Quotes About Truth

The world is what it is, and you are what you are.

Listen to me. I will tell you the truth about a man's life. I will tell you the truth about his love for women.

Tell the truth, all Sicilians prefer smelling the shit of their villages to the best perfumes in Paris. What am I doing here? I could have escaped to Brazil like some others. Ah, we love where we are born, we Sicilians, but Sicily does not love us.

Uxuriousness may be the last refuge of the honest man

I was young myself once, and believe me, in love the truth is of no importance.

He said to the cardinal, I'm a peasant, not instructed in the ways of heaven. But I have never broken my word. And you, a Cardinal of the Catholic Church, with all your holy garments and crosses of Jesus, lied to me like a heathen Moor. Your sacred office alone will not save your life.

The government in Rome with its legal forms demanded the truth. The priest in the confessional box commanded the truth under pain of everlasting hell. But truth was a source of power, a lever of control, why should anyone give it away?

Why couldn't he get a straight answer from any of them? Because this was Sicily, he thought. Sicilians had a horror of truth.

truth was a source of power, a lever of control, why should anyone give it away?

And now, as he looked deeply into Nicole's eyes, he determined she was telling him the absolute truth.

La verdad, había en ella algo que era imposible no admirar, por esas razones que nos llevan a apreciar las obras bien hechas, aunque sean perversas.

Para todo el mundo es más difícil vivir en la verdad que en la mentira.

Era un refugio huir allí: la vida espléndida de la ficción daba fuerzas para soportar la vida verdadera. Pero la riqueza de la literatura hacía también que la realidad real se empobreciera.

En lo que se refiere a Dios hay que creer, no razonar», decía Herbert. «Si razonas, Dios se esfuma como una bocanada de humo.»

When you start looking for purity in politics, you eventually get to unreality.

Il n'y a rien de mieux qu'un roman pour faire comprendre que la réalité est mal faite, qu'elle n'est pas suffisante pour satisfaire les désirs, les appétits, les rêves humains.

The symbol of a setting for a Hemingway story is a boxing ring; for Borges, a library. On the other hand I think Nabokov was a writer quite close to Borges. He had the same rich literary culture, moved with great ease in different languages and traditions, and had a playful approach to literature-literature as an intellectual game, through which, of course, the real truths could appear. But apparently the game was for Nabokov just an exercise devoid of moral substance.

Eso era la historia, una rama de la fabulación que pretendía ser ciencia.

The simple fact is that he didn't write what he saw but what he felt and believed, what those all around him felt and believed. That's how that whole tangled web of false stories and humbug got woven, becoming so intricate that there is now no way to disentangle it.

In matters concerning God, you have to believe, not reason," Herbert would say. "If you reason, God vanishes like a mouthful of smoke." Roger

No tengo gran admiración por los mártires, señor Casement. Ni por los héroes. Esas gentes que se inmolan por la verdad o la justicia a menudo hacen más daño del que quieren remediar

Lily la chilenita, la camarada Arlette, madame Robert Arnoux, Mrs. Richardson, Kuriko y madame Ricardo Somocurcio, se llamaba, en realidad, Otilia. Otilita.

The real truth is one thing, and the literary truth is another; and there is nothing more difficult than to want both truths to coincide.

Julieta nunca lo decepcionó. Era una periodista nata y de su misma estirpe, capaz de matar a su madre por una primicia, sobre todo si era sucia y escabrosa.