"Fallible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... they expect too much of the world," said Ralph. "We should take the world on easier terms. Fallible humanity must have its weaknesses and poor human life its disasters, and where these are mighty and inevitable, what folly is greater than to fly from them or to truckle to them, to make terms with them? Our duty is simply to endure them, to endure ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... itself; and thus it is certain that entrance into religion is a greater good, and to doubt about this is to disparage Christ Who gave this counsel. Hence Augustine says (De Verb. Dom., Serm. c, 2): "The East," that is Christ, "calleth thee, and thou turnest to the West," namely mortal and fallible man. Secondly, the entrance into religion may be considered in relation to the strength of the person who intends to enter. And here again there is no room for doubt about the entrance to religion, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... proper occasion. In the discharge of this trust I will only say that I have, with good intentions, contributed toward the organization and administration of the government the best exertions of which a very fallible judgment was capable. Not unconscious, in the outset, of the inferiority of my qualifications, experience in my own eyes, perhaps still more in the eyes of others, has strengthened the motives to diffidence of myself, and every ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... us mistaken, you see, my dear. Mortifying! to find one's judgment so fallible. I tell the marquis, he might absolutely have been privately married to Gabriella without my finding him out—it is so easy now, the easiest thing in the world, to impose upon me. Well, I must bid you adieu for the present, my dear Miss Turnbull—you may imagine I ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... 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 |
