Quotes About Truth

There is no limit to the amount of intelligence invested in ignorance when the need for illusion runs deep.

Facts always are sensational.

The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop.

To tell the truth I never had it so good. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy.

Unfortunately for the betterment of mankind it is not always the fair-minded who are in the right.

Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can't use he often can't see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn't correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn't try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.

A man may say, From now on I'm going to speak the truth. But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking.

The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it — that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.

Being right was largely a matter of explanations.

What art thou?' Nothing. That's the answer. Nothing. In the heart of hearts- Nothing! So of course you can't stand that and want to be Something, and you try. But instead of being this Something, the man puts it over on everybody instead.

Many common lies and hypocrisies are like that, just out of the harmony of the moment.

A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing bad ever really happens. He was talking high-minded balls. Twaddle! I thought. I said, 'Oh? Do you mean that every gas chamber has a silver lining?

Sometimes I wonder," I said, "if people who are going to tell the truth shouldn't make sure first that they can defend themselves.

Charlie, you know where I am, don't you? All right, Charlie, this isn't literature. This is life.

I am sure you were sincere. Not insincere. True insincerity is hard to find.

Beauty is not a human invention.

Thoughts should be real. Words should have a definite meanings and a man should believe what he said.

So many questions impossible to answer could not be asked about an honest man. Nor perhaps about a sane man.

Even if I am not the honestest type in the world I don't want to lie more than is average.

Nobody should pretend to be always one hundred per cent honest. I wish I knew how to be seventy, sixty per cent." I swore she must be one hundred and ten, two hundred.

Humankind is still fooling around with hypocrisy, I thought. They don't realize that it's too late even for that.

But when he sat down for a moment on the bed, all the comedy of it was snatched away and torn to pieces. He was wrong about the woman's expression: he was trying to transform it into something he could bear. The truth was probably far different. He had started out to see what had happened with her eyes and had ended by substituting his own, thus contriving to put her on his side.

A style of this sort will seem to modern readers marred by classical stiffness--Truth, Knowers, the Good, Man--but we can by no means deny that behind our objection to such language is a guilty consciousness of the flimsiness, and not infrequently the trashiness, of our modern talk about values.

The people who come to evening classes are only ostensibly after culture. Their great need, their hunger, is for good sense, clarity, truth – even an atom of it. People are dying – it is no metaphor – for lack of something real to carry home when day is done.