Quotes About Truth

When truth is divided, errors multiply.

Whatever hysteria exists is inflamed by mystery, suspicion and secrecy. Hard and exact facts will cool it.

The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal.

You have but to know an object by its proper name for it to lose its dangerous magic.

Someone who always has to lie discovers that every one of his lies is true.

The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something trickle about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand.

You draw closer to truth by shutting yourself off from mankind.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation, and it seems most true when it eschews artistic devices of any sort.

You'll try to reveal what should remain hidden, you'll try to incite people to learn from the past and rebel, but they will refuse to believe you. They will not listen to you…. You'll possess the truth, you already do; but it's the truth of a madman.

No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.

Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning. The tragedy of man is that he doesn't know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day.

Halakha, as the human way of life in accordance with the Torah, does not aim at absolute truth, nor does it run after the fata- morgana of universal truth. Neither of them is accessible to human beings. Its aim is "earthly truth" that the human intellect is able to grasp and for whose pursuance in life man must accept personal responsibility.

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

That's what I always tell myself when I'm being fact-checked, and some detail I was attached to turns out not to be true. I'm initially disappointed, and maybe discouraged that now there's more work for me to do, but I know that 99.9% of the time there's actually something there, in the truth, that's more interesting than whatever I or anyone else can make up.

What had been revealed to me at this sadomasochism-themed party was the true face of all parties: how they were all, in one way or another, sadomasochism-themed.

In fact I had no historical consciousness in those days, and no interest in acquiring one. It struck me as narrow-minded to privilege historical events, simply because things happened to have worked out that way. Why be a slave to the arbitrary truth? I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years – it took the experience of lived time – to realize that they really are the same thing.

The mirror will only lie, when you look at it through a mask.

Here is a quick and generally reliable rule to follow. If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment. People

Every encounter with human truth—Jane Austen deftly showing how little we know our own motives; Dickens revealing the meaning of "economy" in the cheerful and charitable housekeeping of Esther Summerson, his finest heroine; or Shakespeare offering us the foolish Lear, mad and childish and yet "every inch a king"—can expand the soul; it helps to set us free from the common delusions of our time, the lies we believe and the lies we tell. But

the judge Don Achille speaks up, with sly and devastating irony, saying that the whole history of mankind is the history of rhetoric: that is, the history of moving masses of people by words, words, words. That is all there is in Political Life Under Compulsion. Words are not troves of truth or bands of friendship. They are tools, and the people who use them are tools, and so are the people upon whom they are used.

To say to young people, "There are no such things, really, as beauty and goodness," is to do far worse than to fail to direct them out of the cave and into the sun. It is to cut out the hearts of those who might still be minded to make that pilgrimage. It is worse than to fail to direct the ship of the soul by the constant star of the North. It is to tear the tiller out of the ship entirely and leave it at the mercy of the winds, and to call the aimlessness "freedom.

Is it not ignorance that we share? A lie takes two. The truth we find alone.

Reality is fatal whereas fantasy is something to die for.

It could be said that the discovery of ourselves is at the heart of what we call enlightenment, which is to say that that big, bright light at the end of the tunnel is us. The problem is that no one wants to discover that we're no better or no worse than the rest—indeed, to discover that we're no different than the rest—because that's no fun.