A Quote by W. H. Auden

Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.

W. H. Auden

Quote Topics

Critical Fallible Guide Infallible Least Means Pleasure

Quote Author

W. H. Auden
English - Poet
February 21, 1907 - September 29, 1973

Let experience, the least fallible guide of human opinion, be appealed to for an answer to these inquiries.

Alexander Hamilton

Though experience be our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of fact; it must be acknowledged, that this guide is not altogether infallible, but in some cases is apt to lead us into errors.

David Hume

Infallible denotes the quality of never deceiving or misleading and so means wholly trustworthy and reliable; inerrant means wholly true. Scripture is termed infallible and inerrant to express the conviction that all its teaching is the utterance of God who cannot lie, whose word, once spoken, abides for ever, and that therefore it may be trusted implicitly.

J. I. Packer

I'm really interested in the pleasure we get from stories and the pleasure we get from movies, and certainly the pleasure we get from virtual experiences. My complaint is against empathy as a moral guide. But as a source of pleasure, it can't be beat.

Paul Bloom

Democracy is essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom. As such it is by no means infallible or certain. Nor must we forget that there has often been much more cultural and spiritual freedom under an autocratic rule than under some democracies and it is at least conceivable that under the government of a very homogeneous and doctrinaire majority democratic government might be as oppressive as the worst dictatorship.

Friedrich August von Hayek

Faith is the first step to understanding. Either it's the Word of an infallible God, the fallible words of men, or faith in what you personally believe. You've got to have faith in something. Believe me.

Ray Comfort

It was manly and dignified to rely upon God for the dissolution of all troubles. He was the only infallible help, guide and friend.

Mahatma Gandhi

Of course language is not an infallible guide, but it contains, with all its defects, a good deal of stored insight and experience.

C. S. Lewis

Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience-that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible-that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.

Ayn Rand

Using the risk-based approach presented by the ISPE Guide (i.e., system and component level classification) limited qualification activities to verifying and testing critical aspects of direct impact systems and their critical components.

Robert A. Young

Clearly, the decision-making that we rely on in society is fallible. It's highly fallible, and we should know that.

Daniel Kahneman

...only the pleasure which proceeds from a rational value judgement can be regarded as moral, pleasure, as such, is not a guide to action nor a standard of morality.

Ayn Rand

Akri infallible. Well, except for a couple of things, and we don’t talk about those ‘cause it makes akri cranky. I like that word ‘infallible.’ It just like me. Infallible. (Simi)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

I don't know what being an Everest guide means. I am a coach, not a guide.

Anatoli Boukreev

Perhaps I had better inform my Protestant readers that the famous Dogma of Papal Infallibility is by far the most modest pretension of the kind in existence. Compared with our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils, our infallible astronomers, our infallible judges, and our infallible parliaments, the Pope is on his knees in the dust confessing his ignorance before the throne of God, asking only that as to certain historical matters on which he has clearly more sources of information open to him than anyone else his decision shall be taken as final.