“To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.”
G 30
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook G (1779-1783)
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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg 137
German scientist, satirist 1742–1799Related quotes
“For to err in opinion, though it be not the part of wise men, is at least human.”
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Context: We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they moved finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
“To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.”
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Variant: To divinise is human, to humanise is divine.
Source: Les Misérables
“To err is human, to purr is feline.”
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“To err is human; to manage error is system.”
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)
“To err is human, whether we are religious, atheist, or agnostic.”
The Transhumanism Handbook, 2019
