Quotes about fallibility
Oli Anderson - Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness
The first step to empathy and compassion is realising the similarities between yourself and those that are suffering the first step to forgiveness is realising that we're all human and we all share the same capacity for fallibility and foible the first step to growth is to recognise the value of things that are outside your current mental frameworks so that you can grow into them.
Meister Eckhart -
Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.
Neil Gaiman - Witch
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
Mark Twain - Pudd'nhead Wilson
Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.
Steven Erikson -
Children understood at a very young age that doing nothing was an expression of power. Doing nothing was a choice swollen with omnipotence. It was, in fact, godly.And this, she now realized, was the reason why the gods did nothing. Proof of their omniscience. After all, to act was to announce awful limitations, for it revealed that chance acted first, the accidents were just that--events beyond the will of the gods--and all they could do in answer was to attempt to remedy the consequences, to al
Bertrand Russell -
When two men of science disagree, they do not invoke the secular arm; they wait for further evidence to decide the issue, because, as men of science, they know that neither is infallible. But when two theologians differ, since there is no criteria to which either can appeal, there is nothing for it but mutual hatred and an open or covert appeal to force.
Winston S. Churchill -
You make all kinds of mistakes, but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her.
Alexander Pope - An Essay on Man
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,The proper study of mankind is Man.Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,A being darkly wise and rudely great:With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;In doubt his mind or body to prefer;Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;Alike in ignorance, his reason such,Whether he thinks too little or too much;Chaos of thought
Marty Rubin -
Let nothing human be considered sacred. Let nothing human be considered divine.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.
Michael Lewis - The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World
The trait [Morey] looked for was awareness that they were seeking answers to questions with no certain answers--that they were inherently fallible. "I always ask them, 'Who did you miss?'" he said. Which future superstar had they written off, or which future bust had they fallen in love with? "If they don't give me a good one, I'm like, 'Fuck 'em.
Paul C. Nagel - a Private Life
Foolish defiance was his lifelong response to being ill.
Will Durant -
We must steel ourselves against utopias and be content with a slightly better state.
Ian McDonald - The Dervish House
We were young and thought we were invincible and we threw ourselves into the gears of history and it ground us up.
Bryant McGill - Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
When you accept fallibility within yourself you become more perfect.
George Eliot - Adam Bede
A man carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.
Immanuel Kant - Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals: & the Metaphysical Elements of Ethics
Even as to himself, a man cannot pretend to know what he is in himself from the knowledge he has by internal sensation. For as he does not as it were create himself, and does not come by the conception of himself a priori but empirically, it naturally follows that he can obtain his knowledge even of himself only by the inner sense, and consequently only through the appearances of his nature and the way in which his consciousness is affected. At the same time, beyond these characteristics of his
Jonathan Haidt - The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.
Robert L. Short - The Gospel According to Peanuts
as Schulz himself has pointed out, Snoopy is capable of being 'one of the meanest' members of the entire Peanuts cast ... he is lazy, he is a 'chow-hound' without parallel, he is bitingly sarcastic, he is frequently a coward, and he often becomes quite weary of being what he is basically -- a dog. He is, in other words, a fairly drawn caricature for what is probably the typical Christian.
Michael Lewis - The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World
Crucial decisions are made, today as thousands of years ago, in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions of authority...[it is] quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.
Bryant McGill - Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
When you demand perfection within yourself, you become more fallible.
Richard M. Weaver - Ideas Have Consequences
The scientists have given [modern man] the impression that there is nothing he cannot know, and false propagandists have told him that there is nothing he cannot have.
Tennessee Williams -
Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in
James Clavell - Tai-Pan
Fallibility in a leader is very trying. Isn’t it? They spill so much of other people’s blood.
Paul Sabatier -
Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the harvest. To be this ploughman, to see my labours result in the furtherance of scientific progress, was the height of my ambition, and now the Swedish Academy of Sciences has come, at this harvest, to add the most brilliant of crowns.
Alexis de Tocqueville - Democracy in America
I had rather mistrust my own capacity than God's justice.
Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls
Embracing human frailty, fallibility, and heartbreaking aloneness is crucial for any person seeking to attain self-actualization and self-realization.
Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams
Our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says.
Marty Rubin -
No one really remembers anything five minutes after it happens.
Shelby Foote - Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville
A visitor asked Lincoln what good news he could take home from an audience with the august executive. The president spun a story about a machine that baffled a chess champion by beating him thrice. The stunned champ cried while inspecting the machine, "There's a man in there!"Lincoln's good news, he confided from the heights of leadership, was that there was in fact a man in there.
Richard C. Carrier - Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith
If God wants something from me, he would tell me. He wouldn't leave someone else to do this, as if an infinite being were short on time. And he would certainly not leave fallible, sinful humans to deliver an endless plethora of confused and contradictory messages. God would deliver the message himself, directly, to each and every one of us, and with such clarity as the most brilliant being in the universe could accomplish. We would all hear him out and shout "Eureka!" So obvious and well-demonst
Harold Bloom - The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.