“Many errors,
a little rightness.”

— Ezra Pound, The Cantos

Canto CXVI
The Cantos

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Ezra Pound68

American Imagist poet and critic 1885–1972

Marco Guazzo (1480–1556) Italian historian

È poco male
Quel fallo poi che al fin in ben riesse.
Act V (Filarco).
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 295.
Errori d’Amore

“Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.”

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751) English politician and Viscount

Reflections upon Exile (1716)

“Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth.”

Jules Verne book A Journey to the Center of the Earth

La science, mon garçon, est faite d’erreurs, mais d’erreurs qu’il est bon de commettre, car elles mènent peu à peu à la vérité.
Source: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Ch. XXXI: Preparations for a voyage of discovery

“Custom may lead a man into many errors; but it justifies none.”

Henry Fielding (1707–1754) English novelist and dramatist

“Truth is one, but error proliferates. Man tracks it down and cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth. But the ultimate atom will always essentially be an error, a miscalculation.”

René Daumal (1908–1944) French poet and writer

Vol. 2, Essais et Notes
The Lie of the Truth (1938)

“It takes just the right combination of circumstances to produce a catastrophe, just as it takes the right combination of inevitable errors to produce an accident.”

Charles Perrow book Normal Accidents

Source: 1980s and later, Normal Accidents, 1984, p. 356

“All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it.”

John Locke book An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Book IV, Ch. 20, sec. 17
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

“What fundamental biological principle gives the largest number the right to think they are preserved from error?”

Henri Laborit (1914–1995) French physician, writer and philosopher

Mais en vertu de quel principe biologique fondamental, le plus grand nombre serait-il préservé de l’erreur?
L'Homme imaginant: essai de biologie politique (1970), p. 36