Quotes About Truth

Be not misled by

Difficult to believe, yet absolutely true.

The truth is this: Good luck can be enticed by accepting opportunity.

Deride not what I say because of its simplicity. Truth is always simple.

La beauté qui parle aux yeux, reprit-elle, n'est que le prestige d'un moment; l'œuil du corps n'est pas toujours celui de l'âme. (The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes, she continued, is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.) [Le beau Laurence]

Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué.

La vie ressemble plus souvent à un roman qu'un roman ne ressemble à la vie. (Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.)

Dejadme escapar de la mentirosa y criminal ilusión de la felicidad! Dadme trabajo, cansancio, dolor y entusiasmo.

Quoique mon être ait subi des modifications et passé par des phases d'action et de réaction, comme tous les êtres pensants, il est au fond toujours le même : besoin de croire, soif de connaître, plaisir d'aimer.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.

Absurdism was really just realism seen from close to the bottom.

Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others).

Sermon: Why this surprising? Did you think you were going to live forever? Only difference between you, sitting there anticipating rest of your day, and Todd, in coffin, bound for eternal home in cold earth? Is heartbeat. Feel that, people? In your chests? This is thin line between you and grave. So why do you live like you are eternal? That foolish, you are fools. This scary? This not scary! This truth, this reality!

None of it was real; nothing was real. Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear.

In Buddhism, it's said that a teaching is like "a finger pointing at the moon." The moon (enlightenment) is the essential thing and the pointing finger is trying to direct us to it, but it's important not to confuse finger with moon.

Now all these happy sites and sounds seem like triks. Now it seems like the gud times are mere lee smoke that, upon blowing away, here is the reel life, which is: rok hats, kikking, stomping.

What is truth, if not an ongoing faith in, and continuing hope for, that which one feels and knows in one's heart to be right, all temporary and ephemeral contraindications notwithstanding?

How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it? How can we feel any peace when some people have everything and others have nothing? How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?

Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others). If we learn what a truthful sentence looks like, a little flag goes up at a false one.

What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It's good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It's good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes necessary, someone says: war is large-scale murder, us at our worst, the stupidest guy doing the cruelest thing to the weakest being.

You were told the big something/someone loved you especially but in the end you saw it was otherwise. The big something/someone was neutral. Unconcerned. When it innocently moved, it crushed people.

None of that ever was, he said. And it never will be.

Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to. The comic is the truth stripped of the habitual, the cushioning, the easy consolation.