Quotes About Truth

If the 'I' is understood strictly as we have been taking it, then it is quite certain that knowledge of it does not depend on things of whose existence I am as yet unaware; so it cannot 28depend on any of the things which I invent in my imagination.

The Church is a microcosm here in the earth of what humanity and the entire cosmos is really called to be - and we treat those who don't know the Truth according to their true identity as much as possible. Those who are not yet awakened to the fact that they are clean and forgiven before they even know to ask.

As in all of these disciplines, there's one key ingredient that helps keep the religion out – fun. Religion, by nature, demands your serious attention. It is the anti-play. Capon writes: For while it is a truism that nothing that is fun can be done without some measure of discipline, it is practically an eternal truth that nothing that calls for discipline will be kept at very long (or very well) if it is not fun.44

A secret is not a thing you're not supposed to tell; it is a thing that can't be told.

I was proud of this small insight; I had no notion how close I was to the truth, and therefore I was as far away as ever.

they slipped one by one again into the merely fictional – Hermes's false Egypt, and Bruno's false Hermes; Kraft's false Bruno; Pierce's false history of the world, the doors that had once blown open blowing closed again one by one down the corridor into the colored centuries.

That was what did the harm, knowing the one, believeing the other.

What if it were true. It could not be: but what if it were. Strange but true. A sudden partisanship arose within Pierce's heart, a longing so deep and simple that he could not even be puzzled by it: a longing indistinguishable from grief, that the story ought to be true, and could not be.

There are some good people. But a good chunk of them will lie for no reason at all - it'll be ten o'clock and they'll tell you it's nine. You're looking at the clock and you can't even fathom why they're lying. They just lie because that's what they do.

What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or — worse yet — leaving the blanks blank?

There is no formula that can deliver all truth, all harmony, all simplicity. No Theory of Everything can ever provide total insight. For, to see through everything, would leave us seeing nothing at all.

Most scientists and mathematicians operate as if Platonism is true regardless of whether they believe that it is. That is, they work as though there were an unknown realm of truth to be discovered.

I do not recommend ignorance and I am not saying that there is no truth, but I am arguing that the best way to think about truth is to call it the best interpretation that anybody has come up with yet while conceding that no one knows what is coming next. There are lots of competing truths battling with one another for their place in the sun, and the truth is that we have to learn to cope with the conflict. The skies do not open up and drop The Truth into our laps.

the truth of the event does not belong to the order of identificatory knowledge, as if our life's charge were to track down and learn the secret name of some fugitive spirit.

Nietzsche had it right when he said we lack the courage for the truth, that the truth will make us stronger just so long as it doesn't kill us first.

would you rather stand before God as a learned theologian who is full of pride or an unlearned man with a head full of superstition who worships in spirit and in truth?

The cross is not magic. It does not magically dispel the course of evil, or stop global warming, or alter the laws of thermodynamics. The cross is an event in which the difficulty is not dispelled but disclosed, not extinguished but exposed, not crossed out but made visible.

It is not a question of finding an answer to the night of truth, but of sitting up with one another through the night... of dividing the abyss in half, in a companionship that is its own meaning.

you begin to realize that The Mountains and Rivers Sutra is not a sutra about mountains and rivers, but rather that the mountains and rivers are themselves the sutra.

Fundamentally, Zen is a way of seeing clearly who we are and what our life is, and a way of living based on that clear vision.

Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history.

If we think we have found truth for ourselves, above all things, let us not impose it on one another. Let us lock upon it all the doors of consciousness. For however inspiring it may be to us, however ennobling, when once we try to impose it on another it becomes a poison.

How sad, that the group with the most access to the truth chose in several strategic instances to look the other way.

Beauty's but skin deep.