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More "Fallible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... first undertook the arduous trust were explained on the proper occasion. In the discharge of this trust, I will only say that I have, with good intentions, contributed towards 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 ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... 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 ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... 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
... 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
... the name ought infinitely to surpass; our coarse, fallible, self-indulgent sex, in the power ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... precluded the enjoyment of this invaluable privilege, by the laws relative to subscription, whereby your petitioners are required to acknowledge certain articles and confessions of faith and doctrine, drawn up by fallible men, to be all and every one of them agreeable to the said scriptures. Your petitioners therefore pray that they may be relieved from such an imposition upon their judgment, and be restored to their undoubted right as Protestants, of interpreting scripture for themselves, without being bound by ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... have sustained one day in doubtful fight, (And if one day, why not eternal days?) What Heaven's Lord had powerfullest to send Against us from about his throne, and judged Sufficient to subdue us to his will, But proves not so: Then fallible, it seems, Of future we may deem him, though till now Omniscient thought. True is, less firmly armed, Some disadvantage we endured and pain, Till now not known, but, known, as soon contemned; Since now we find this our empyreal form Incapable of mortal injury, Imperishable, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... no means pleased, either with the matter or the manner of this address. He therefore began to soothe the captain's choler, by representing that he did not pretend to omniscience, which was the attribute of God alone; that human art was fallible and imperfect; and all that it could perform was to discover certain partial circumstances of any particular object to which its inquiries were directed. That being questioned by the other man concerning the cause of his master's ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... 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 ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... 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 ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... another audience, was 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 be deceived. The judge smote with his eye a person who sought to hide himself in the crowd; ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... or nation, or rank. What says the Bible? 'Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.' Who is to decide then from what depths of moral degradation the power of God's grace will fail to lift up a human being? Certainly, we mortals, fallible, helpless, sinful, as we must feel ourselves, are not capable of judging. All we have to do is to receive the plain command, and obey it. Oh, there is scope, believe me, for the exertions, not of one missionary only, but of hundreds and thousands of the soldiers of the ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... to town next week to her grandmother's and I want you girls to make friends with her. It seems to me that she is very nice—but that is only a fallible man's judgment, and Heaven forbid that I should attempt to forestall Miss Cudberry's decision on such a question. Anyhow she has plenty of energy and, among other things, works very hard ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... are guiltless, why should you care whether I, or any other fallible mortal, should consider you guilty?" ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... fellow-man, or to any body of men called a church, what perplexity must he experience ere he can make up his mind which to choose! Instead of relying upon the ONE standard which God has given him in his Word; should he build his hope upon a human system he could be certain only that man is fallible and subject to err. How striking an instance have we, in our day, of the result of education, when the mind does not implicitly follow the guidance of the revealed Word of God. Two brothers, named Newman, educated at the same school, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... our ears: but when we hear him it is not in our power to contradict him. Nothing is more unlike man than that invisible master that instructs and judges him with so much severity, uprightness, and perfection. Thus our limited, uncertain, defective, fallible reason, is but a feeble and momentaneous inspiration of a primitive, supreme, and immutable reason, which communicates itself with measure, to ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... following on the parable of the Talents,—"Those mine enemies, bring hither, and slay them before me." Nor does it seem reasonable, on the other hand, to set the limits of favouritism more narrowly. For even if, among fallible mortals, there may frequently be ground for the hesitation of just men to award the punishment of death to their enemies, the most beautiful story, to my present knowledge, of all antiquity, that of Cleobis and Bito, might suggest to them the ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... cross-examination of the aged butler. "You have done all that could be done; but he is a doomed man, spite of his innocence, of which I feel, every moment that I look at him, the more and more convinced. God help us; we are poor, fallible creatures, with all our scientific ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... fault 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
... ordinances, word, sacraments, censures, &c., shall therein be dispensed, 2 Tim. iii. 16, 17. (See chap. IV.) Now this Scripture is divinely breathed, or inspired of God—holy men writing not according to the fallible will of man, but the infallible acting of the Holy Ghost, 2 Tim. iii. 16, with ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... as he held out that false hope. It could never be! The one unpardonable sin, in the judgment of fallible human creatures like herself, was the sin that Sydney Westerfield had committed. Is there something wrong in human nature? or something wrong in human laws? All that is best and noblest in us feels the influence ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... is a fallible man, like other fallible man. He has shown at least this, that he is ready to stand by his convictions, living and dying; and he holds this conviction fixed and immutable, that there is a crisis coming on us of overtopping and overwhelming magnitude, and demanding the American people should ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... merely to the question considered in the abstract, but as it springs from its context in the questioner's mind; we are not wrong, on this score alone, in arguing from the character of the revelation to the character of the mind to which it was addressed. Fallible men may often speak and write above or beside the intelligence of their hearers and readers; but not so He who reads the heart He has made. Now these revelations were not addressed to the Church through Mother Juliana; but, as she says, were addressed ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... 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 ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... of his memory be it 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 deliverer ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... love with her at all. But if you are in love with her, however little, it is dreadful; whereas, if, as in the present case, you happen to worship her, more, perhaps, than it is good to worship any fallible human creature, then the sight is positively overpowering. And so, indeed, it proved in the present instance. The Colonel could not bear it, but lifting her head from his shoulder, he kissed her sweet face ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... moments of neglect, caused by a particularly thick-headed idealism, is perfectly justified. It is also very proper: for it is good for a body of men conscious of a great responsibility to feel themselves recognised, if only in that fallible, imperfect and often irritating way in which recognition is sometimes ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... decline to make the venture, I thought, but her courage was too great. Now was the time when I proved myself still a son of the earth, with fallible judgment and a will too much engrossed with self. I had been wishing for an opportunity to do some difficult thing for Mona, something noble which should win her affection, and here, when the chance offered, I did not recognize it. The truly heroic action would have been to respect Mona's feeling ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... utterance, but in the teacher, for it strikes at his claim not to knowledge so much as to wisdom, to balance and insight of thought. I venture to say that recent drifts of speculation shew how rapidly the conception of a fallible Christ developes towards that of a wholly imperfect and untrustworthy Christ. And, looking again at the vast phenomenon of the Portrait in the Gospels, I hold that the line of thought which offers by very far the least difficulty, not to faith only but to reason, is that ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... of trios, has given us three dogmatists, all of whom greatly interested their own generation, and whose personality, especially in the case of the first and the last of the trio, still interests us,—Johnson, Coleridge, and Carlyle. Each was an oracle in his way, but unfortunately oracles are fallible to their descendants. The author of "Taxation no Tyranny" had wholesale opinions, and pretty harsh ones, about us Americans, and did not soften them in expression: "Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... him a great deal of power,—too much. Husband's are fallible, as well as wives," said Mrs. ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... is breaking down the barriers that divide, and in response to his 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. Multitudes already recognize no other ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... excelled all men in recoining the gold of common sense in his own mind. All the world has said "humanum est errare": but the saying is newborn when Johnson clinches an argument with, "No, sir; a fallible being will fail somewhere." So on a hundred other commonplaces of discussion one may find him, all through Boswell's pages, adding that unanalysable something of himself in word or thought which makes the ancient dry bones stir again to life. "It ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... the true tone, and with all the levity of a sophist. It is well that a true feeling of religion does not depend on the quirks and quibbles of human reasonings, or, what are as fallible, on masses of ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... "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 speak to you in honest, plain English. Mrs. Hilland's ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... 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 ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... 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
... contending against great difficulties with the courageous determination which characterized him. I do not hold the memory of Conolly in respect, merely or principally because he was the apostle of non-restraint, but because, although doubtless fallible (and indiscriminate eulogy would defeat its object), he infused into the treatment of the insane a contagious earnestness possessing a value far beyond any mere system or dogma. His real merit, ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... suggestion of personal blame, to acknowledge that he himself was impatient of every condition, intolerant even of the bonds of humanity. But if there ever should arise the time when the goddess should be taken from her pedestal, when the woman should be found fallible like all women, heaven preserve poor Theo then. The thought went through Mrs. Warrender's mind like a knife. What would become of him? He had given himself up so unreservedly to his love, he had sacrificed his own fastidious temper in the first place, had borne the remarks of the county, had supported ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... she was to be tried for her life: tried, not by the All-wise Judge, but by fallible men, and under a system ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... the Bees always erected domes on every planet they colonized, Arthur, but precedent is a fallible tool. And it's even more firmly established that there's no possibility of our rationalizing the motivations of a culture as alien as the Hymenops'—we've been over that argument a hundred times on other ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... himself on Sunday evenings by her side in her parlour, where his rights were now so well established that no one presumed to contest his seat, unless it were old Jacobi, who from time to time reminded him that he was fallible and mortal. Occasionally, though not often, Mr. Ratcliffe came at other times, as when he persuaded Mrs. Lee to be present at the Inauguration, and to call on the President's wife. Madeleine and Sybil ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... implicitly obeyed. A deviation from his requirements was sufficient cause for the severest punishment to be visited upon the bodies and souls of the offenders. Thus the minds of the people were turned away from God to fallible, erring, and cruel men, nay, more, to the prince of darkness himself, who exercised his power through them. Sin was disguised in a garb of sanctity. When the Scriptures are suppressed, and man comes to regard himself as supreme, we ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... 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
... imperfect; no police 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 history—and ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... legal disabilities to the exercise of suffrage (for persons of sound mind and body) in the several States, are five—age, color, sex, property and education. As age depends on a fixed law, beyond the control of fallible man, viz., the revolution of the earth around the sun, it must be impartial, for, nolens volens, all men must revolve with their native planet; and as no Republican or Democratic majority can make the earth stand still, even for a Presidential ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... thousand times—a dog recognizes your voice and looks at you. He knows your face and figure. Good, there can be no doubt in his mind but that it is you; but is he satisfied? No, sir-he must come up and smell of you. All his other senses may be fallible, but not his sense of smell, and so he makes assurance positive ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... love has forced her to practise duplicity and to accept dependence. And this sense of dependence in her on a protector, not always forthcoming, and, even when present, not always able to protect, has sent her in search of something outside and beyond the known and fallible, and has prepared her to accept with eagerness any professed revelation of the ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... resurrection, 1 Cor., ch. 15; 1. Thess. 4:13-18—enter into the very substance of the gospel. They are, in fact, integral parts of it. Can we suppose that our Lord began the revelation of his gospel by his own infallible wisdom, and then left it to be completed by the fallible wisdom of men? If Augustine and Jerome in the latter period of the Roman empire, if Anselm and Bernard in the middle ages, if Luther and Calvin at the era of the Reformation, if Wesley and Edwards in later days, commit errors, the mischief ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... head. He sprang forward to catch her—but she was away, beyond his reach. She ran on ahead and Pats, after a short pursuit, gave up the chase, for his fallible legs were still unfit for speed. With a mocking laugh and a wave of the hand she hastened on toward the cottage. Following more leisurely he watched the graceful figure in the white dress hurrying on before him until it was lost among ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... 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 ...
