...it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human intellect to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives; whereas it ought properly to hold itself indifferently disposed towards both alike.

Es error peculiar y perpetuo del entendimiento humano el que lo mueva y lo estimule más lo afirmativo que lo negativo.

Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.

I think the most common mistake for humanity is believing you’re going to be made happy because of some external circumstance.

Se comete un gran error creyendo que los seres humanos son capaces de alcanzar tarde o temprano los límites de su satisfacción.

"Nothing is against nature!" he retorted. "That's the mistake people make; and it causes endless unhappiness."

What is wrong with positive thinking? In a word — truth.

It is a human defect — to try to know one's self by the self of another.

It is as great an error to speak well of a worthless man as to speak ill of a good man.

The fatal error of much science fiction has been to subscribe to an optimism based on the idea that revolution, or a new gimmick, or a bunch of strong men, or an invasion of aliens, or the conquest of other planets, or the annihilation of half the world — in short, pretty nearly anything but the facing up to the integral and irredeemable nature of mankind — can bring about utopian situations. It is the old error of the externalization of evil.

To err is human

Most errors consist only in our not rightly applying names to things. For when someone says that the lines which are drawn from the center of a circle to its circumference are unequal, he surely understands (then at least) by a circle something different from what mathematicians understand. Similarly, when men err in calculating they have certain numbers in their mind and different ones on the paper. So if you consider what they have in mind, they really do not err, though they seem to err because we think they have in their mind the numbers which are on the paper. If this were not so, we would not believe that they were erring, just as I did not believe that he was erring whom I recently heard cry out that his courtyard had flown into his neighbor's hen, because what he had in mind seemed sufficiently clear to me.

And most controversies have arisen from this, that men do not rightly explain their own mind, or interpret the mind of the other man badly. For really, when they contradict one another most vehemently, they either have the same thoughts, or they are thinking of different things, so that what they think are errors and absurdities in the other are not.

For neither love, nor the “unction of the Holy One,” makes us infallible: therefore, through unavoidable defect of understanding, we cannot but mistake in many things.

Porque se dice que los humanos no se satisfacen jamás, que se les da una cosa y siempre quieren algo más. Y se dice esto con erróneo desprecio, ya que es una de las mayores virtudes que tiene la especie y que la hace superior a los animales que se dan por satisfechos con lo que tienen.