William Cullen Bryant Quotes

Error is created; truth is eternal.

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.

Truth indeed rather alleviates than hurts, and will always bear up against falsehood, as oil does above water.

An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains.

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

When truth and error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.

Most of what we know or assume to know is wrong one way or another.

He who shuts out truth, by the same act opens the door to all the error that supplies its place.

Every error pronounces judgment on itself when it attempts to apply its rules to the standard of truth.

Every error is truth abused.

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.

He that is possessed with a prejudice is possessed with a devil, and one of the worst kinds of devils, for it shuts out the truth, and often leads to ruinous error.

Antithesis is the narrow gateway through which error most prefers to worm its way towards truth.

The truth is perilous never to the true, Nor knowledge to the wise; and to the fool, And to the false, error and truth alike, Error is worse than ignorance.

Truth lives in the cellar, error on the doorstep.

Many-have too rashly charged the troops of error, and remain as trophies unto the enemies of truth.

All the martyrs in the history of the world are not sufficient to establish the correctness of an opinion. Martyrdom, as a rule, establishes the sincerity of the martyr, - never the correctness of his thought. Things are true or false in themselves. Truth cannot be affected by opinions; it cannot be changed, established, or affected by martyrdom. An error cannot be believed sincerely enough to make it a truth.

Custom without truth is error grown old.

If I go for the alternative which is false, then obviously I shall be in error; if I take the other side, then it is by... chance that I arrive at the truth, and I shall still be at fault.... In this incorrect use of free will may be found the privation which constitutes the essence of error.

Error is worse than ignorance.

Truth is one, but error is manifold.

Truth possesses within herself a penetrating force, unknown alike to error and falsehood. I say 'truth' and you understand my meaning. For the beautiful words truth and justice need not to be defined in order to be understood in their true sense.

It is better to be divided by truth than to be united in error. It is better to speak the truth that hurts and then heals, than falsehood that comforts and then kills. It is better to be hated for telling the truth than to be loved for telling a lie. It is better to stand alone with the truth, than to be wrong with a multitude. It is better to ultimately succeed with the truth than to temporarily succeed with a lie. There is only one Gospel.

There is something very sublime, though very fanciful, in Plato's description of the Supreme Being,--that truth is His body and light His shadow. According to this definition there is nothing so contradictory to his nature as error and falsehood.