Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurled: / The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

There are minds constructed like the eyes of certain insects, which discern, with admirable distinctness, the most delicate lineaments and finest veins of the leaf which bears them, but are totally unable to take in the ensemble of the plant or shrub. When error has effected an entrance into such minds, it remains there impregnable, because no general view assists them in throwing off the chance impression of the moment.

Mistakes live in the neighbourhood of truth and therefore delude us.

No one is always right.

Men are not necessarily more zealous for truth than they are for error.

Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has the right to be wrong in his facts.

The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny each other's existence. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal.

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

Referees are human beings, and they make mistakes.

Not everybody is right all the time.

Truth as Circe. - Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?

Unity of opinion is indeed a glorious and desirable thing, and its circle cannot be too strong and extended, if the centre be truth; but if the centre be error, the greater the circumference, the greater the evil.

How strange it is to see with how much passion People see things only in their own fashion!

Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman – how dense! Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too. Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle.

The truth is a fog, in which one man sees the heavenly host and the other one sees a flying elephant.

There is a point when a personal opinion shades off into an error of fact.

The fog of illusion, the fog of confusion is hanging all over the world.

Small minds can never handle great themes.

The superstition that the hounds of truth will rout the vermin of error seems, like a fragment of Victorian lace, quaint, but too brittle to be lifted out of the showcase.

Error is to truth as sleep is to waking. I have observed that one turns, as if refreshed, from error back to truth.

The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

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

When you look into a mirror it is not yourself you see, but a kind of apish error posed in fearful symmetry kool uoy nehW rorrim a otni ton si ti ˛ees uoy flesruoy dnik a tub rorre hsipa fo lufraef ni desop yrtemmys

Truth lives in the cellar, error on the doorstep.

An error becomes an error when born as truth.