Quotes About Truth

We must not take from our children—or ourselves—the truth that is in the world of the imagination.

Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

Okay, I can get to the grade school all right, but I can't possibly take you with me. You're so big you wouldn't even fit into the school bus. Anyhow, you'd terrify everybody.' At the thought she smiled, but Proginoskes was not in a laughing mood. 'Not everybody is able to see me,' he told her. 'I'm real, and most earthlings can bear very little reality.

If I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children.

How can we be able to live our lives if we deny the one who we truly love?

Sextus [Empericus] identifies three different types of philosophy. There are Dogmatists, who think that they know the truth. There are Academic Sceptics, who think the truth can never be known. Then there are Sceptics, who retain an open mind, not thinking truth is yet discovered, but prepared to accept that it might be.

Why should I apologise for being utterly honest from the start, telling you the score, telling you the truth, coming to meet your parents, calling them to say I was worried that you didn't answer your phone. Are these the actions of some kind of shit? No, I think they're what a man who loves you might do.

No, that can't be so.' 'Believe me, it is. All kinds of things you told them like sunsets are good and killing small birds is bad.' 'Oh please, may I have said something less banal. Please!

I told you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty.

If he hadn't lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is.' She is trying to get me to see that although I thought I loved this man very completely for exactly who he was, I was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is.

You young people are always so obsessed with truth. The truth is often overrated.

Be who you seem to be.

The man stands behind the man. The seated man thinks, For heaven's sake, stop standing behind me. You are driving me mad. It is February and it is impossible. Someone has thrown onion skins all over the stairwell. Now I will have to clean them up - though I love to sweep. But still, it is disgusting. But all he says is I have to go soon. Why can't people tell the truth? It is impossible not to lie. It is February and not lying is impossible.

He is a monk. On his card it says INNER PEACE CENTER. I will go there in February for a tea ceremony. Does he actually know more than I do about inner peace? If he met my relatives, would he have a nervous breakdown? What about his relatives? Do they drive him nuts? The truth is everybody gets on everybody's nerves.

The Holy Fool is a truth-teller because he is an outcast. Those who are not part of existing social hierarchies are free to blurt out inconvenient truths or question things the rest of us take for granted.

The first set of mistakes we make with strangers—the default to truth and the illusion of transparency—has to do with our inability to make sense of the stranger as an individual. But on top of those errors we add another, which pushes our problem with strangers into crisis. We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.

Defaulting to truth is a problem. It lets spies and con artists roam free.

Puzzle Number One: Why can't we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face?

The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours.

That's the consequence of not defaulting to truth. If you don't begin in a state of trust, you can't have meaningful social encounters.

We have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest.

Suicide is coupled. The first set of mistakes we make with strangers—the default to truth and the illusion of transparency—has to do with our inability to make sense of the stranger as an individual. But on top of those errors we add another, which pushes our problem with strangers into crisis. We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.

Default to truth becomes an issue when we are forced to choose between two alternatives, one of which is likely and the other of which is impossible to imagine.

We fall out of truth-default mode only when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive. We do not behave, in other words, like sober-minded scientists, slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion. We do the opposite. We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.