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“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”
Custom can disguise error by making the familiar feel legitimate; critical judgment requires re-examining practices that have escaped scrutiny through repetition.
Source note: Common Sense, Introduction; Paine uses the observation to explain the resistance that unfamiliar political arguments may initially provoke.
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“Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things.”
James resists treating every possible intellectual mistake as catastrophic, because an excessive fear of error can itself prevent inquiry, experience and the possibility of gaining truth.
Source note: The Will to Believe, essay “The Will to Believe”; Project Gutenberg #26659. James is contrasting the risk of being mistaken with the cost of refusing every uncertain intellectual venture.
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“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”
Understanding a position requires serious contact with competing arguments; familiarity with only one side can produce confidence without real comprehension.
Source note: On Liberty, Chapter 2; Mill argues for open discussion because opposing views expose weaknesses and sharpen understanding.
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“It’s better by far to hunt for a star, than the spots on the sun abiding.”
Wilcox contrasts constructive attention with habitual fault-finding, recommending a perspective that actively looks for what remains promising without claiming flaws do not exist.
Source note: Poems of Cheer, “As You Go Through Life,” represented 1914 edition; Project Gutenberg #3238. The poem explicitly acknowledges that things go wrong, so the line is about chosen attention rather than denial.
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“The optimist has the power of seeing things in their entirety and in their right relations.”
Optimism is defined here as a broader way of interpreting circumstances: the positive outlook is linked to seeing relationships and the whole situation rather than only one discouraging part.
Source note: In Tune with the Infinite, Prelude; Project Gutenberg #23559. The sentence belongs to Trine’s philosophical New Thought contrast between optimist and pessimist and should not be treated as a clinical definition.
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“The universe is wider than our views of it.”
Reality exceeds any one viewpoint, so confidence in a perspective should leave room for what has not yet been seen.
Source note: Walden, Conclusion; Thoreau uses the sentence while arguing that familiar human views do not exhaust reality.