"Knowledge being to be had only of visible and certain truth, error is not a fault of our knowledge, but a mistake of our judgment, giving assent to that which is not true." (John Locke, "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding", 1689)
"Most mistakes in philosophy and logic occur because the human mind is apt to take the symbol for the reality." (Albert Einstein, "Cosmic Religion: With Other Opinions and Aphorisms", 1931)
"The most pervasive paradox of the human condition which we see is that the processes which allow us to survive, grow, change, and experience joy are the same processes which allow us to maintain an impoverished model of the world - our ability to manipulate symbols, that is, to create models. So the processes which allow us to accomplish the most extraordinary and unique human activities are the same processes which block our further growth if we commit the error of mistaking the model of the world for reality." (Richard Bandler & John Grinder, "The Structure of Magic", 1975)
"Since we have no systematic way to avoid all the inconsistencies of commonsense logic, each person must find his own way by building a private collection of 'cognitive censors' to suppress the kinds of mistakes he has discovered in the past." (Marvin Minsky, "Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious", 1980)
"All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. […] What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create." (Paul Valéry, "The Outlook for Intelligence", 1962)
"To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know." (Hannah Arendt, "The Life of the Mind", 1977)
"To assume you know someone well enough that you can and do predict their behavior and mental perspective is a gross and often tragic mistake, for it eliminates that person's freedom to create his or her own opinion and drastically affects the emerging picture of the relationship." (Meredith L Young-Sowers, "Agartha: a journey to the stars", 1984)
"Don't mistake a solution method for a problem definition - especially if it’s your own solution method." (Donald C Gause & Gerald M Weinberg, "Are Your Lights On?", 2011)
"Trust is fundamental to leading others into the dark, since trust enables fear to be 'actionable' as courage rather than actionable as anger. Since the bedrock of trust is faith that all will be OK within uncertainty, leaders’ fundamental role is to ultimately lead themselves. Research has found that successful leaders share three behavioral traits: they lead by example, admit their mistakes, and see positive qualities in others. All three are linked to spaces of play. Leading by example creates a space that is trusted - and without trust, there is no play. Admitting mistakes is to celebrate uncertainty. Seeing qualities in others is to encourage diversity." (Beau Lotto, "Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently", 2017)
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