Quotes About Truth

Truth is a risky proposition. It's the nature of mediocre human beings to believe that lies are necessary, that they serve a purpose, that truth is subversive, that candor is dangerous, that the very scaffold of communal life is supported by lies.

I don't believe in anything, Mother, I said. You told Armand long ago that you believe you'll find answers in the great jungles and forests; that the stars will finally reveal a vast truth. But I don't believe in anything. And that makes me stronger than you think

The fact that I loved you was the greatest lie I have ever lived.

Oh, the lies that I have told myself and others. I knew it yet I didn't know.

so important to believe in a concept of goodness, even if we make it up ourselves. We don't really make it up. it's there, isn't it? Oh, yes, it's there, she said. It's there because we put it there.

Oh, if the moon only had a secret, if the moon only held a truth. But the moon was just the moon.

The highest truths a person could discover were rooted in the natural world.

But I lived a lie. I lived it out of anger. This is what I am trying to tell you. I have lived lies. I have done it again and again. I live lies because I cannot endure the weakness of anger and I cannot admit the irrationality of love. Oh the lies I have told myself and others. I knew it yet I didn't know.

Because no one could in any guise convince me of what I myself knew to be true, that I was damned in my own mind and soul.

As we move on year by year in this life, we learn that telling doesn't necessarily purge; telling something is merely a reliving, and it's a torment.

Because people don't believe it unless it happens to them.

There's a virtue,' Felix said, 'to listening to a reluctant storyteller. You know that he is in fact diving deep for the salvageable truth.

Muy pocos seres buscan de verdad el conocimiento en este mundo. Mortales o inmortales, son escasos los que hacen preguntas. Al contrario, casi todos intentan extraer de lo desconocido las respuestas a las que ya han dado forma en sus propias mentes; justificaciones, confirmaciones, formas de consuelo sin las cuales serian incapaces de continuar adelante. Preguntar de verdad es abrir la puerta a un torbellino. La respues puede aniquilar a la vez la pregunta y quien la hace.

So we reach into the raging chaos, and we pluck some small glittering thing, and we cling to it, and tell ourselves it has meaning, and that the world is good, and we are not evil, and we will all go home in the end.

Traditions are seldom lies; traditions reflect people's deepest beliefs and customs. They have their own truth

There is no normal life. There is only life.

Tell me–how old are you, Reuben? I'm thirty-eight. How is that for total honesty? Do you know many women who volunteer they're thirty-eight?

People swindle themselves out of Salvation with great regularity.

And I knew only what all men know, that the cycle of winter and spring and all growing things has within itself some sublime truth that restores without myth or language.

So you're saying that demons aren't as smart as angels." "Perhaps they could be," he said, "but their state of mind interferes with their intelligence. It interferes with their observations, and their conclusions. It interferes with everything that they do. Theirs is a hideous predicament. They refuse to admit that they have lost." That was beautiful. I liked it. I liked the puzzle of it and the truth of it.

There's an old story," he said, "about a saint who once said, 'Even when the Prince of Darkness takes the form of an angel of light, you'll know him by his reptilian tail.

I explained that often when we revealed ourselves to mortals we drove them mad—for we were unnatural beings, and yet we did not know anything about the existence of God or the Devil. In sum, we were like a religious vision without revelation. A mystic experience, but without a core of truth.

I saw it, and I knew that he spoke the truth. I would always see it. I would see the spark of the Creator in every human life I ever encountered, and in every human life I took.

I wish you hadn't told her. If you must know, I could have done without your telling her I commited statutory rape on the living room couch with her cousin. - Michael Curry