— Indian Why Stories • Frank Bird Linderman
... imprisoned or silenced. It is so easy to confute your opponent when you are a hundred strong and he is one weak unit. Buffon merely said, therefore, that if we didn't know the contrary to be the case by sure warrant, we might easily have concluded (so fallible is our reason) that animals always varied slightly, and that such variations, indefinitely accumulated, would suffice to account for almost any amount of ultimate difference. A donkey might thus have grown into a horse, and a bird might have developed ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... 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 at that time, he affirms, that the war waged ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... converting a man, in such cases God seldom condescends to employ it. Yet, let not such vain or ignorant reasoners convert you to unbelief in great matters or little; let them not persuade you, that your faith is built on the mere teaching of fallible men; do not you be ridiculed out of your confidence and hope in Christ. You may, if you will, have an inward witness arising from obedience: and though you cannot make them see it, you can see it yourselves, which is the great thing; and it will be quite sufficient, with God's ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... which Certainty is now attainable, from those in which only varying degrees of Probability exist, and the clear exhibition of that which is positive and demonstrable knowledge, in the strict sense of the term, as distinguished from that which is liable to be more or less fallible. Although the precise point at which, in some cases, the proofs of Probable Reasoning cease to be as convincing as those of Demonstration cannot be readily apprehended, yet the essential nature of the two methods of proof is radically and inherently different, and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... such as ours, in which authority, prescription, tradition, habit, moral instinct, and the divine influences go for nothing, in which patience of thought, and depth and consistency of view, are scorned as subtle and scholastic, in which free discussion and fallible judgment are prized as the birthright of each individual, I must be excused if I exercise towards this age, as regards its belief in this doctrine, some portion of that scepticism which it exercises itself towards ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... stars, rolling the worlds, reflecting [1] all space and Life,—but not life in matter. Wisely governing, informing the universe, this Mind is Truth,— not laws of matter. Infinitely just, merciful, and wise, this Mind is Love,—but not fallible love. [5] ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... fallible and vain Is human judgment, dimmed by clouds obscure! Bireno's actions, impious and profane, By others are reputed just and pure. Already stooping to their oars, the train Have loosed his vessel from the port secure, And with ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... comes a time in our lives when we are simply astonished that people pay any attention to us at all. We are so conscious of our short-comings, and so keenly aware of our mistakes, that it seems to us that surely no one is quite so blundering and fallible as we are. How easy it is then to bear ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... so many conflicting opinions, each courting our adherence to it,—amidst such a variety of circumstances without, and of feelings within, and on which, notwithstanding, our condition for all eternity must depend,—we shall be judged, not by erring man, not by our own fallible conscience, but by the all-wise, and all-righteous God. With him, after all, even in the very courts of his holy Church, we yet, in one sense, must each of us live alone. On his gracious aid, given to our own individual souls, and determining our own individual wills, depends the character of ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... that I should commit the sacrilege of 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 consideration: 'Perhaps strong circumstantial evidence in cases of crime, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... gaiety in which they had dined, they left the table. Not that, in their hearts, either greatly questioned their ultimate triumph; but they were allowing for the element of error so apt to set at naught human calculations. Calendar himself had already been proved fallible. Within the bounds of possibility, their turn to stumble might ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... play and honourable treatment. Both views are far-fetched. It is as true of Japan as it is of every other Government in the world that her actions are dictated neither by altruism nor by perfidy, but are merely the result of the faulty working of a number of fallible brains and as regards the work of administration in Japan itself the position is equally extraordinary. Here, at the extreme end of the world, so far from being in any way threatened, the principle of Divine Right, which is being denounced and ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... preparing a "plant." Still, I meant to caution him when he returned that one could not believe his eyes, certainly not his ears, as to what might happen, unless he was unusually skilful or lucky. It would not do to rely on anything so fallible as the human eye or ear, and I meant to impress it on him. What, after all. had been the net result of our activities so far? We had found next to nothing. Indeed, it was all a greater mystery ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... intuitive 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 ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... 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 ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... 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, in its plain unanswerable ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... the facts themselves. They come to us through the minds of those who recorded them, neither machines nor angels, but fallible creatures, with human passions and prejudices. Tacitus and Thucydides were perhaps the ablest men who ever gave themselves to writing history; the ablest, and also the most incapable of conscious falsehood. Yet even ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... person. He says, 'I 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 ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... has recently begun to veer away from the vision of an eighteenth century demigod in a wig,—an old-fashioned statue in dusky bronze, stern and forbidding. We are swinging around toward the idea of a loveable, fallible, very human personality with humor, a hot temper, and ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... 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 a fire ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... gullible horrible sensible terrible possible visible perceptible susceptible audible credible combustible eligible intelligible irascible inexhaustible reversible plausible permissible accessible digestible responsible admissible fallible flexible incorrigible irresistible ostensible tangible contemptible divisible discernible ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... midst of the silence the priest's voice broke sad and deliberate, but consoling: "God will forgive you, Senor—Simoun," he said. "He knows that we are fallible, He has seen that you have suffered, and in ordaining that the chastisement for your faults should come as death from the very ones you have instigated to crime, we can see His infinite mercy. He has frustrated your plans one by one, the best conceived, first ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... 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 ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... suffers under torture, it enjoys the divinity, and feels felicity in his presence. But if all these things are so, it cannot be within the province either of individual magistrates or of governments, consisting of fallible men, to fetter the consciences of those who may live under them. And any attempt to this end is considered by the Quakers as a direct usurpation of the prerogative ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... answer to prayer he believes that the Holy Spirit has given him light; and, confident that it is the truth, he announces it to the people. But you would not say that that man is inspired. There may be much of what is fallible and human with what is truthful and divine. Suppose, however, that on some Sabbath morning, he could with authority stand up and say that what is now about to be declared is not his, but God's—that he is in ignorance of what the utterance will really be, and that in simple fact, God is to speak ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... loved the wretched woman who with himself shared the honours of parentage to the poor but hopeful mite who was also dreaming of Christmas and the morning. And his love inspired him to action. Singular into what devious courses, utterly unjustifiable, even so exalted and holy an emotion may lead fallible man. Love—burglary! They do not belong naturally in association, yet slip cold, need, and hunger in between and we may have explanation even if there be no justification. Oh, Love, how many crimes are ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... throne. But after we have recovered from our fright, we recollect that, 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 close his ears to all further discussion, comes nothing short ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... judge or magistrate has authority over either property, liberty, or life. He is God's servant, the servant of Christ, who is King of this land and of all lands, and of all governments, and all kings and rulers of the earth. He sits there in God's name, to see God's will done, as far as poor fallible human beings can get it done. And, because he is, not merely as a man, but, by his special authority, in the likeness of God, who has power over life and death, therefore he also, as far as his authority goes, has power ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... The maxim is one which would probably be unreservedly accepted in theory by the most ardent propagandist who has ever used history as a vehicle for the dissemination of his own views on political, economic, or social questions. For so fallible is human nature that the proclivities of the individual can rarely be entirely submerged by the judicial impartiality of the historian. It is impossible to peruse Mr. Gooch's work without being struck ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... of a rich and influential family happens to transgress the law. It seems that the saloon-keeper, who was at first reasonably sure of what happened, suffered a strange lapse of memory when on the stand. Gooch thinks he was bought up, but Gooch is fallible where human motives are involved. His misanthropy invariably ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... same plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other, and those no small benefits, from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence of canonized ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... may discover a truth contrary to the sacred writings to pronounce upon it in definitive fashion, and ordering them to await events in the conviction that this truth will some day be proved an error! Only the Pope, says the Church, is infallible; Science is fallible, her constant groping is exploited against her, and divines remain on the watch striving to make it appear that her discoveries of to-day are in contradiction with her discoveries of yesterday. What do her sacrilegious assertions, what do her certainties rending dogma ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... impossible to work news; therefore the gospel is not of works. In the law, the first requirement is to do;—but in the gospel the first requirement is to believe. The law-covenant is therefore temporary, fallible and uncertain; but the gospel-covenant is eternal, infallible, and in all things well ordered and sure. The first rests on the obedience of the creature, but the second on the promises of Jehovah. ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... neither satisfied with Rationalism in its destructive sense, nor with orthodoxy. He is confessedly one of the champions of the Critical School. Skepticism, he contends, is perfectly legitimate. We are authorized to doubt; our opinions are fallible; we must be prepared to change them whenever we think we can find better ones. The Bible is intended to reveal to us a life, not a dogma. We find in it no effort to describe dogmas; no theological criticisms; no system of morality.[109] Religious inspiration is nothing but ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... right, Lady: phisiognomy and chiromancy are but trifles; nay, your geomancie meere coniecturall, the execution of your schemes circumstantiall and fallible, but your quaint alamode weare of ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... once or oftener in every century, to find itself in a new locality. Then it rubs its eyes and wonders whether it has found its harbor or only lost its anchor. There is no end to its disputes, for it has nothing but a fallible vote as authority for its oracles, and these appeal ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... centuries ago; and I must not withhold my own faith in its veracity, but say that I believe this pretty little flower to afford more certain indication of dryness or moisture in the air than any of our hygrometers do. But if these be fallible criterions, we will notice another that seldom deceives us. The approach of a sleety snow-storm, following a deceitful gleam in spring, is always announced to us by the loud untuneful voice of the missel-thrush (turdus viscivorus) as it takes its stand on some ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... religious choice they can; yet not in 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 ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... Catherine's visions clearly fall in the category of private revelation. Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition are infallible; private revelation is fallible. However, her visions are neither mere human meditations nor pious fiction. Her account of events in the lives of Jesus and Mary were revealed to her by God. Although God cannot err in anything He ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... &c. (indistinct) 447; mystic, oracular; dazed. perplexing &c. v.; enigmatic, paradoxical, apocryphal, problematical, hypothetical; experimental &c. 463. unpredictable, unforeseeable (unknowable) 519. fallible, questionable, precarious, slippery, ticklish, debatable, disputable; unreliable, untrustworthy. contingent, contingent on, dependent on; subject to; dependent on circumstances; occasional; provisional. unauthentic, unauthenticated, unauthoritative; unascertained, unconfirmed; undemonstrated; untold, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... assumption of finality natural to the man of limited outlook. In studying the history of philosophy sympathetically we are not merely calling to our aid critics who possess the advantage of seeing things from a different point of view, but we are reminding ourselves that we, too, are human and fallible. ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... fitness of things quite as much as the Squire's, or why, on the other hand, Mr. Macey's official respect should restrain him from subjecting the parson's performance to that criticism with which minds of extraordinary acuteness must necessarily contemplate the doings of their fallible fellow-men. ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... government administered by Washington, President; Jefferson, Secretary of State; Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury; Knox, Secretary of War; and Randolph, Attorney-General, was pretty nearly ideal, no one smiled. But Jefferson's plain inference was that power is dangerous and man is fallible; that a man so good as Washington dies tomorrow and another man steps in, and that those who have the government in their present keeping should curb ambitions, limit their own power, and thus fix a precedent for ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... sloped a hill, on which were seated, though unknown to us, two Chinamen; the first half-a-dozen rounds were so true that the unseen watchers had no suspicion they were in dangerous quarters, or that it was possible that even the Duke's marksmen were fallible; the seventh round disillusioned them, for, from a slight fault in the elevation, the shot over-reached the target and pitched so close to the Chinamen that stones and rubbish came rattling down from everywhere about their ears; fear lent them wings, and they scampered off like the wind. They ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... Washington can be to no nation on earth what he is to the American. Their influence may and does extend far beyond their respective national horizons, yet they can never furnish a universal model for imitation. We regard them as extraordinary but fallible and imperfect men, whom it would be very unsafe to follow in every view and line of conduct. Very frequently the failings and vices of great men are in proportion to their virtues and powers, as the tallest bodies ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Church is Human. She consists of fallible men, and her Humanity is not even safeguarded as was that of Christ against the incursions of sin. Always, therefore, there have been scandals, and always will be. Popes may betray their trust, in all human matters; priests their flocks; laymen ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... has been rather more 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 a writer, ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... must first collect the suffrages of the Catholic bishops, this only lands us in deeper perplexities. Why should the Pope need assessors and advisers? Can Infallibility not walk alone, that it uses crutches? Can an infallible man not know truth from error till first he has collected the votes of fallible bishops? Why should Infallibility seek help, which it cannot in ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... this particular cure for the community's ills has proved to be worse than the sickness, leading to total community dependence on a fallible and perhaps capricious enterprise, pollution of air and water, noise and flood-plain clutter, and frequently the destruction of the local riverside where industries tend to locate unless directed elsewhere. Little of this is necessary now, as a number of examples ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... message, but each passed it on in his own way. It was with each as it was with Haggai: "Then spake Haggai, the Lord's messenger in the Lord's message" (Haggai i. 13). The message was Divine, though the messenger was human; the message was infallible, though the messenger was fallible; the vessel was earthen, though the contents were golden. In this unique sense, the Bible is indeed "the Word of God". It is the "Word of God," delivered in the ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... 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
... heard it 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 is safer ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... should always be followed as a guide in both its proper and larger sense; but as an impulse to do what we believe to be right, it is infallible, while as a guide to knowledge of what is right, it is fallible and liable to lead us into all ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... 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, accepting it from ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... life, the eternal teaching of the honour of the material thing through its agency and through its existence as the subject for redemption. So also, through the material association, and the divine condescension to his earthly and fallible estate (limited by association with matter only to inadequate presentation) he makes the Spirit of God his own, to dwell therewith after the ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... conjectures I can form."[84] This uncertainty is illuminating. It shows that Pitt and Grenville were not farseeing schemers bent on undermining the liberties of France and Britain by a war on which they had long resolved, but fallible mortals, unable to see a handbreadth through the turmoil, but cherishing the hope that somehow all would soon become clear. As to British policy during the summer of 1792, it may be classed as masterly inactivity or nervous passivity, according to the standpoint of the critic. In one case alone ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... establishing in their room, and at their Expence, mere Sovereign Power alone. Physically speaking indeed, we allow God can do Evil itself; but the moral Perfections of his Nature, are to us an infallible and unshaken Security, that he never will do it. Man being an impotent and fallible Creature, liable, not only to mistake the true Nature and importance of Things, but when he does understand his Duty rightly, liable also, thro' the Prevalence of Habit and Passion, to be very backward and defective ...
