“Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion.”

"Religion: A Dialogue."
Variant translation: To free a man from error does not mean to take something from him, but to give him something.
Essays
Source: Essays and Aphorisms
Context: To free a man from error is to give, not to take away. Knowledge that a thing is false is a truth. Error always does harm; sooner or later it will bring mischief to the man who harbors it. Then give up deceiving people; confess ignorance of what you don't know, and leave everyone to form his own articles of faith for himself. Perhaps they won't turn out so bad, especially as they'll rub one another's corners down, and mutually rectify mistakes. The existence of many views will at any rate lay a foundation of tolerance. Those who possess knowledge and capacity may betake themselves to the study of philosophy, or even in their own persons carry the history of philosophy a step further.

Source: The Way Towards The Blessed Life or the Doctrine of Religion 1806, P. 26-27

Es ist so gewiß als wunderbar, daß Wahrheit und Irrthum aus Einer Quelle entstehen; deßwegen man oft dem Irrthum nicht schaden darf, weil man zugleich der Wahrheit schadet.
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

The complete political works. Rights of man: being an answer to Mr. Burke's attack on the French Revolution, p. 306
1790s

Gitanjali http://www.spiritualbee.com/gitanjali-poems-of-tagore/ (1912) <br class="br">Context: Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high<br>Where knowledge is free<br>Where the world has not been broken up into fragments<br>By narrow domestic walls<br>Where words come out from the depth of truth<br>Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection<br>Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way<br>Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit<br>Where the mind is led forward by thee<br>Into ever-widening thought and action<br>Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

&quot; Cargo Cult Science http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm&quot;, adapted from a 1974 Caltech commencement address; also published in Surely You&#x27;re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, p. 342 <br class="br">Context: We&#x27;ve learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature&#x27;s phenomena will agree or they&#x27;ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven&#x27;t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it&#x27;s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.

Also translated as: Truth does not need to borrow garments from falsehood.
Noli me Tangere