The evils of the body are murder, theft, and adultery; of the tongue, lying, slander, abuse and idle talk; of the mind, covetousness, hatred and error.
The mystic must be steadily told,-All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,-universal signs, instead of these village symbols,-and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.
One point of difference between Hinduism and other religions is that in Hinduism we pass from truth to truth-from a lower truth to a higher truth-and never from error to truth.
No one should be judged by their defects. The great virtues a person has are his or her especially. But their errors are the common weakness of humanity and should never be counted in estimating a person’s character.
Even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets; because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom.
Some positive persisting fops we know, Who, if once wrong, will needs be always so; But you with pleasure own your errors past, And make each day a critique on the last.
Not complete inaction, which is an error, a confusion, a self-delusion, an impossibility, but action full and
free done without subjection to sense and passion, desireless and unattached works, are the first secret of perfection.
The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. The error of Louis XIV was that he thought human nature would always be the same. The result of his error was the French Revolution. It was an admirable result.
We cannot see outside what we are not inside. The universe is to us what the huge engine is to the miniature engine; and indication of any error in the tiny engine leads us to imagine trouble in the huge one.