— Free and Impartial Thoughts, on the Sovereignty of God, The Doctrines of Election, Reprobation, and Original Sin: Humbly Addressed To all who Believe and Profess those DOCTRINES. • Richard Finch
... 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 ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... interior provinces; but being assured that peace might yet be obtained, he gave carte blanche for its conclusion. 'One can form no adequate idea,' says Dr Gutzlaff, 'of the utter amazement of the Chinese on perceiving that the "son of heaven" was not invincible; and that he was even fallible; a revulsion of feeling took place, such as had never been known before; and the political supremacy which China had so proudly asserted, was humbled ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... throne, so are his laws and statutes above all the laws and statutes of man. To question these is to question God himself. But to assume that human laws are beyond question is to claim for their fallible authors infallibility. To assume that they are always in conformity with the laws of God is presumptuously and impiously to exalt man even to equality with God. Clearly, human laws are not always in such conformity; nor can they ever be beyond question from each individual. ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... the sting of Death, His Holiness could draw; Why render up His breath Unto a conquered foe? Either, he fallible must be, Or sin hath gained ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth
... revert to the subject of the right appreciation of the Scriptures, and in what sense the Bible may be called the word of God, and how and under what conditions the unity of the Spirit is translucent through the letter, which, read as the letter merely, is the word of this and that pious but fallible and imperfect man. Alas for the superstition, where the words themselves are made to be the Spirit! O might I live but to utter all my meditations ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... utterances. He will then accord the place of primacy to all understood scientific references of the Bible over all discoveries in the natural realm. He will do this by interpreting the few and fragmentary discoveries of finite and fallible man in the light of the statements that come to us as the Word of an infallible God, concluding that if there is any apparent inharmony, it lies in the partial discoveries or premature conclusions of scientists, rather than in any error of statement in the Bible. In other words, he will interpret ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... present day, on many sides, with speculations about the "Kenosis" of the Lord which in some cases anyhow have it for their manifest goal to justify the thought that He condescended to be fallible; that He "made Himself void" of such knowledge as should protect Him from mistaken statements about, for example, the history, quality, and authority of the Old Testament Scriptures. I have said once and again elsewhere[21] that such an application of the ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... in a flood, "to keep up a hollow mockery of trust and friendship, and it is more honest to tell you fairly that I have not entirely shared her faith in you. I have always thought that, like the rest of us after all, you were neither better nor worse than most other fallible people in this world, and that you may be, as I daresay we all are, fashioned by circumstances, or even by temptation. And I tell you frankly that I believe that you did this thing that I accuse you of. How, I demand to know. That, at any rate, is not more ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... defective, imperfect, meager, scant, blemished, deficient, incomplete, perverted, short, corrupt, deformed, inferior, poor, spoiled, corrupted, fallible, insufficient, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... himself quickly placed under a lamp for inspection, and surrounded by three old and well-beloved fellow-campaigners. What could a man do under the circumstances? Nothing, if human and fallible, I should say, but what the Major did—stay there, laughing and joking, and talking of old times, and freshen up his honest heart, and shake his honest sides with many an old half-forgotten ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... always, false. The source of error in human logic is what the philosophers call the 'personal equation.' My machine eliminated the personal equation; it proceeded from cause to effect, from premise to conclusion, with steady precision. The human intellect is fallible; my machine was, and is, infallible in ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... philosophers at their analytic work, witnessed the "Triumph of Reason and Democracy" in the shape of the French Revolution:—had he lived to see all this, he would have beheld meanwhile something which shows how fallible is prophecy. He would have seen, to wit, a most marvellous, rich and widespread outburst of the strenuous natural poetry he thought dead. From amid the critical rationalism of Germany would come the fullest, most fervid voices ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... to hear when the High Church party were more formidable than they are at present—much about "the right of private judgment." Why, the eloquent Protestant would say, should I pin my faith upon the Church? the Church is but a congregation of fallible men, no better able to judge than I am. I have a right to my own opinion. It sounds like a paradox to say that free discussion is interfered with by a cause which, above all others, would have been expected to further it; but this in fact has been the effect, because it tends to remove the ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... certain. When we come 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
... literature of the supernatural for proof, he will know what I mean. This literature is enormous, but it is practically worthless for evidential purposes. Facts enough are cited, indeed; but the records of them are so fallible and imperfect that at most they lead to the opinion that it may be well to keep a window open upon ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... who were concerned in breaking public treaties, and rejecting overtures for peace, would have relented, if with my feelings they had beheld this single victim of the millions that have been imolated, to the calculations of their fallible policy. ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... Mrs. Bright said: "You cannot temporise with forbidden fruit, Honey. Eve did, you know. You are but human, therefore fallible, however good you are trying to be. The time will come when the heart, torn with longing, becomes too weak to resist. Specious arguments are insidious and irresistible, and you will go down. Let him that thinketh he ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... 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 continually appear throughout its course, and seem never to ...
— Religion and Theology: A Sermon for the Times • John Tulloch
... upon other people's thoughts, by endeavoring to influence other minds to any action not first made known to them or sought by them. Corporeal and selfish influence is human, fallible, and temporary; but incorporeal impulsion is divine, infallible, and eternal. The student should be most careful not to thrust aside Science, and shade God's window which lets in light, or seek ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... cannot contradict you, I will seek some fallible creatures like myself"; and she vanished, leaving him as uncomfortable and puzzled as ever he ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... Hutchinson, which, of course, I admire, etc. But is there not an irritating deliberation and correctness about her and everybody connected with her? If she would only write bad grammar, or forget to finish a sentence, or do something or other that looks fallible, it would be a relief. I sometimes wish the old Colonel had got drunk and beaten her, in the bitterness of my spirit. I know I felt a weight taken off my heart when I heard he was extravagant. It is quite possible to be too good for this evil world; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wholehearted as it was in the case of La Valette; when it is allied to a genius for war, and a supreme gift for the inspiration of others, then that man and the force which he commands are as near to invincibility as it is permitted to fallible human beings to attain. There were two things in which the Knights were supremely fortunate on this occasion: the first was that they had La Valette as Grand Master, the second that Dragut was not in supreme command of the Turks, and that the ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... oppress him with such wants, that in the 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
... as it is attended to, he is enabled to distinguish good from evil, and to correct the disorderly passions and corrupt propensities of his nature, which mere reason is altogether insufficient to overcome. For all that belongs to man is fallible, and within the reach of temptation; but this divine grace, which comes by Him who hath overcome the world, is, to those who humbly and sincerely seek it, an all-sufficient and present help in time of need. By this, the snares ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... merely to note the mortal fallibility of man, most fallible when herded in groups and prone to do in the aggregate what he would hesitate to do when left to himself and ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... development, and these he is now rendering in this book. He calls himself a Socialist, but he is by no means a fanatical or uncritical adherent. To him Socialism presents itself as a very noble but a very human and fallible system of ideas and motives, a system that grows and develops. He regards its spirit, its intimate substance as the most hopeful thing in human affairs at the present time, but he does also find it shares with all mundane concerns the qualities of inadequacy and error. ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... the disposition of natures: she, having the truth of honour in her, hath 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 ...
— Measure for Measure - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... frailty, but of charity for the shortcomings, sympathy for the needs, of ordinary mortals, would not subdue the effulgence of his talents and virtues into mild lustre, more tolerable to the optics of fallible beholders ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... in a scrape with the critics. I am in a scrape for having said, a couple of years ago, that a critic was nothing but a sign-post, and for having added, somewhat later, that he was a fallible sign-post at that. So now, contributing to a supplement [T] which, being written by critics, is sure to be read by them, I naturally take the opportunity of explaining that what I said, if rightly understood, was perfectly civil ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... 'Some men are black' is a particular proposition. So also is 'Men are fallible;' for here it is not clear from the form whether 'all' or ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... 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 and die on faith," but ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Paul says of the resurrection, 1 Cor., ch. 15; 1. Thess. 4:13-18—enter into the very substance of the gospel. They are, in fact, integral parts of it. Can we suppose that our Lord began the revelation of his gospel by his own infallible wisdom, and then left it to be completed by the fallible wisdom of men? If Augustine and Jerome in the latter period of the Roman empire, if Anselm and Bernard in the middle ages, if Luther and Calvin at the era of the Reformation, if Wesley and Edwards in later days, ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... was his manner always under opposition. 'Thou hast not altogether caught my meaning. I say a man should trust in the Most High, not think too much beforehand of his ways. By thinking beforehand, he may form a bad intention, since man's thoughts are naturally fallible. Let him think afterwards, thus he will learn to shun such snares in future, and by repentance place a good work to his credit. Men learn wisdom from their sins, not from their righteous deeds. And the consciousness of sin, the knowledge that they may at any moment ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... can at last by no means be secure that we have attained to a perfect result, should be to teach us a wholsome diffidence and humility, and induce us to confess that, when we have done all, we are ignorant, dim-sighted and fallible, that our best reasonings may betray, and ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... without distinction of race, or colour, or nation, or rank. What says the Bible? 'Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.' Who is to decide then from what depths of moral degradation the power of God's grace will fail to lift up a human being? Certainly, we mortals, fallible, helpless, sinful, as we must feel ourselves, are not capable of judging. All we have to do is to receive the plain command, and obey it. Oh, there is scope, believe me, for the exertions, not of ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... be also an agent of the government, appointed for his party services, looking for his reward, expecting future pay for present work, extra pay for uncommon zeal and "discretion." Gentlemen of the Jury, this may be the case—humanity is fallible, and it sometimes may happen even in the Circuit Court of the United States that such a man should hold the office of District Attorney. For it is not to be expected, nay, it is what we should not even ask—that this place should always be filled by such conspicuous ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... (writes Mr. Tyrrell in his "Much-abused Letter") is but a means, a way, a creature, to be used where it helps, to be left where it hinders.... Who have taught us that the consensus of theologians cannot err, but the theologians themselves? Mortal, fallible, ignorant men like ourselves! ... Their present domination is but a passing episode in the Church's history.... May not history repeat itself? [as in the transition from Judaism to Christianity]. Is God's arm shortened that He should not again out of the very ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... evidence; it may be controvertible or incontrovertible, as the law may have provided, but there is nothing in the nature of a certificate which forbids inquiry into its verity; it is not a revelation from above; it is a paper made by men, fallible always, and sometimes dishonest as well as fallible; and, if honest, often deceived. It is made generally in secret and ex parte, without hearing both sides, without oral testimony, without cross-examination. Of such evidence it may be safely affirmed, that it is ...
