Quotes About Truth

Whereas today people often understate their age to census takers, studies of past censuses have revealed that they used to overstate it.

Courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped. Wisdom is prudent strength. At least two kinds of courage are required in aging and sickness. The first is the courage to confront the reality of mortality—the courage to seek out the truth of what is to be feared and what is to be hoped. Such courage is difficult enough. We have many reasons to shrink from it. But even more daunting is the second kind of courage—the courage to act on the truth we find.

But even more daunting is the second kind of courage—the courage to act on the truth we find.

At least two kinds of courage are required in aging and sickness. The first is the courage to confront the reality of mortality—the courage to seek out the truth of what is to be feared and what is to be hoped.

We could never bring ourselves to discuss the larger truth about his condition or the ultimate limits of our capabilities, let alone what might matter most to him as he neared the end of his life.

The first is the courage to confront the reality of mortality—the

They were regarded as children: too fragile and simpleminded to handle the truth, let alone make decisions.

En la vejez y la enfermedad se requieren dos tipos de valor. El primero es el valor para afrontar la realidad de la mortalidad –el valor de querer saber la verdad de lo que cabe temer y lo que cabe esperar–

Whereas today people often understate their age to census takers, studies of past censuses have revealed that they used to overstate it. The dignity of old age was something to which everyone aspired.

When the prevailing fantasy is that we can be ageless, the geriatrician's uncomfortable demand is that we accept we are not. *

feared that the autopsy would uncover an error.

You should tell the truth as often as you can, but in such a way as people don't believe you or think that you're being funny.

At any rate it seems unlikely that there is any truth in the rumour as I have just this moment invented it.

The rest of us learned the simple lesson - invaluable in a bureaucratic society - that there is no moral or practical obligation to tell the truth when filling in forms.

How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live unblinded? How much of this pain can I use?

What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope.

I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

One of the hardest things to accept is learning to live within uncertainty and neither deny it nor hide behind it. Most of all, to listen to the messages of uncertainty without allowing them to immobilize me, nor keep me from the certainties of those truths in which I believe. I turn away from any need to justify the future- to live in what has not yet been. Believing, working for what has not yet been while living fully in the present now.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?

We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present.

The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance.

I sit before the typewriter and nothing comes. If feels as if underlining these assaults, lining them up one after the other and looking at them squarely might give them an unbearable power. Yet, I know that the opposite is true-no matter how difficult it may be to look at the realities of our lives, it is there that we will find the strength to change them. And to suppress any truth is to give it power beyond endurance.

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance.

Once it was easy to know who were my people... I do not believe our wants have made all our lies holy.