Common Error Quotes

#1. A Nation ... is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry, and a common dislike of their neighbors

Karl Deutsch

#2. Identifying someone by his, or her, outward appearance is often the first and most common error in the world

Sunday Adelaja

#3. Perhaps the prevalence of pedantry may be largely accounted for by the common error of thinking that, because useful knowledge should be remembered, any kind of knowledge that is at all worth learning should be remembered too.

Albert J. Nock

#4. A common error of ignorance is to maintain that what one does not know does not exist.

Leon Battista Alberti

#5. Failing to open the center at the right moment - a common error by White in the Exchange Lopez - can allow Black an excellent game.

Andrew Soltis

#6. Let us not be too prodigal when we are young, nor too parsimonious when we are old. Otherwise we shall fall into the common error of those, who, when they had the power to enjoy, had not the prudence to acquire; and when they had the prudence to acquire, had no longer the power to enjoy.

Charles Caleb Colton

#7. It is common error to infer that things which are consecutive in order of time have necessarily the relation of cause and effect.

Jacob Bigelow

#8. There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.

Alfred North Whitehead

#9. The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one's soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are not attractive - you are leaking.

Charles Lamb

#10. There is hardly a more common error than that of taking the man who has one talent, for a genius.

Arthur Helps

#11. Be very slow to believe that you are wiser than all others; it is a fatal but common error. Where one has been saved by a true estimation of another's weakness, thousands have been destroyed by a false appreciation of their own strength.

Charles Caleb Colton

#12. The very common error of young or unconfident cooks is to keep putting more of their own personal ideology into a plate until there's so much noise that you really can't even hear a tune. You can say more in an empty space than you can in a crowded one.

Mario Batali

#13. It is a common error to imagine that to be stirring and voluble in a worthy cause is to be good and to do good.

John Lancaster Spalding

#14. The common error today is to bring God so close that we strip Him of His "godness." We think we have him figured out. So God becomes our pal, our buddy, our Divine Butler."
from "Dug Down Deep

Joshua Harris

#15. We must beware of falling into the fatally common error of supposing that what we see is all there is to see.

Charles Webster Leadbeater

#16. The common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for the reality, to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for comfort rather than follow it.

Alan W. Watts

#17. It is the common error of builders and parents to follow some plan they think beautiful (and perhaps is so) without considering that nothing is beautiful that is misplaced.

Mary Wortley Montagu

#18. It is an error common to many artists, who strive merely to avoid mistakes, when all our efforts should be to create positive and important work. Better positive and important with mistakes and failures than perfect mediocrity.

Edward Steichen

#19. A common American error is to believe that freedom is the absence of state authority.

Timothy Snyder

#20. We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universalthat error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#21. The organic fundamental error of humanism was that it desired to educate the common people (on whom it looked down) from its lofty stance instead of trying to understand them and to learn from them.

Stefan Zweig

#22. Sometimes you feel so much that common sense goes out the window. The important thing moving forward is that you're making the best decisions. Everyone has an error in judgment every now and again.

Heidi McLaughlin

#23. Art and science have so much in common - the process of trial and error, finding something new and innovative, and to experiment and succeed in a breakthrough.

Peter M. Brant

#24. It is an error common to many to take the character of mankind from the worst and basest amongst them; whereas, as an excellent writer has observed, nothing should be esteemed as characteristical, of a species but what is to be found amongst the best and the most perfect individuals of that species.

Henry Fielding

#25. A common human error is a tendency to recognize personal truths as universal truths.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#26. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#27. Do not commit the error, common among the young, of assuming that if you cannot save the whole of mankind you have failed.

Jan De Hartog

#28. In baseball you have individual responsibility, and if you fail it, you get an error. But at the same time, your focus is on the common goal of the team to win. This is part of what resonates with people about baseball. This is how they would like society to work.

Jed S. Rakoff

#29. We must talk and reach for common understandings, precisely because all of us are imperfect and can never act with the certainty that God is on our side; and yet at times we must act nonetheless, as if we are certain, protected from error only by providence.

Barack Obama

#30. Manipulating strings in C or C++ is error prone. Four common errors are unbounded string copies, off-by-one errors, null-termination errors, and string truncation.

Robert C. Seacord

#31. Error is none the better for being common, nor truth the worse for having lain neglected.

John Locke

#32. Educated men and women, especially those who are in college, very often get the idea that religion is fit only for the common people. No young man or woman can make a greater error than this ...

Booker T. Washington

#33. Error is far more common than fraud which probably comprises 1 percent or a tenth of a percent of the literature.

Walter Gilbert

#34. Though experience should be our guide ... and we see mistakes are common at the age of twenty-three, it must be acknowledged that not every youthful feeling begins unworthily and ends in error. If this were the case, mankind would have perished long ago.

Allegra Goodman