— The Electoral Votes of 1876 - Who Should Count Them, What Should Be Counted, and the Remedy for a Wrong Count • David Dudley Field
... times, but life was always bringing forward 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 ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... name ought infinitely to surpass; our coarse, fallible, self-indulgent sex, in the power to perform ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... there are well-known characteristics of human nature that explain how such revulsions of feeling come about. It has never been found difficult to get up a case against those whom the great and powerful have made up their minds to destroy. The best men are fallible and have their weak side. Large bodies of men must contain some unworthy members. A long history can hardly be without blots, mistakes, and crimes. No man's life, if narrowly scrutinized by an unfavorable and prejudiced criticism, but will ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... highest veneration for the Great God, who has become 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 telling ...
— Indian Why Stories • Frank Bird Linderman
... the soul, the soul itself is free, and, while it suffers under torture, it enjoys the divinity, and feels felicity in his presence. But if all these things are so, it cannot be within the province either of individual magistrates or of governments, consisting of fallible men, to fetter the consciences of those who may live under them. And any attempt to this end is considered by the Quakers as a direct usurpation ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... as that of life, amidst so many conflicting opinions, each courting our adherence to it,—amidst such a variety of circumstances without, and of feelings within, and on which, notwithstanding, our condition for all eternity must depend,—we shall be judged, not by erring man, not by our own fallible conscience, but by the all-wise, and all-righteous God. With him, after all, even in the very courts of his holy Church, we yet, in one sense, must each of us live alone. On his gracious aid, given to our own individual souls, and determining our own individual ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... 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
... were explained on the proper occasion. In the discharge of this trust, I will only say that I have, with good intentions, contributed towards 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 ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... 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 ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... gardener, the clear-starcher, and the perfumer, and how to make pickles, puff paste, butter, blacking, &c. together with my Lady Bountiful's sovereign remedy for an inward bruise, and other ever-failing nostrums,—Dr. Killemquick's wonder-working essence, and fallible elixir, which cures all manner of incurable maladies directly minute, Mrs. Notable's instructions how to make soft pomatum, that will soon make more hair grow upon thy head, "than Dobbin, thy thill-horse, hath upon his tail," ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... incontinent farewell to reason, or to despise the arts and sciences, or to deny reason's certitude? (85) But, in the meanwhile, we cannot wholly absolve them from blame, inasmuch as they invoke the aid of reason for her own defeat, and attempt infallibly to prove her fallible. (86) While they are trying to prove mathematically the authority and truth of theology, and to take away the authority of natural reason, they are in reality only bringing theology under reason's dominion, and proving that her authority ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part III] • Benedict de Spinoza
... from our fright, we recollect that, 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 close his ears to all further discussion, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... or rather of Pyrrhonism. This is made more clear by the words of Dryden, from which it appears that, having once admitted the mysterious doctrines of the Trinity and of redemption, so incomprehensible to human reason, he felt no right to make any further appeal to that fallible guide: ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... us good men, and they will make us good laws," is the maxim of a demagogue, and is (through the alteration which is commonly perceivable in men, when they have power to work their own wills) exceeding fallible. But "give us good orders, and they will make us good men," is the maxim of a legislator, and the ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... vague about it, if we could make up our minds what it is that it does mean or that we wish it to mean. We all of us distinguish between good and bad in literature, even if we regard our own judgments as fallible. We are all disposed to mistrust the opinions of our contemporaries, though we have a childlike faith in the verdict of posterity. Well, what is it that will satisfy posterity, and that ought, a fortiori, to satisfy us? What is it, ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... found himself quickly placed under a lamp for inspection, and surrounded by three old and well-beloved fellow-campaigners. What could a man do under the circumstances? Nothing, if human and fallible, I should say, but what the Major did—stay there, laughing and joking, and talking of old times, and freshen up his honest heart, and shake his honest sides with many an old half-forgotten tale of fun ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... a conformity to Nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other, and those no small benefits, from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Dalgarno does not drink so much; aye or swear so much, as his father, but he wenches, Geordie, and he breaks his word and oath baith. As to what ye say of the leddy and the ministers, we are all fallible creatures, Geordie, priests and kings as weel as others; and wha kens but what that may account for the difference between this Dalgarno and his father? The earl is the vera soul of honour, and cares nae mair for warld's gear than a noble hound for the quest of a foulmart; but as for his son, he ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... vapors. Again the audience, but another audience, was 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 be deceived. The judge smote with his eye a person who sought to hide himself in the crowd; the guilty ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... is positively certain! Let us then reverentially enter upon an analysis of the effect of beauty upon the human spirit, whether found in the perfect works of our God, or shining through the more humble imitations and manifestations of the fallible human artist. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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 ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... 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 ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... disposition of natures: she, having the truth of honour in her, hath 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 ...
— Measure for Measure - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... considerable;" and, to be told of their faults, is an excitement which they seldom enjoy at the hands of their own authors. Now, we are accustomed to treat our own public as a rational, but extremely fallible personage, and to think that we best deserve his support, by administering to his failings the language of unpalatable truth. And we greatly mistake the character of Demus, and even of that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... suspicion here, since it has been brought forward by avowed disciples of an opposite philosophic school. Nevertheless, as there is from our present disinterested and purely scientific point of view a presumption that philosophers like other men are fallible, and since it is certain that philosophical introspection does not materially differ from other kinds, it seems permissible just to glance at some of these alleged illusions in relation to other and more vulgar forms. ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... Presbyterians have a pope themselves, composed of the 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 ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... and obviate the cavils and objections of the sceptics. She can no longer plead the infallible and irresistible instinct of nature: for that led us to a quite different system, which is acknowledged fallible and even erroneous. And to justify this pretended philosophical system, by a chain of clear and convincing argument, or even any appearance of argument, exceeds the power of all ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... 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 ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... in asking to withdraw his resolution. He doesn't expect Mr. Peck to convince him in a private conference that he has been preaching an all-round gospel. I don't contend that he has; but I suppose I'm not a very competent judge. I don't propose to give you the opinion of one very fallible and erring man, and I don't set myself up in judgment of others; but I think it's important for all parties concerned to know what the majority of this society think on a question involving its future. That importance must excuse—if anything can excuse—the ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... he steps out of his province. My dear Grace, you grew up in the days of curatolatry, but it won't do; men are fallible even when they preach in a surplice, and you may be thankful to me that you and Fanny are not both led along in a string in the train of Mr. ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... grimly and sadly. On what flimsy bases the best plant of wise men too often rest! The latest power of nature had been harnessed to do man service in his utmost extremity; science had perfected its instruments, but one link in the chain was fallible man. The bell would tinkle—the watcher would be laughing out of earshot—and the life would sink back into Lethe after ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... the practical science of grammar has an intrinsic dignity and merit sufficient to throw back upon any man who dares openly assail it, the lasting stigma of folly and self-conceit. It is true, the judgements of men are fallible, and many opinions are liable to be reversed by better knowledge: but what has been long established by the unanimous concurrence of the learned, it can hardly be the part of a wise instructor now to dispute. The literary reformer who, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... 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
... cases, this particular cure for the community's ills has proved to be worse than the sickness, leading to total community dependence on a fallible and perhaps capricious enterprise, pollution of air and water, noise and flood-plain clutter, and frequently the destruction of the local riverside where industries tend to locate unless directed elsewhere. Little of this is necessary now, as a number of examples of ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... a great deal of power,—too much. Husband's are fallible, as well as wives," said Mrs. ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... continue to reverence the Scriptures as containing a unique and special revelation from God to men, and yet clearly see and frankly acknowledge the facts concerning their origin, and the human and fallible elements in them, which are not concealed, but ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... the Father and the Son, as opening the eyes of our understanding, bringing us out of darkness into His marvelous light, renewing the image of God in our soul, and sealing us unto the day of redemption. So that, in truth, what is now "in the sight of God, even the Father," not of fallible men "pure religion and undefiled," would then, have had no being: inasmuch as it wholly depends on those grand principles, "By grace ye are saved through faith"; and "Jesus Christ is of God made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... 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, since those who enter religion trust not to be able to stay by their own power, but by the assistance ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... what we call fancy or imagination. Out of fancy springs reason. And if by imagination is understood a faculty which fashions images capriciously, I will ask: What is caprice? And in any case the senses and reason are also fallible. ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... PLEA.....24 Augsburg Confession the only universal symbol of the Lutheran Church. Definite Platform liberal. The Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Methodists, altered their European Creeds in this country. Creeds subordinate, to Scripture. Progressive light of Scripture. Human creeds fallible. Drs. Lochman, Endress, F. C. Schaeffer, Hazelius, Bachman, &c. Origin of the Definite Synodical Platform. Dr. ...
