Wisdom: The first error is that of the southern people, and it consists in holding that these eastern and western places are real places. ... give no quarter to that thought, whether it threatens you with fear, or tempts you with hopes. For this is Superstition and all who believe it will come in the end to the swamps to the south and the jungles to the far south. Part of the same error is to think that the Landlord is a real man:

When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together

When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

"It seems to me that, very strikingly here, is borne out the general acceptance that ours is only an intermediate existence, in which there is nothing fundamental, or nothing final to take as a positive standard to judge by. Peasants believed in meteorites. Scientists excluded meteorites. Peasants believe in "thunderstones." Scientists exclude "thunderstones." It is useless to argue that peasants are out in the fields, and that scientists are shut up in laboratories and lecture rooms. We cannot take for a real base that, as to phenomena with which they are more familiar, peasants are more likely to be right than are scientists: a host of biologic and meteorologic fallacies of peasants rises against us."

They will realize the fact that planet and man can and should work hand in hand, so to speak, to their mutual benefit and understanding; and that the majority of cataclysms, earthquakes, droughts and floods are in actuality man-made. The past unfortunate period of ignorant self-interest resulting in private enterprise, which has among other disasters, exploited parts of the planet to the extent of flaying the surface of its layer of fertile earth which has taken aeons to build up, will be found to have given all of mankind a serious set-back. It will be necessary for the people fully to realize that this is so, and therefore to subscribe to a patient and lengthy process of renovation of the soil.

[T]he most fatal error that could be committed by the leaders of religious thought is the attempt to force into their own age conceptions which have lived their life, and come to their natural end in preceding ages.

The... earthquakes, hurricanes, floods...are the result of the wrong thoughts and actions of humanity... All atoms in creation are interconnected. There is no separation anywhere. If, as today, we create conditions in which two-thirds of the world’s population must make do with one-fourth of the world’s food, and therefore starve and die in the millions, then catastrophe is inevitable.

The great error of traditional proofs of the existence of god is that they try to take a symbolic truth for a literal truth, a truth of fact, and then try to prove that it is a fact.

There are two opposite errors into which those who study the annals of our country are in constant danger of falling, the error of judging the present by the past, and the error of judging the past by the present. The former is the error of minds prone to reverence whatever is old, the latter of minds readily attracted by whatever is new. The former error may perpetually be observed in the reasonings of conservative politicians on the questions of their own day. The latter error perpetually infects the speculations of writers of the liberal school when they discuss the transactions of an earlier age. The former error is the more pernicious in a statesman, and the latter in a historian.

The source of the errors of these two sects, is in not having known that the state of man at the present time differs from that of his creation; so that the one, remarking some traces of his first greatness and being ignorant of his corruption, has treated nature as sound and without need of redemption, which leads him to the height of pride; whilst the other, feeling the present wretchedness and being ignorant of the original dignity, treats nature as necessarily infirm and irreparable, which precipitates it into despair of arriving at real good, and thence into extreme laxity.