Quotes About Fictions

The war, of course, furnished many examples of this pattern: the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and out of these three elements, a counterfeit of reality to which there was a violent instinctive response. For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.

to judge us all through the machine of the Commandant's monstrous fictions! As though they were the truth! As though history & the written word were friends, rather than adversaries!

Theatre,' Davy said. 'That's what houses are, you know. Just theatre. All buildings are. Charades of permanence. They're fantasies. Fictions we make about ourselves. Right?

Whence can any cause be known but from its known effects? Whence can any hypothesis be proved but from the apparent phenomena? To establish one hypothesis upon another is building entirely in the air; and the utmost we ever attain by these conjectures and fictions is to ascertain the bare possibility of our opinion, but never can we, upon such terms, establish its reality.

There has already been published by the bucketfuls such brazen lies and utter fictions about me that I would long since have gone to my grave if I had let myself pay attention to that.

Somos contos contando contos. Nada.

In such a society as ours the only possible chance for change, for mobility, for political, economic, and moral flow lies in the tactics of guerrilla warfare, in the use of fictions, of language.

Some dreams we have are nothing else but dreams, Unnatural and full of contradictions; Yet others of our most romantic schemes, Are something more than fictions.

Religions, rites, and rituals will remain important as long as the power of humankind rests on mass cooperation and as long as mass cooperation rests on belief in shared fictions.

fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power. You will have to admit things—for example, about the sources of your own power—that will anger allies,

Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. Ever since the Stone Age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives. Indeed, Homo sapiens conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions.

The primary ambition of Nietzsche's critique of knowledge is ... to demonstrate that 'truths' are fictions masking moral commitments.

In merest prudence men should teach . . . That science ranks as monstrous things Two pairs of upper limbs; so wings-- E'en Angel's wings!--are fictions.

but I've never been much for faking feelings or maintaining polite fictions to suit public celebrations.

This is a repository of ideas, dissertations from geniuses, not a library packed with lies and fictions!

The fictions were far more persuasive than the facts, and more persuasive than both was the longing to be caught up in a mass movement of solidarity, with the promise of emancipation at the end. My father's grievances were real and well founded. But his solutions were dreams.

O mal verdadeiro, o único mal, são as convenções e as ficções sociais, que se sobrepõem às realidades naturais, tudo, desde a família ao dinheiro, desde a religião ao Estado.

this is our tragedy, she said in his words, our fictions are killing us, but if we didn't have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.

I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be.

Gaston Milhaud, like many of his contemporaries, sought to overthrow empirical positivism by insisting on the fundamental reality of the mind, but mind conceived in the Kantian sense. The knowledge of nature is symbolic, and there is no necessary connection between the phenomena and our fictions.

Time obliterates the fictions of opinion and confirms the decisions of nature.

But aren't journals such as this basically occasions for candid assessments? No. They're not. They're for telling oneself the fictions that are as honest as you can make them and still keep your life bearable.

Time obliterates the fictions of opinion and confirms the decisions of nature.

I have some knowledge of the time that may be misspent, clinging to fictions and supposing them truths.