— American Lutheranism Vindicated; or, Examination of the Lutheran Symbols, on Certain Disputed Topics • Samuel Simon Schmucker
... How little we fallible mortals know! Even as he spoke, a tiny fragment of lobster shell, which had been working its way silently into the tip of his tongue, was settling down under the skin and getting ready to cause him the most acute mental distress which he ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... collect the suffrages of the Catholic bishops, this only lands us in deeper perplexities. Why should the Pope need assessors and advisers? Can Infallibility not walk alone, that it uses crutches? Can an infallible man not know truth from error till first he has collected the votes of fallible bishops? Why should Infallibility seek help, which it cannot in the nature of ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... all 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 ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... authority as its interpreter are denied, but also his knowledge of his own nature and place in the universe. If his knowledge of things so essential be denied, what trust can we place in any other of his utterances? To those who reason in this way, Christ cannot possibly be divine—he is only a fallible man, self-deceived, and so, deceiving others. The fault of the critics lies in their presupposition. They have begun wrongly, by leaving out the primary fact in the subject they investigate, namely, that the preincarnate Christ was ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... decoctible deducible defeasible defensible descendible destructible digestible discernible distensible divisible docible edible effectible eligible eludible enforcible evincible expansible expressible extendible extensible fallible feasible fencible flexible forcible frangible fusible gullible horrible illegible immiscible impassible intelligible irascible legible miscible negligible partible passible (susceptible) perceptible permissible persuasible pervertible plausible ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton
... 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 times, but he detected ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... "Recollections" is a fallible man, like other fallible man. He has shown at least this, that he is ready to stand by his convictions, living and dying; and he holds this conviction fixed and immutable, that there is a crisis coming on us of overtopping and overwhelming magnitude, and demanding ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... throne of God is above every earthly throne, so are his laws and statutes above all the laws and statutes of man. To question these, is to question God himself. But to assume that human laws are above question, is to claim for their fallible authors infallibility. To assume that they are always in conformity with those of God, is presumptuously and impiously to exalt man to an equality with God. Clearly, human laws are not always in such conformity; nor can they ever be beyond question from each individual. ...
— The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 9, An Appeal To The Legislators Of Massachusetts • Lydia Maria Child
... low levels and directions. 'The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her,' is the short summary of the happy lives of many, I have no doubt, of my present hearers. Have you none of that confidence to spare for God? Is it all meant to be poured out upon weak, fallible, changeful creatures like ourselves, and none of it to rise to the One in whom absolute confidence may eternally ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... thus living in an atmosphere of continual dependence on, and reference to, God, about great things and little things. Whenever a man is living by trust, even when the trust is mistaken, or when it is resting upon some mere human, fallible creature like himself, the measure of his confidence is the measure of his tranquillity. You know that when a child says, 'I do not need to mind, father will look after that,' he may be right or wrong in his estimate of his father's ability ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Manders. We are only fallible, and many steps seem to us hazardous at first, that afterwards—(grasps his hand). Welcome, welcome! Really, my dear Oswald—may I still ...
— Ghosts - A Domestic Tragedy in Three Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... That night, on her white bed, in her black room, Cassy sought it. But the counsel that night brings is not delivered while you toss about. Night waits until you sleep. Then, to the subjective self that never sleeps, the message is delivered. It may be fallible, often it is and, in our scheme of things, what is there that is not? Yet in any dilemma bad advice may be better than none. Then, without transition, the black room changed into an avenue where faces peered and smiled. It was not though for these that she was looking, but ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... practise duplicity and to accept dependence. And this sense of dependence in her on a protector, not always forthcoming, and, even when present, not always able to protect, has sent her in search of something outside and beyond the known and fallible, and has prepared her to accept with eagerness any professed revelation of ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... without the aid of immediate revelation, shall undertake to decide upon such subjects, and prescribe 'articles of faith' or 'creeds' to govern the belief or views of others, there will be thousands of well-meaning people who will not have confidence in the productions of these fallible men, and, therefore, frame creeds of their own.... In ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... nature. The preacher, the novelist, or the philosopher, in dwelling upon the peculiarity of our common constitution, being himself an example of what he is speaking of, associates the rest of mankind with him, and speaks collectively by means of 'we.' 'We are weak and fallible'; 'we are of yesterday'; 'we are doomed to dissolution.' 'Here have we no continuing city, but ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... transgress the law. It seems that the saloon-keeper, who was at first reasonably sure of what happened, suffered a strange lapse of memory when on the stand. Gooch thinks he was bought up, but Gooch is fallible where human motives are involved. His misanthropy invariably colors ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... somewhat vague so far as enunciation of doctrine, a point on which he had once confessed himself fallible, was concerned, there was nothing vague in his recommendation of a National Synod. To this the opposition of Barneveld was determined not upon religious but upon constitutional grounds. The confederacy did not constitute a nation, and therefore there could ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... did great good. Its teachings, though applied by often fallible instruments and in blundering ways, yet never completely lost sight of their own higher meanings of mercy and peace. From the Abbey of Cluny originated that quaint mediaeval idea of the "truce of God," by which nobles were ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... prodigy. 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 ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... Sacraments as having a mechanical efficacy irrespective of their conscious effect upon the mind of the receiver was an idolatrous superstition; that the Church was a human institution, which had varied in form in different ages, and might vary again; that it was always fallible; that it might have Bishops in England, and dispense with Bishops in Scotland and Germany; that a Bishop was merely an officer; that the apostolical succession was probably false as a fact—and, if a fact, ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... use in putting Iphigenia to death, and that nothing but superstition made anybody suppose there was. I do not think the case is one less to our purpose on that account, for Utilitarians, like other fallible mortals, are liable to deceive themselves. They never can be quite secure of the genuineness of the utility on which they rely, and in default of positive knowledge they will always be reduced to act, as the Grecian chiefs did, according to the best of ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... her daughter tenderly, Mrs. Bright said: "You cannot temporise with forbidden fruit, Honey. Eve did, you know. You are but human, therefore fallible, however good you are trying to be. The time will come when the heart, torn with longing, becomes too weak to resist. Specious arguments are insidious and irresistible, and you will go down. Let him that ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... think they are psychic when they are 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 only ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... the 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
... 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 I may have ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... You tell them the fault is in its disciples and ministers, and not in Christianity itself. But they cannot understand why God should allow the success of a system so important to depend on faithless or fallible men. Nor can they understand how it is that in the nations in which the Gospel has been received, it has not worked a greater transformation of character, and produced a happier change in their condition. How ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... 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
... the year 1820, much discussion having passed to and fro, serious doubts had arisen in many quarters; scepticism had begun to arm itself against the sceptic; the economist of 1800 was no longer quite sure of his ground. He was now suspected of being fallible; and what seemed of worse augury, he was beginning himself to suspect as much. To one capital blunder he was obliged publicly to plead guilty. What it was, we shall have occasion to mention immediately. Meantime it was justly thought ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... 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 ...
— 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
... attracted considerable attention among oral history enthusiasts. The author has taken advantage of this special source, but oral testimony concerning integration must be treated cautiously. In addition to the usual dangers of fallible memory that haunt all oral history interviews, the subjects of some of these interviews, it should be emphasized, were separated from the events they were recalling by a civil rights revolution that has changed fundamentally the attitudes of many people, both black and white. In some instances ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... inequality, of men. Next, he must learn that no new birth into spiritual purity is necessary before socialism becomes possible. He must learn that socialism deals with what is, not with what ought to be; and that the material with which it deals is the "clay of the common road," the warm human, fallible and frail, sordid and petty, absurd and contradictory, even grotesque, and yet, withal, shot through with flashes and glimmerings of something finer and God-like, with here and there sweetnesses of service and unselfishness, desires for goodness, for renunciation and sacrifice, ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... Quantity of nitrous Particles, it [might more reasonably][6] be supposed to be black. In short, the young Husseys would persuade me, that to believe ones Eyes is a sure way to be deceived; and have often advised me, by no means, to trust any thing so fallible as my Senses. What I have to beg of you now is, to turn one Speculation to the due Regulation of Female Literature, so far at least, as to make it consistent with the Quiet of such whose Fate it is to be liable to its Insults; and to tell us the Difference between ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... 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, living, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... 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 ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... contemplation full of awful interest, and on which it is impossible to be at ease where the mysterious intercourse is without a witness and without a check—but the consciences of two frail and fallible human beings. Well may we say with Michelet, that under such a system the priest ought to be truly a presbyteros, "a man who has seen, learned, and suffered much." A young priest as a father-confessor is not merely "a nonsensical ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... do not respect, because he is really the only inconsistent person. He says, 'I 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 ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... 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 ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... who believes in an infallible teacher of revelation cannot consistently listen to any fallible teacher with a view of getting more correct information than his infallible teacher gives him. To do so would be absurd, for it would be to believe and at the same time not believe ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... 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, ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... laboratory—every sort and kind of risk. Of course he has surveys, made by inspectors, to help him, showing details the map fails to show, such as the location of your piano, and where the hazards lie and how they are cared for. But inspectors are fallible, ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... attainable, from those in which only varying degrees of Probability exist, and the clear exhibition of that which is positive and demonstrable knowledge, in the strict sense of the term, as distinguished from that which is liable to be more or less fallible. Although the precise point at which, in some cases, the proofs of Probable Reasoning cease to be as convincing as those of Demonstration cannot be readily apprehended, yet the essential nature of the two methods of proof is radically and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... dolt he would be, did he not learn at least all the superficialities of 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
... speaking indeed, we allow God can do Evil itself; but the moral Perfections of his Nature, are to us an infallible and unshaken Security, that he never will do it. Man being an impotent and fallible Creature, liable, not only to mistake the true Nature and importance of Things, but when he does understand his Duty rightly, liable also, thro' the Prevalence of Habit and Passion, to be very backward ...
