Quotes About Truth

Don't I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves! — Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do. — But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean. — This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.

I could not stop feeling that life as I had known it was gone. Because it was. I knew this was true.

I said, "But, William, someone had to know this was going to happen! I mean in the government, someone had to know and they looked away.

When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

For the truth of the conclusions of physical science, observation is the supreme Court of Appeal.

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.

Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.

We journalists tell the public which way the cat is jumping. The public will take care of the cat.

We tell the public which way the cat is jumping. The public will take care of the cat.

Of course Your Excellency will deny this story," Hale blurted out. Zimmermann turned to him. "I cannot deny it," he replied glumly; "it is true."23

Aquinas was unconvinced. The message of revealed religion contained in the Bible and church doctrine was meant for everyone, not just the rednecks among us. Likewise, every human being deserved to know the whole truth, not just a chosen elite. To fall for the notion of a "double truth" and argue there was one set of truths for reason and another for faith and never the two shall meet made nonsense of the idea of truth itself.

The overriding issue for Aquinas is, "Is it true?" His Averroist colleague Siger of Brabant had asserted that if it was in Aristotle, then it must be true. Not necessarily, Aquinas says. He cites the Philosopher (as he calls Aristotle in both Summas) more often than any other non-Christian thinker. But he also finds powerful insights in Plato, in Saint Augustine, and in Dionysius the Areopagite.? Citations from the Bible always clinch the argument.

Dialectic teaches us that contradiction is the essence of the false, just as consistency with first principles is the essence of the true.

Being human means understanding the reality around us not because God commands us to, but because that is what our mind does as part of its nature. The Augustinian and the Neoplatonist mind passively contemplates the world and waits for a connection to a higher truth to be revealed. Aquinas saw the mind as Aristotle did, as actively analyzing that world in order to forge those connections for itself.

They are "guilty," "not guilty," and "not proven," which jurors invoke when they decide the prosecution has failed to make a compelling case even when the prisoner is obviously guilty.

Isaac Newton had demonstrated to Voltaire's satisfaction that human reason alone can discover the true inner workings of nature and the universe. Indeed, the human mind could achieve almost any goal it set for itself, as long as it remained grounded in experience and truth.

The metaphor of the cave explains how this works. It occurs in Book VII of Plato's Republic, where Socrates describes the world around us as a darkened cavern, across the back of which a puppet show is flashed with the figures of men, animals, and objects cast as shadows. For a modern audience, the description has an eerily familiar ring. It's the world of television and the media at its most flimsy and superficial.

What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?" One of Augustine's fellow Christian Africans, Tertullian, had posed that question in the third century. His meaning was all too clear. What do Plato, Aristotle, and the rest really tell us about wisdom and salvation, compared with the Bible and Christianity? More than a century later, Augustine bleakly answered: Not much.

Like the boy from the expensive prep school who becomes a drug dealer, or the evangelist preacher who steals from his congregation, Augustine had discovered that simply knowing right from wrong was not enough. What's needed is a deeper emotional commitment to rightness and truth. Augustine saw it coming not from our reason or from our conscious will, which bears the stain of Adam, but from our faith.

He ripped aside the veil of respectability with which the ancients had clothed their traditional gods and goddesses and exposed the sordid reality underneath. What Socrates and Plato had started, the overthrow of the pagan pantheon, Origen's Christianity finished.

Ockham didn't use the term fiction to suggest that what we say about the world isn't true; just the opposite. Science deals with real life; and logic is the language of science. But we shouldn't mistake the logical gymnastics going on inside our heads for the reality going on outside. Science is about real things; logic, surprisingly perhaps, is not.

Plato was crucial. His works provided a framework for making Christianity intellectually respectable, while Christianity in turn gave Plato's philosophy a shining new relevance. The supreme light of truth that had hovered outside Plato's shadowy cave was now revealed to be the light of Christ.8