time not believe in ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... Father. I know that in him I shall find both a just and a merciful judge; and in him who was tempted even as we are, who was of our nature and exposed to our trials, shall I find an advocate and intercessor such as the soul needs. So that, if anxious as he who is human and fallible must ever be, I am nevertheless happy and contented. My voyage is ended; the ocean of life is crossed, and I stand by the shore with joyful expectations of the word that shall bid me land and enter into the haven ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... by slightly working them. Sand is commonly met with at the depth of three or four fathoms, and beneath this a stratum of napal or steatite, which is considered as a sign that the metal is near; but the least fallible mark is a red stone, called batu kawi, lying in detached pieces. It is mostly found in red and white clay, and often adhering to small stones, as well as in homogeneous lumps. The gold is separated from the clay by means of water ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... sometimes occur when a scion of a rich and influential family happens to transgress the law. It seems that the saloon-keeper, who was at first reasonably sure of what happened, suffered a strange lapse of memory when on the stand. Gooch thinks he was bought up, but Gooch is fallible where human motives are involved. His misanthropy ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... royal language was somewhat vague so far as enunciation of doctrine, a point on which he had once confessed himself fallible, was concerned, there was nothing vague in his recommendation of a National Synod. To this the opposition of Barneveld was determined not upon religious but upon constitutional grounds. The confederacy did not constitute a nation, and therefore there could ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... men are black' is a particular proposition. So also is 'Men are fallible;' for here it is not clear from the form whether 'all' or only ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... itself without supervision, without oiling; that there are no wheels which will revolve without our help, except the great wheel of the constellations or that great circle of the sun's which has its hand upon the dial plate, and which was made by a hand much less fallible than ours. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... cases, this particular cure for the community's ills has proved to be worse than the sickness, leading to total community dependence on a fallible and perhaps capricious enterprise, pollution of air and water, noise and flood-plain clutter, and frequently the destruction of the local riverside where industries tend to locate unless directed elsewhere. Little of this is necessary ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... men, without distinction of race, or colour, or nation, or rank. What says the Bible? 'Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.' Who is to decide then from what depths of moral degradation the power of God's grace will fail to lift up a human being? Certainly, we mortals, fallible, helpless, sinful, as we must feel ourselves, are not capable of judging. All we have to do is to receive the plain command, and obey it. Oh, there is scope, believe me, for the exertions, not of one missionary only, but of hundreds and ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... with me a moment and look at it. Here am I, a little animal called a man—a bit of vitalized matter, one hundred and sixty-five pounds of meat and blood, nerve, sinew, bones, and brain,—all of it soft and tender, susceptible to hurt, fallible, and frail. I strike a light back-handed blow on the nose of an obstreperous horse, and a bone in my hand is broken. I put my head under the water for five minutes, and I am drowned. I fall twenty feet through the air, and I am smashed. I am a creature of temperature. ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... least be honest with myself—and this was my verdict. You will, perhaps, fancy that when I arrived at this decision I at once mended my ways and resigned my seat of observation to Maitland's entirely professional care. This, doubtless, I should have done, if we fallible human beings governed our conduct by our knowledge of what is right and proper. Inasmuch, however, as desires and emotions are the determining factors of human conduct, I did nothing of the sort. I simply watched there day after day, with ever-increasing ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... the irresistible logic of Dr. Wayland. But the assertion of no man can be accepted as sound argument. We want to know the very meaning of the words of the great Teacher, and to be guided by that, rather than by the fallible authority of an earthly oracle. What, then, is the meaning, the real meaning, of his ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... to it, in their hearts, though no political man of influence, now existing, has the moral calibre necessary to take the lead in putting it down. Dunning deferred to principles, and not to men. He well knew that an infallible whole was not to be composed of fallible parts; and while he thought majorities ought to determine many things, that there are rights and principles that are superior to even such unanimity as man can manifest, and much more to their ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... from them. But the breeze was blowing in their faces; it lifted her hat for a second, and she drew out a pin and stuck it in again,—a little action which seemed, for some reason, to make her rather more fallible. Ah, if only her hat would blow off, and leave her altogether disheveled, accepting ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... apparent knowledge on its merits, and retains whatever still appears to be knowledge when this consideration is completed. That some risk of error remains must be admitted, since human beings are fallible. Philosophy may claim justly that it diminishes the risk of error, and that in some cases it renders the risk so small as to be practically negligible. To do more than this is not possible in a world where mistakes must occur; and more than this no ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
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