"Fallibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from a powerful invader and numerous traitors, it was more intent on raising resources and checking treason than would become a parliament sitting in peace and safety, let us, while confessing its fallibility, attend to its difficulties, and do honour to its ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... waning power refutes their senseless boast; although they boldly assert the dogma of popish infallibility, yet the loss of the temporal power once wielded by Rome, and the death of each succeeding pontiff, attest both the Pope's fallibility and the Pope's mortality. Indeed, the successor of St. Peter is but human—the sacred college at Rome is but mortal; and faith and dogma cannot forever resist the influence of light and knowledge. The power of Catholicism is surely declining throughout Europe; and if it has become aggressive in ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... any kind of conduct, however widely it diverged from his own, and provided that it concerned themselves only. This widening of his tolerance would be the natural result of a rational and realised consciousness of his own general fallibility. ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... that the Immensity that had conceived and wrought the unbelievable universe should deign to consider man, so weak that a stone, a little slug of lead, could kill him, an enemy worth bothering about. Man with his vanity, his broad fallibility, ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... was a case of the fallibility of appearances. Fyles was remarkable both for great intelligence and extreme shrewdness. Not only that, he was a man of cat-like activity. His bulk was the result of a superabundance of muscle, and not of superfluous tissue. His bucolic spread of features was useful to him in that it detracted ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... acts of one another in governmental matters, or some more infallible criterion by which the truth of speculative opinions, before they have undergone the test of experience, are to be forejudged, than has yet fallen to the lot of fallibility, I believe it will be difficult, if not impracticable, to manage the reins of government, or to keep the parts of it together; for if, instead of laying our shoulders to the machine after measures are decided on, one pulls this way and another that, before the utility ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... however, was not to have much immediate practical result; especially as the Confession was now ratified by the Parliament. And this was done without change or qualification, though the preface prefixed to it by the Churchmen admits its fallibility and invites amendment—a view in which Knox had long since been ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... in the right at first starting, and then it is that a calm, judicious friend, capable of seeing both sides, is a gift from Heaven. For the longer the dissension endures, the wider and deeper it grows by the fallibility and irascibility of human nature: these are not confined to either side, and finally the invariable end is reached—both in ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... paramount claims of the poor and the public?—From respect to any such right, ought so great a libel on our political economy to be suffered to exist, as a receptacle for the poor in the middle of an uncultivated and unappropriated waste? To dwell further on so mortifying a proof of the fallibility of human wisdom may, however, pique the pride of those who enjoy the power to organize a better ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... dry as dust title of a scientific communication from a distinguished toxicologist there was some sinister significance. It was the letter of a great chemist, who demonstrated therein the fallibility of all tests in relation to a certain poison. It was one of those papers which, while they aid the cause of science, may also further the dark processes of the poisoner, by showing him the forces he has to encounter, and the weapons with which he may defend himself ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... Almena lay too far over on the Jersey flats for the flag to be noticed, or because harbor police share the fallibility of their shore brethren in being elsewhere when wanted, no shiny black steamer with blue-coated guard appeared to investigate the trouble, and it was well on toward three o'clock before a tug left the beaten track to the eastward and steamed over to the ship. The ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... training. In this, as in religion, he subordinated them to his ideals. He would fain tune their very souls to his own key; and he exacted a precision that was difficult of attainment by men and women of average fallibility and carelessness. The men singers were divided into five choruses of five persons each; the sisters were classified, according to the pitch of their voices, into three divisions, each of which sang or kept silent, according to the duty assigned to it in the notebook. At the love-feasts ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... any aspect but the mathematical, the author has put himself outside the pale of orthodox science, so he is under no compulsion to ignore a field so rich merely because it appears to be tainted by a certain amount of fallibility and is even under suspicion of fraud. Diseased oysters, though not edible, produce pearls, and a pearl of great price is the object of this quest. Let us glance, therefore, at the findings of hypnotism ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... on the fallibility of critics were suggested to us by finding some old bound volumes of the Edinburgh Review on a bookstall, five cents each. In the issue for November, 1814, we read with relish what the Review had to say about Wordsworth's "Excursion." These are ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... matter, her chin on her palm. Considering the chronic fallibility of Mrs. Snawdor's judgment, she would have been more comfortable if she ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... both, and the judgment of