"If it is
fallible," he replied, "there is the greater reason that I explain it, lest it mislead."
She is a daughter of earth; you are an angel of heaven; only be not too austere in your divinity, and remember that I am a poor,
fallible mortal.
Worldly wisdom may force them into widely different ways of life; worldly wisdom may delude them, or may make them delude themselves, into contracting an earthly and a
fallible union.
He is very, distinctly
fallible, but I think his life is not less instructive because in certain things it seems a failure.
"The human and
fallible should not arrogate a power with which the divine and perfect alone can be safely intrusted."
Let experience, the least
fallible guide of human opinions, be appealed to for an answer to these inquiries.
As long as the reason of man continues
fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.
The one thing he dreads (next to not being noticed) is to be proved
fallible! If you once praise a picture, your character for infallibility hangs by a thread.
Even here there might be a mistake: human prescriptions were
fallible things: Lydgate had said that treatment had hastened death,--why not his own method of treatment?
All his other senses may be
fallible, but not his sense of smell, and so he makes assurance positive by the final test.
And just because we are not misled by familiarity we find it easier to be cautious in interpreting behaviour when we are dealing with phenomena remote from those of our own minds: Moreover, introspection, as psychoanalysis has demonstrated, is extraordinarily
fallible even in cases where we feel a high degree of certainty.
But it has not been quite so often remarked that this power (
fallible, like every other human attribute) is for the most part absolutely incapable of self-revision; and that when it has delivered an adverse opinion which by all human lights is subsequently proved to have failed, it is undistinguishable from prejudice, in respect of its determination not to be corrected.