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# Errare humanum est, ignoscere divinum

> *"To err is human; to forgive, divine."*

## The phrase

| Language | Form |

| --- | --- |

| Latin | *Errare humanum est, ignoscere divinum.* |

| English | To err is human; to forgive, divine. |

| Literal | "To be wrong is human; to pardon, godlike." |

## Origin

The Latin half — *errare humanum est* — is older and proverbial. A close form ("*errare humanum est, perseverare autem diabolicum*" — "to err is human, but to persist in error is diabolical") is commonly attributed to **Seneca the Younger** (1st century AD), though the exact wording does not appear verbatim in his surviving texts. Variants circulated through medieval Latin as a school maxim.

The familiar bilingual pairing we use today — joining the Latin proverb to "to forgive, divine" — comes from **Alexander Pope**'s *An Essay on Criticism* (1711), lines 524–525:

> *Good-nature and good-sense must ever join;*

> *To err is human, to forgive, divine.*

Pope was writing about literary critics: his point was that critics, like everyone else, will make mistakes, and the mark of a generous reader is to forgive small faults rather than seize on them. The line escaped its original context almost immediately and has been quoted in moral, religious, and legal settings ever since.

## Why it endures

The phrase compresses two ideas that are usually argued separately:

1. **Error is the baseline condition of being human.** Not a failure mode, not an exception — the default. Any framework that treats mistakes as aberrations is built on a wrong model of people.

2. **Forgiveness is harder than error.** It is the active part. Erring takes no effort; pardoning does. Calling it *divine* is not flattery — it is an honest admission that it costs something, and most people will not pay.

The asymmetry is the whole point. Pairing the two halves makes the second one impossible to read as cheap.

## In practice

Useful as a check on two reflexes:

- **When you catch someone in a mistake.** The first line says: of course they made one. So did you, last week. The interesting question is what you do next.

- **When you catch yourself.** The same line applies. Self-flagellation over an error is just a different way of treating the error as exceptional. It wasn't.

## See also

- Seneca, *Epistulae Morales*, on human fallibility.

- Alexander Pope, *An Essay on Criticism* (1711).

- The shorter modern fragment "*to err is human*" — usually quoted alone, which loses Pope's whole argument.

# The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing

> *"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."*

## The phrase

| Language | Form |

| --- | --- |

| Greek (paraphrase) | *ἓν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα* — *hen oîda hóti oudèn oîda* |

| Literal | "One thing I know: that I know nothing." |

| Common English | The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. |

The widely circulated English version is a popular paraphrase, often attributed to Socrates by way of Plato. The exact wording does not appear in the dialogues; the closest source is the **Apology** (21d), where Socrates, recounting his conversation with a man reputed to be wise, concludes:

> *"I am wiser than this man; for neither of us really knows anything fine and good, but this man thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not think I do either."*

The compressed proverb we quote today is a later distillation of that passage.

## Origin

Socrates (c. 470–399 BC) never wrote anything down. Everything attributed to him reaches us through his students — primarily **Plato** and, to a lesser extent, **Xenophon**. The "I know that I know nothing" formulation is sometimes called the *Socratic paradox*, though Socrates himself uses it not as a paradox but as a procedural starting point: if you don't grant that you might be wrong, you cannot inquire honestly.

## Why it endures

Two reasons it has survived 2,400 years of quotation:

1. **It is a precondition for inquiry, not a conclusion of it.** The line is usually read as humility, but its real function is methodological. You can only investigate a question seriously if you treat your current answer as provisional. Every research practice — from science to law to debugging — depends on this move.

2. **It distinguishes confidence from knowledge.** Most people who *think* they know something have not separated "I have a strong intuition" from "I have verified this." Socrates' contribution was to make that gap visible and uncomfortable.

## In practice

Useful as a check on two reflexes:

- **When you find yourself certain.** Ask what would have to be true for you to be wrong. If you can't name anything, the certainty is probably a feeling, not a finding.

- **When you find yourself dismissive of someone else.** Ask what they might know that you don't. The Socratic move is to assume there is something, and to look for it before deciding they're confused.

## See also

- Plato, *Apology*, 21a–23b — the source passage.

- Xenophon, *Memorabilia* — a parallel, less philosophical portrait of Socrates.

- The Dunning–Kruger effect — the modern empirical cousin: people with the least knowledge are often the most confident.