Quotes About Facts

What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them.

Scientific truths are true even if there's nobody around to know about them; were true before humans appeared; will be true after we are extinct.

The truths of evolution, along with many other scientific truths, are so engrossingly fascinating and beautiful; how truly tragic to die having missed out on all that!

My passion is for scientific truth. I don't much care about good and evil. … I care about what's true.

It's odd, though, what makes you think about the truth. It's so rarely involved in the events of your life. I quit thinking about the truth for a time then. Its finer points seems impossible to find among the facts.

Face the facts. Then act on them. It's the only mantra I know, the only doctrine I have to offer you, and it's harder than you'd think, because I swear humans seem hardwired to do anything but. Face the facts. Don't pray, don't wish, don't buy into centuries-old dogma and dead rhetoric. Don't give in to your conditioning or your visions or your fucked-up sense of . . . whatever. Face the facts. Then act.

Literature is] the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts.

few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can't be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That's the best I can manage.

But there really was no point in asking. She read things, she knew things, and out they came, little surprises. It was strangely like unwrapping little gifts, not all of which he appreciated. She clung to facts and information, like flotsam in a shipwreck. They'd saved her.

Anger and hate are destructive emotions and neither will change the facts.

We in China had been trained not to draw conclusions from facts, but to start with Marxist theories or Mao thoughts or the Party line and to deny, even condemn, the facts that did not suit them. I

The man's expression grew darker and darker, and he puffed restlessly on his cigarette; he had apparently quite forgotten the original business. I had at first intended to tell him, and only him, something of the real facts in order to allay his opposition as much as possible, but there was apparently no longer any need to. Under my bandage I involuntarily smiled a secret, bitter smile. Once in a while it's good to give vent to one's anger.

in a foreign language. Linguists have called this epistemological law the "principle of charity"; it requires that when we are confronted with discourse that is strange to us, we seek an "interpretation which, in the light of what it knows of the facts, will maximise truth among the sentences of the corpus."11

we may need to find a way of posing Socratic questions that lead to personal insight rather than simply repeating the facts as we see them yet again. We

Hegel nota in un passo delle sue opere che tutti i grandi fatti e i grandi personaggi della storia universale si presentano, per così dire, due volte. Ha dimenticato di aggiungere: la prima come tragedia, la seconda come farsa.

Fiction had never been Jackson's thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up. What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.

No sane man objects to palpable lies about him; what he objects to is damaging facts.

A man who has bought a theory will fight a vigorous rearguard action against the facts.

No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy subject and masters all its facts.

When a man wants to write a book full of unassailable facts, he always goes to the British Museum.

But facts always convince, and another man's opinion rarely convinces.

I came to Freud for facts. I read 'The Interpretation of Dreams' and I thought- 'Oh, here is a man who is not just theorizing away, here is a man who has got facts.

Still, it will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring what belief is most in harmony with their system.

Most men are less afraid of ghosts than of facts.