Quotes About Truth

For medieval thinkers, this was an eye-opening revelation. Side by side with divine truth, Averroës was saying, lay another truth, that of the natural world. This insight earned Averroës an admiration equaled by no other living non-Christian. It is why Dante praises him in his Divine Comedy and why Raphael gives him a prominent place in his School of Athens.

More than any previous work, Galileo's Dialogue showed that if Copernicus wasn't right on every detail of the working of the solar system, Aristotle and Ptolemy were both very clearly wrong. The first printing sold out almost at once.

Susan Sontag did in 1967, that "the truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, the emancipation of women … don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought on the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

Aquinas was no Averroist. His life's work would be an implicit repudiation of Averroës's idea that reason has a higher claim to truth than faith does.12 Instead, Thomas Aquinas's reading of Aristotle led him in a different direction. He would conclude that faith and reason are actually two sides of the same coin. His writings would try to persuade his age that men are part of both a divine and a human order, and both have valid standing in their lives.

finishing his final work on mechanics and physics, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences in 1638, four years before his death. Down to the end, Galileo protested that he was a better Aristotelian than his opponents because he believed in avoiding fallacies in reasoning, and because he believed "it is not possible that sensible experience is contrary to truth.

The Pseudo-Dionysius begins with a seeming paradox. We see God nowhere, and yet God is everywhere. The skeptic and atheist get stuck at the first obvious truth; they fail to push on to the second. The secret is that God's presence is made visible to us not directly but symbolically, in a material world that bears the faint but still perceptible trace of a higher intelligible and spiritual realm.

Aristotle showed (or seemed to show) that by linking one valid syllogism to another regarding a single subject, such as biology or ethics or even the nature of God, one could build a conceptual chain of reasoning that would inevitably lead, link by link, from one set of necessary truths to another, all the way to the highest truths of all.

Socrates could do this because he starts with a different question from "What is real?" (although eventually he gets there, too). Socrates was the first also to ask: "What am I?

In effect, Aristotle's logic offered the possibility of creating a universally true science out of anything—or of deconstructing claims of being a science.

Not everything that makes deductive sense may be true.b But if it doesn't fit into a syllogism, Aristotle concluded, then don't bother asking if it's true or not.

It was the math that mattered. And when the math yields a pattern of harmonious proportion, whether it's the golden section of the Greeks or the Sierpinski gasket and Mandelbrot set of modern fractal geometry, the Platonist knows, as Archimedes did many centuries before, that he is standing at the threshold of the truth.

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.

Diogenes's goal, he said, was "to deface the coinage," meaning strip away the false conventions on which society was built and expose the raw reality underneath.

in wine, the truth

Everyone and everything were becoming bricks in the comprehensive and complex edifice Aristotle was determined to build in order to reach the most profound truths. Those truths, as he made clear,† come not in a sudden moment of intuitive insight or from some inner contemplative process. They are the result of hard work and thought.

Aristotle decided that Reality with a capital R is not (for the most part) something ultimately above or behind the world we see and hear and smell and touch. It is that world. What Plato had dismissed as the illusions of the cave, Aristotle set out to prove were the keys to ultimate understanding all along.

His name was Parmenides, and in answer to Heraclitus's claim that everything changes, Parmenides countered by arguing that nothing changes. Far from permanency being an illusion, as Heraclitus claimed, it is change that is the illusion.

To be a human is to have a soul, Socrates and Plato tell us. Our soul is our true essence, our true identity. It is the soul that actively seeks to unlock the mysteries of the world, including the truth about reality.

It was a fate that other, later Communist leaders would know, from Stalin and Mao Zedong to Fidel Castro and Kim Il-Sung. Lenin at least had the ruthless honesty to acknowledge the truth about what had happened and what would come next.

Beyond the actual words of God, and underneath the literal narrative of law, history, and even geography, Origen could discern timeless truths waiting to be pointed out and explained. This way of reading the Bible, called exegesis, would become standard during the Middle Ages. Indeed, the Middle Ages came to interpret just about everything morally, symbolically, or allegorically and sometimes all three.

the key to happiness is understanding how the real world works. This idea stood in contrast to Plato-inspired utopian dreams, including John Calvin's Geneva (a favorite target in the Enlightenment). Our highest ideals are not reflections of some transcendent reality, Enlightenment thinkers argued, or some higher truth. They are just that, ideals: insubstantial playthings of the mind that can deceive as often as they can inspire.

The shadows that now lie dark upon our path will soon be dispelled and we shall walk with the light all about us if we be but true to ourselves.

It is not difficult for me to have this faith, for it is incontrovertible that where there is a plan there is intelligence - an orderly, unfolding universe testifies to the truth of the most majestic statement ever uttered - 'In the beginning, God.'

So I have seen a man killed! An experience that, among others! Yes, I suppose I hav; although I can hardly be certain, And in a court of justice could never declare I had seen it. But a man was killed, I am told, in a place where I saw Something: a man was killed, I am told, and I saw something.