the whole is vitiated. For example, the understanding examines a miraculous history; it judges truly of what I may call the human part of the case; that is to say, of the rarity of miracles,—of the fallibility of human testimony,—of the proneness of most minds to exaggeration,—and of the critical arguments affecting the genuineness or the date of the narrative itself. But it forgets the divine part, namely, the power and ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... afterwards, shaped and colored by passing through the minds and pens of the sometimes dissentient and always imperfect disciples. He once declared to them, "I have many things to say unto you, but ye are not able to bear them." Admitting his infallibility, as we may, yet asserting their fallibility, as we must, and accompanied, too, as his words now are by many very obscuring circumstances, it is extremely difficult to lay the hand on discriminated texts and say, "[non ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... questions proposed on the bill before me; and though I have been necessarily obliged to examine the subject with much haste, I have no other doubts as to the soundness of the construction above given than such as belong to discussions of this nature and to a proper sense of the fallibility of human judgment. It is, however, my duty to remind you that very different opinions were expressed in the course of the debates on the proposed law by some of the members who took part therein. It would seem from these debates that the bill, in some instances at least, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... might, on his return, enter upon some more embarrassing line of inquiry; in which case the agent decided to take refuge in silence. But the reporter, when he came back late in the evening disheartened and disgusted with the fallibility of long-distance tips, declared himself ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... step for all is to learn to the dregs our own ignoble fallibility. When we have fallen through storey after storey of our vanity and aspiration, and sit rueful among the ruins, then it is that we begin to measure the stature of our friends: how they stand between us and our own contempt, believing in our best; how, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reexamined for signs of recurrence, and perhaps from time to time reinforce his immunity by a course of rubs or a few mercurial injections. Such a statement is not pessimism, but merely the same deliberate recognition of the fallibility of human judgment and the uncertainty of life which we show when we sleep out-of-doors after we have been suspected of having tuberculosis, or when we take ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... like all human institutions, the church of England, its Liturgy, and its authorised translation of Scripture, were imperfect; but unless we admit fallibility as a justifiable motive for rejecting whatever is of human origin, and withholding our obedience to all governments, because there is something defective in them, this objection must fall to the ground. The very nature ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... vastest quantity, which can enter into human imagination, must in this manner be reduced to nothing. Let our first belief be never so strong, it must infallibly perish by passing through so many new examinations, of which each diminishes somewhat of its force and vigour. When I reflect on the natural fallibility of my judgment, I have less confidence in my opinions, than when I only consider the objects concerning which I reason; and when I proceed still farther, to turn the scrutiny against every successive estimation I make of my faculties, all the rules of logic ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... weighing on his mind ever since he had heard of the state of things between Roger and Cynthia. He did not like the having to go and tell of a love affair so soon after he had declared his belief that no such thing existed; it was a confession of fallibility which is distasteful to most men. If the squire had not been of so unsuspicious and simple a nature, he might have drawn his own conclusions from the apparent concealment of facts, and felt doubtful of Mr. ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... writer who was too idle to examine the works he was describing; pouncing on his minute errors, and forgetting the totality of his generous labors. Much of this spirit infests literature; and merges the kindly exposition of error into the bitterness of personal attack. The fallibility of human nature should teach us charity, and our own faults lead us to "more gently scan our brother man,"—a thing too often unthought of by those who are nothing if not critical, and as frequently nothing when they are. The painter was descended from a Westmoreland ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... been one of those responsible, for the plan of campaign that ended in Jena and Auerstadt, but he did not see the least proof of the fallibility of his theory in the disasters of that war. On the contrary, the deviations made from his theory were, in his opinion, the sole cause of the whole disaster, and with characteristically gleeful sarcasm he would remark, "There, I said the whole affair would go to the devil!" Pfuel was ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... executive had at least the advantage that a well-disposed governor-general would find no red-tape hindrances to his plans for the public benefit. But Despujol professed to believe that the best of men make mistakes and that a wise government would establish safeguards against this human fallibility. ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... destiny; and I do not see how the existence of such an ultimate popular political freedom and responsibility can be denied by any one who has rejected the theory of a divinely appointed political order. The fallibility of human nature being what it is, the practical application of this theory will have its grave dangers; but these dangers are only evaded and postponed by a failure to place ultimate political responsibility where it belongs. While a country in the position of Germany ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... general was the most painstaking and accurate of observers, as he is one of the most interesting of our systematic writers, says that the two songs are "almost exactly" alike. There could be no better example of the fallibility which attaches, and in the nature of the case must attach, to all writing upon such subjects. The two songs have about as much in common as those of the hermit thrush and the brown thrasher, or those of the song sparrow and the chipper. ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... two-and-twenty, Southampton justified Lady Bridget's censure by a public proof of his fallibility. The fair Mistress Vernon (first cousin of the Earl of Essex), a passionate beauty of the Court, cast her spell on him. Her virtue was none too stable, and in September the scandal spread that Southampton was courting her ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... have been developed during the period of fifty years, that were brought before the Institute of France in 1806, and not one of them survives to-day." Truly the history of scientific investigation reveals the same fallibility of human nature that is known in the many errors found in the line of theological investigation. Truth, in science and religion, stands true to ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... and vivid were the impressions upon my senses that, were I to live to the age of pyramids, I could recall every slight sequence with accuracy. I say this because you are a physician and as such, no doubt,—and it is no different in the case of us lawyers,—have learned the absurd fallibility of ordinary human testimony, not excluding that which proceeds from the highest and most honorable type of ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... clutch, to save his headgear from falling into the mire, it being a drizzling, mizzling, dirty November day, our worthy preceptor pulled away what we had always imagined to be a magnificent head of hair, but what turned out now, alas for human fallibility, only ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... confidence in your own steadiness, which so much disdained my fears that the change of your residence might produce a change in your sentiments, is still as unshaken as when we parted in Suffolk? Or whether experience, that foe to unpractised refinement, has already taught you the fallibility of theory?" ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... presence, and particularly diminutive that book appeared as its light cloth cover was outlined against the Bibliotaph's ample black waistcoat. From time to time he would vent 'a series of small private laughs,' especially if he was on the point of announcing some fresh illustration of the fallibility of inexperienced writers. Finally the uncomfortable author said, 'Don't sit there and pick out the mistakes.' To which the Bibliotaph triumphantly replied, 'What other motive is there for reading it ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... wisdom of the framers of the Federal Constitution. Under all circumstances the result of their labors was as near an approximation to perfection as was compatible with the fallibility of man. Such being the estimation in which the Constitution is and has ever been held by our countrymen, it is not surprising that any proposition for its alteration or amendment should be received with reluctance and distrust. While this sentiment deserves ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... revamping and half-soling of Science and Health, whose official name is the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, and who is now the Official Pastor and Infallible and Unerring Guide of every Christian Science church in the two hemispheres, hear Simple Simon that met the pieman brag of the Infallible's fallibility: ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... doubtless feel that he did ignore you and your authority, though I own it wasn't my intention that you should assume command over him. You are both young and you perhaps judge more sharply than I, but I've learned to know the fallibility of human judgment. I've suffered too much from it myself, and the fact stares me in the face that Harris knew just what ought to be done, and went and did it. He rescued that poor creature at the risk of his life, and he—deserves the ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... "The Verbalist." To this, one of the most bewildering books on the manner of writing English ever written, Herbert Spencer's "Philosophy of Style" was added. Whether it is Herbert Spencer's lack of a sense of humour or the fallibility of his theories that has put him somewhat out of date is not easy to say. In no book of his is a sense of humour so lacking as in the "Philosophy of Style." Its principles have a perennial value and nearly every author on style, since Spencer wrote, has repeated them with variations; but Spencer's ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... for careful editing. Though the present edition can claim to come nearer the original in many thousands of passages, it is chiefly in the mint and cummin of capitals and italics that we have been able to improve on Haslewood: in all the weightier matters of editing he shows only the minimum of fallibility. We have however divided his two tomes, for greater convenience, into three volumes of as nearly as possible equal size. This arrangement has enabled us to give the title pages of both editions of the two tomes, those of the first edition in facsimile, those ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... progenitor of this series of medieval copies. One must bear in mind how assiduously medieval scribes copied everything that appeared to be of any importance to them, and how each new copy by virtue of human fallibility or self-sufficiency must have suffered in the making, and it is only by very careful comparison of the various manuscripts that the original text may ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... of most of the common schemes for reconciling science and theology; of the untrustworthy character of Jewish chronology and Jewish figures; of the