— Free and Impartial Thoughts, on the Sovereignty of God, The Doctrines of Election, Reprobation, and Original Sin: Humbly Addressed To all who Believe and Profess those DOCTRINES. • Richard Finch
... the Actual,—SCIENCE. Always old, and must last as long as the Actual. Less fallible than Idealism, but less practically potent, from its ignorance of ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... of Death, His Holiness could draw; Why render up His breath Unto a conquered foe? Either, he fallible must be, Or sin hath gained ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth
... 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
... But is there not an irritating deliberation and correctness about her and everybody connected with her? If she would only write bad grammar, or forget to finish a sentence, or do something or other that looks fallible, it would be a relief. I sometimes wish the old Colonel had got drunk and beaten her, in the bitterness of my spirit. I know I felt a weight taken off my heart when I heard he was extravagant. It is quite possible to be too good for this evil world; and unquestionably, Mrs. Hutchinson was. ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Father. I know that in him I shall find both a just and a merciful judge; and in him who was tempted even as we are, who was of our nature and exposed to our trials, shall I find an advocate and intercessor such as the soul needs. So that, if anxious as he who is human and fallible must ever be, I am nevertheless happy and contented. My voyage is ended; the ocean of life is crossed, and I stand by the shore with joyful expectations of the word that shall bid me land and enter into ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... our knowledge of the disease, which are taking place almost from day to day. The patient usually presses his physician for an estimate of his chances, and in such cases, after carefully explaining why our knowledge is fallible and subject to change, I usually estimate that for a patient who will absolutely follow the advice of an expert, the prospects are well over 90 ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... admit the feeling itself to be truly cognitive. We are ourselves the critics here; and we shall find our burden much lightened by being allowed to take reality in this relative and provisional way. Every science must make some assumptions. Erkenntnisstheoretiker are but fallible mortals. When they study the function of cognition, they do it by means of the same function in themselves. And knowing that the fountain cannot go higher than its source, we should promptly confess that our results in ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... a changed time-table, and he forgot it just as I did," explained Susanna, pleased to find him fallible, ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... undefined, undefinable; confused &c. (indistinct) 447; mystic, oracular; dazed. perplexing &c. v.; enigmatic, paradoxical, apocryphal, problematical, hypothetical; experimental &c. 463. unpredictable, unforeseeable (unknowable) 519. fallible, questionable, precarious, slippery, ticklish, debatable, disputable; unreliable, untrustworthy. contingent, contingent on, dependent on; subject to; dependent on circumstances; occasional; provisional. unauthentic, unauthenticated, unauthoritative; unascertained, unconfirmed; undemonstrated; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... temper, or his weaknesses of body? Of course, to you now he seems perfection, and yet he is a human being, fallible and imperfect. If his faults are similar to yours, you double the possibility of their inheritance by your children. If you both have a tendency to lung trouble, the probabilities are that your children will have ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... recognized his moral leadership. The controversies of old and new organization, nonresistance and political action, may now be looked upon by the parties to them, who still survive, with the philosophic calmness which follows the subsidence of prejudice and passion. We were but fallible men, and doubtless often erred in feeling, speech, and action. Ours was but the common experience of reformers ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... arraigned for their departure from certain standards, such as the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Westminster Confession, and the lugubrious compilation known as the New Hampshire Confession of Faith. These documents, with whatever excellency they may be accredited, were prepared by fallible men—some of them, indeed, exceedingly fallible—who were hardly qualified in their day to define the faith of Christ for the guidance of future ages, and were adopted in most cases by meagre majorities. Why we should suppose their statements are to be regarded as infallible, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... are gone to the Havannah, and that the French will either stand for Cadiz or Toulon—I feel most inclined to the latter place; and then they may fancy that they will get to Egypt without any interruption." "So far from being infallible, like the Pope, I believe my opinions to be very fallible, and therefore I may be mistaken that the enemy's fleet has gone to Europe; but I cannot bring myself to think otherwise, notwithstanding the variety of opinions which different people ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... whichever point of view we take from which to consider it, we find in it nothing to distinguish it above other moral codes, or to prevent it from being classed among other moralities, as being a mixture of good and bad, and, therefore, not to be taken as an, unerring guide, being like them, all FALLIBLE. ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... 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 do so. If there were ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... Church; 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 a sacred deposit, ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... 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 ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... memory for every line that had appeared in its columns. He edited a book of humorous anecdotes, but even he overlooked numerous doubles, and left not a few errors for the detection of the critics;" in fact, was fallible too, as in the nature of things he was bound to be. And Shirley Brooks, although with his wide knowledge of comic literature and "happy thoughts" he was successful too, had nevertheless humiliation to bear for blunders not a few. Tom Taylor ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... absolutely sure she had forgotten nothing, had put everything in perfect order. Once in bed, she hated to get out; yet if she should recall any omission, however slight, she would be unable to sleep until she had corrected it. Finally, sure as fallible humanity can be, she turned out the last light, lay down—went ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... somewhat commensurate with his offence; and, on the other hand, it was appropriate that he should commend the conduct of his other sons, who sought to hide their father's shame. And all this was done without any inspiration. He simply expressed himself as a fallible man. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... one can say in advance about what matters intuitive 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
... becomes infallible, and the infallible remains fallible. Read and believe: these are MYSTERIES! In the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... my witness that I think her mere dust and ashes in comparison with you, and shall continue to think so, unless you drive me from you by too much severity. She is a daughter of earth; you are an angel of heaven; only be not too austere in your divinity, and remember that I am a poor, fallible mortal. Come now, Helen; won't you forgive me?' he said, gently taking my hand, and looking up with an ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... trespass not intentionally upon other people's thoughts, by endeavoring to influence other minds to any action not first made known to them or sought by them. Corporeal and selfish influence is human, fallible, and temporary; but incorporeal impulsion is divine, infallible, and eternal. The student should be most careful not to thrust aside Science, and shade God's window which lets in light, or seek to ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... Christian trunk. With the Protestants, the Bible, which is the Word of God, is the sole spiritual authority; all the others, the Doctors, Fathers, tradition, Popes and Councils, are human and, accordingly, fallible; in fact, these have repeatedly and gravely erred.[5330] The Bible, however, is a text which each reader reads with his own eyes, more or less enlightened and sensitive, with eyes which, in Luther's time, possessed the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... tempering, not of human frailty, but of charity for the shortcomings, sympathy for the needs, of ordinary mortals, would not subdue the effulgence of his talents and virtues into mild lustre, more tolerable to the optics of fallible beholders ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... not yet finished my treatise proving that the touchstone is fallible," he cried eagerly; "but it would give me pleasure to delay the work indefinitely if in the meantime ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... 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 ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... 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 ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... it 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 is safer ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... less a private right than a public necessity. Its absence would involve a waste which Society could not endure. With individual operations controlled by fallible men enormous waste is inevitable. It is essential to Society that this waste be minimized. No industrial or commercial enterprise can go on without risk. Profit is the compensation for risk. One of the things which I believe, but which cannot be proved, is that from the dawn of history ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... different men. Variety is manifest, and patent, upon everything mental and material. The Almighty has not created, nor man fashioned, two things alike! How futile, then, is the attempt to shape and mould man's apprehension of divine truth by one fallible standard of man's invention! If proof of this be required, an appeal might be made to history and the experience of eighteen ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... 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 ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... Pierre Philibert is almost beyond the range of fallible mortals," said the Lady de Tilly. "In the sudden crash of all his hopes he would not utter a word of invective against your brother. His heart tells him that Le Gardeur has been made the senseless instrument ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... closer 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 into tolerance of ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... not merely to the question considered in the abstract, but as it springs from its context in the questioner's mind; we are not wrong, on this score alone, in arguing from the character of the revelation to the character of the mind to which it was addressed. Fallible men may often speak and write above or beside the intelligence of their hearers and readers; but not so He who reads the heart He has made. Now these revelations were not addressed to the Church through Mother Juliana; but, as she says, were addressed to herself and were primarily ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... mockery of trust and friendship, and it is more honest to tell you fairly that I have not entirely shared her faith in you. I have always thought that, like the rest of us after all, you were neither better nor worse than most other fallible people in this world, and that you may be, as I daresay we all are, fashioned by circumstances, or even by temptation. And I tell you frankly that I believe that you did this thing that I accuse you of. How, I demand to ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... was a man rated high up in the millions, but he was fallible like the rest. His wealth, compared to Rimrock's was as a hundred dollars to one, but it was spread out a hundred times as far; and with his next dividend, which was due in December, Rimrock would have nearly a million in cash. To Stoddard, at the same ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... Behind this rock sloped a hill, on which were seated, though unknown to us, two Chinamen; the first half-a-dozen rounds were so true that the unseen watchers had no suspicion they were in dangerous quarters, or that it was possible that even the Duke's marksmen were fallible; the seventh round disillusioned them, for, from a slight fault in the elevation, the shot over-reached the target and pitched so close to the Chinamen that stones and rubbish came rattling down from everywhere ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... for her, and she would have sacrificed much rather than see it fail. She did not on that account blame Giovanni for his discouraging view when Orsino had consulted him. Giovanni was the passion of her life and was not fallible in his impulses, though his judgment might sometimes be at fault in technical matters for which he cared nothing. But her love for her son was as great and sincere in its own way, and her pride in him was such as to make his success a condition ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... private judgment," and our "Christian liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free;" to add fuel to the fire of investigation, and in the crucible of deep inquiry, melt from the gold of pure religion, the dross of man's invention; to appeal from the erring tribunals of a fallible Priesthood, and restore to its original state the mutilated Testament of the Saviour; also to induce all earnest thinkers to search not a part, but the whole of the Scriptures, if therein they think ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... between the genuine effort and the adventitious mistakes is perhaps the most difficult test which comes to our fallible intelligence. In the range of individual morals, we have learned to distrust him who would reach spirituality by simply renouncing the world, or by merely speculating upon its evils. The result, as well as the process of virtues attained by repression, has become distasteful to us. When the entire ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... troubled eyes and straining hands, Silent, attentive, thoughtful, Justice stands. To her alone let the appeal be made. Heroes, or merely tools of huckstering Trade, Men brave, though fallible, or sordid brutes, Let all be heard. Since each to each imputes Unmeasured baseness, somewhere the black stain Must surely rest. The dead speak not, the slain Have not a voice, save such as that which spoke From ABEL's blood. Green laurels, or the stroke Of shame's swift ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 22, 1890 • Various
... gave me. I determined I would at least be honest with myself—and this was my verdict. You will, perhaps, fancy that when I arrived at this decision I at once mended my ways and resigned my seat of observation to Maitland's entirely professional care. This, doubtless, I should have done, if we fallible human beings governed our conduct by our knowledge of what is right and proper. Inasmuch, however, as desires and emotions are the determining factors of human conduct, I did nothing of the sort. I simply watched ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right. In the general experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it has taken, in most instances, such a weary while to find out how wrong, that the authority is proved to be fallible. Everybody may sometimes be right; "but THAT'S no rule," as the ghost of Giles Scroggins says in ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... impress himself 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 directly to ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... the omen, dear Miss Bernard," said Pownal, looking with admiration upon her beaming countenance, "Men arrive at conclusions, how often false, by a fallible process of reasoning, while truth comes to your more fortunate ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... seemingly perfect mechanism which rode so steadily through the air; of the quick response that ingenious arrangement of inanimate matter would make to an eternal and inexorable law if a few frail wires should part; of the equally quick, but less phlegmatic response of another fallible mechanism, capable of registering horror, capable—it is said—of passing its past life in review in the space of a few seconds, and then—capable of ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... 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 Lost he makes Adam state the difficulties of the Ptolemaic system, and ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... knew what Christianity was, then Jose was forced to admit that he did not. He, weak, frail, fallible, remit sins? Preposterous! What was the true remission of sins but their utter destruction? He change the wafer and wine into the flesh and blood of Jesus? Nay, he was no spiritual thaumaturgus! He could not do even the least of the works ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... to be conclusively indicated by the order following on the parable of the Talents,—"Those mine enemies, bring hither, and slay them before me." Nor does it seem reasonable, on the other hand, to set the limits of favouritism more narrowly. For even if, among fallible mortals, there may frequently be ground for the hesitation of just men to award the punishment of death to their enemies, the most beautiful story, to my present knowledge, of all antiquity, that of Cleobis ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... to make the venture, I thought, but her courage was too great. Now was the time when I proved myself still a son of the earth, with fallible judgment and a will too much engrossed with self. I had been wishing for an opportunity to do some difficult thing for Mona, something noble which should win her affection, and here, when the chance offered, I did not recognize it. The truly heroic action would have been to respect ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... too little attention, else it could never have been thought strange that Christ should comply in things indifferent with popular errors. A few Words will put the reader in possession of my view. Speaking of the Bible, Phil. says, 'We admit that its separate parts are the work of frail and fallible human beings. We do not seek to build upon it systems of cosmogony, chronology, astronomy, and natural history. We know no reason of internal or external probability which should induce us to believe that such matters could ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... and needs of social development, and these he is now rendering in this book. He calls himself a Socialist, but he is by no means a fanatical or uncritical adherent. To him Socialism presents itself as a very noble but a very human and fallible system of ideas and motives, a system that grows and develops. He regards its spirit, its intimate substance as the most hopeful thing in human affairs at the present time, but he does also find it shares with all mundane concerns ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... perfect he was glad to seize at that suggestion of personal blame, to acknowledge that he himself was impatient of every condition, intolerant even of the bonds of humanity. But if there ever should arise the time when the goddess should be taken from her pedestal, when the woman should be found fallible like all women, heaven preserve poor Theo then. The thought went through Mrs. Warrender's mind like a knife. What would become of him? He had given himself up so unreservedly to his love, he had sacrificed his ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... discovery, seen another crop of even subtler philosophers at their analytic work, witnessed the "Triumph of Reason and Democracy" in the shape of the French Revolution:—had he lived to see all this, he would have beheld meanwhile something which shows how fallible is prophecy. He would have seen, to wit, a most marvellous, rich and widespread outburst of the strenuous natural poetry he thought dead. From amid the critical rationalism of Germany would come the fullest, ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... satisfied with Rationalism in its destructive sense, nor with orthodoxy. He is confessedly one of the champions of the Critical School. Skepticism, he contends, is perfectly legitimate. We are authorized to doubt; our opinions are fallible; we must be prepared to change them whenever we think we can find better ones. The Bible is intended to reveal to us a life, not a dogma. We find in it no effort to describe dogmas; no theological criticisms; no system of morality.[109] Religious inspiration ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... persecuting spirit, which were exhibited in the Lutheran and Calvinistic churches. Each began with a common principle—the necessity of an orthodox faith. But this orthodoxy meant nothing more than their own belief as opposed to that of their adversaries; a belief acknowledged to be fallible, yet maintained as certain; rejecting authority with one breath and appealing to it in the next, and claiming to rest on sure proofs of reason and Scripture, which their opponents were ready with just as much ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... not bear this. I and the others would see that she was fallible; that there were things she wanted which she could not get. "Why can't you tell me now what your price ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... we used to hear when the High Church party were more formidable than they are at present—much about "the right of private judgment." Why, the eloquent Protestant would say, should I pin my faith upon the Church? the Church is but a congregation of fallible men, no better able to judge than I am. I have a right to my own opinion. It sounds like a paradox to say that free discussion is interfered with by a cause which, above all others, would have been expected to further it; but this in fact has been the ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... are always the Gainers by these Curbs and 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 them; and No body is debarr'd from Writing almost any Thing, but Blasphemy and Treason. ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... did she doubt the reality of her love. She had conceived one of those deep, uplifting passions possible only to a young girl. But her cynical experience warned her that the reality of that passion's object was not proven by any test besides the fallible one of her own poetizing imagination. The reality of the ideal she had constructed might be a vanishable quantity even though the love of it was not. So to the interview that ensued she brought, not the partiality of ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... called a church, what perplexity must he experience ere he can make up his mind which to choose! Instead of relying upon the ONE standard which God has given him in his Word; should he build his hope upon a human system he could be certain only that man is fallible and subject to err. How striking an instance have we, in our day, of the result of education, when the mind does not implicitly follow the guidance of the revealed Word of God. Two brothers, named Newman, educated at ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the order-book, said, "Not at all impossible, for it is in the order-book;" and so Lord Wellington turned round and went to sleep again. Then suddenly Roland half rose, and said, in a voice clear and firm, "But Lord Wellington, though a great captain, was a fallible man, sir, and the order-book was his own mortal handiwork. ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to swear to any purpose, are the Roman Catholics; and they, indeed, may well be said to swear "terribly"—or rather they would do so, if any poor set of human creatures, fallible by the necessity of their natures, could of a surety know what is infallible, and be commissioned by a writing on the sun or moon to let us hear it. Lord Thurlow, with all his damns, and his big voice, and his ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... familiarity we find it easier to be cautious in interpreting behaviour when we are dealing with phenomena remote from those of our own minds: Moreover, introspection, as psychoanalysis has demonstrated, is extraordinarily fallible even in cases where we feel a high degree of certainty. The net result seems to be that, though self-knowledge has a definite and important contribution to make to psychology, it is exceedingly misleading unless it is constantly checked and controlled by the test of external observation, ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
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