“If this be error and upon me proved,”William Shakespeare · Sonete · 1609 · Sonetul 116
To deny a belief means accepting the full price its denial carries.
The sonnet closes with a wager: the poet stakes his entire work. If constant love does not exist, then everything he wrote about it is false, and the whole of human experience is an illusion. The argument is a reductio: to deny unchanging love is to deny everything people have ever known about love. It is a bold but honest move — it admits the possibility of error and shows what that error would cost.
Why it matters A model for how to hold a conviction: not with arrogant certainty, but by showing what abandoning it would concretely mean.