grave doubts that hang over the authorship and the date of some of the books; of the necessity of making full allowance, when reading them, for human fallibility and inaccuracy. At the same time, his admiration for the German critics was by no means unqualified. While fully admitting their extraordinary learning, industry, and ingenuity, he complained that their too common infirmity was 'a passion for making ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... grounds, as on others, the unreal Bible must be expected to pass away. The Church at large never properly authenticated it. The Bible nowhere calls for such a view of itself. Scripture reveals to a critical study manifest tokens of its human fallibility, its thoroughly literary character. We can trace the growth of this theory, and account for it naturally. As a theory it cannot be stated reasonably. It is a theory which is shown to be a superstition in ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... Tirnanoge. Touched earth he had, in spite of warning, and become on the minute a wrinkled, old, old man. So with Kenny. He had touched earth, he reflected tragically. Never again would his fairyland be quite the same. Man talked of his flaws. His fallibility they said was monumental. There was Adam who had morbidly incited him to a notebook, a damnable, pervasive notebook which he tried in vain to ignore. There was Whitaker, to whom, at a loose end, he wrote a great many letters of rebuke, ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... prognostication," (p. 65,) is his abhorrence. He would eliminate the Messianic passages altogether. (pp. 65-6.) That Prophecy was miraculous, was a dream of the Fathers, (p. 66.) Even the notion that Prophecy is "a natural gift, consistent with fallibility," (p. 70,) Dr. Williams rejects as an unwarrantable addition to the "moral and metaphysical basis of Prophecy." (p. 70.) Bunsen was for admitting that addition. "One would wish," (says the Vicar ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... that the easiness with which she hears of her faults, is only another effect of the levity with which she commits them. But if the young are never tired of erring in conduct, neither are the older in erring in judgment; the fallibility of mine I have indeed ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... studied with such effect that upon her arrival at Rome she was thought worthy of being raised to the Pontificate. This Epistle is addressed to her Lover (whom she had elevated to the dignity of Cardinal), soon after the fatal accouchement, by which her Fallibility ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... according to the Greek conviction, Orestes was right and Clytemnestra entirely wrong. But for all that, the infallible King, the infallible male Self, is dead in Orestes, killed by the furies of Clytemnestra. He gains his peace of mind after the revulsion from his own physical fallibility, but he will never be an unquestioned lord, as Agamemnon was. Orestes is left at peace, neutralized. He is ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... affections to my Reason such as it is, so in consideration of the fallibility and infinite deficiencies of this my Reason, I would subject it to God, that He may guide and ...
— Some Remains (hitherto unpublished) of Joseph Butler, LL.D. • Joseph Butler
... Whitgift and Bancroft during their rule, and Bonner and Gardiner in the reign of Mary, I will be thankful to him in my heart and for him in my prayers. One difference I see, namely, that the former professing the New Testament to be their rule and guide, and making the fallibility of all churches and individuals an article of faith, were more inconsistent, and therefore less excusable, than the Popish persecutors. 30 ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... not do it, father, without publishing their fallibility. The credit of certain great patricians was concerned, and I fear there is a morality in these Councils which separates the deed of the man from those of the senators, putting policy ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... importance and universality. As preachers they are admirable. But the foundation they provide for morality is slippery. It amounts to saying, "We ought to do right because we know we ought!" When we ask how we can be sure, in view of the general fallibility of human conviction, that we are not mistaken in our assurance, and following a false light, they can but reiterate in altered phraseology that we know because ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... boy, with the air of confidence befitting a knight who had already won his spurs, yet with the modesty of a youth who was aware of his fallibility. ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... upon society, are there not plenty of hulks and prisons, God wot; treadmills, galleys, and houses of correction? Above all, as in the case of Sebastian Peytel and his family, there have been two deaths already; was a third death absolutely necessary? and, taking the fallibility of judges and lawyers into his heart, and remembering the thousand instances of unmerited punishment that have been suffered, upon similar and stronger evidence before, can any man declare, positively and upon ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... is no evidence that the moon directly affects the earth or its inhabitants in any other way than by her attraction, which is so minute as to be entirely insensible except in the ways we have described. A striking illustration of the fallibility of the human judgment when not disciplined by scientific training is afforded by the opinions which have at various times obtained currency respecting a supposed influence of the moon on the weather. Neither in the reason of the case ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... the King would not allow. To do so would be an admission of royal fallibility which neither he nor his advisers were prepared to make. To enforce conformity on his subjects, Louis XIV. had already driven some half-a-million of the best of them into exile, besides the thousands who had perished on gibbets, ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles |
