Quotes About Truth

Man is a thinking substance, a portion of the Cosmic Substance; but man is limited, while God has no limits. We are immersed in mind and that mind contains all knowledge and all truth. It is seeking to give us this knowledge, for God delights to give good gifts to his children.

Any man who develops the power to perceive truth, and who can show that he always knows the right thing to do and that he can be trusted to do the right thing, will be honored and advanced.

He wants all these things because it is Himself that enjoys and appreciates them; it is God who wants to play, and sing, and enjoy beauty, and proclaim truth and wear fine clothes, and eat good foods. "It is God that worketh in you to will and to do," said Paul.

Art gives charm and beauty to terrible things. That is the power and its glory. It is hard for us to accept the truth that art is doom - a harsh doom for the artist who survives in his art but not as a living human.

that the work may be defined as the poem of a confession

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie.

How to write a story, though ignorant or baffled. You take something that is important to you, something you have brooded about. You try to see it as clearly as you can, and to fix it in a transferable equivalent. All you want in the finished print is the clean statement of the lens, which is yourself, on the subject that has been absorbing your attention. Sure, it's autobiography. Sure, it's fiction. Either way, if you have done it right, it's true.

Nevertheless, no fictions.

The only life we know well, the one on which we are the ultimate authority, is our own. The only experience to which we can bear witness is that which we have personally endured and observed.

For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.

No Eden valid without serpent.

Which demonstrates our need of a sense of history : we need it to know what real injustice looked like.

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention, and

As the saying goes, I don't want his blood on the rug.

In fiction I think we should have no agenda except to try to be truthful. The shouters in thunder roar from their podiums and pulpits; I squeak from my corner.

You break experience up into pieces, and you put them together in different combinations, new combinations, and some are real and some are not, some are documentary and some are imagined.... It takes a pedestrian and literal mind to be worried about which is true and which is not true. It's all of it not true, and it's all of it true.

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention...

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne.

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.

It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self.

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling. p.903