Quotes About Truth

Not knaves, fools.

And now you'll be telling stories of my coming back and they won't be false, and they won't be true but they'll be real

You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul. That worrier.

I had believed something probably not true, yet it was wonderful to have believed it.

The whole business of what's reality and what isn't has never been solved and probably never will be. So I don't care to be too definite about anything. I have a lot of edges called Perhaps and almost nothing you can call Certainty.

from Emerson's journals. In the context, it is written in the past tense; changing the verb to present tense it reads: The poem is a confession of faith. Which is to say, the poem is not an exercise. It is not 'wordplay.' Whatever skill or beauty it has, in contains something beyond language devices, and has a purpose other than itself.

You can fool a lot of yourself but you can't fool the soul. That worrier.

there's a sickness worse than the risk of death and that's forgetting what we should never forget.

Belief isn't always easy. But this much I have learned— if not enough else— to live with my eyes open.

Whatever you know about here it doesn't tell you

What we love, shapely and pure, is not to be held, but to be believed in.

life is real, and pain is real, but death is an imposter

What good does it do to lie all day in the sun loving what is easy?

and how could anyone believe that anything in this world is only what it appears to be— that anything is ever final— that anything, in spite of its absence, ever dies a perfect death?

It has an undeniable value: it exists.

they won't be false and they won't be true, but hey'll be real.

You are simple, brave, and honest. With training, you could be excellent warriors. Not me, said Annie. I don't like to fight. Sometimes one must fight for the right things, said the emperor. Like what? said Jack. Freedom and justice, and the emperor. Truth.

When Jack looked up, he saw the woman had pulled off her wig. It was a boy dressed up as a woman! "See, even she's a boy," said Annie. "That's weird.

We need to stop allowing the unsupported testimony of children who are of an age where they can barely distinguish fantasy and reality.

A retarded daughter told contradictory tales of sexual abuse by her step-brother and other male relatives… So here we have a girl who probably made up the story in the first place.

Religion says that your soul goes to heaven or possibly to a seven-tiered garden, or that your soul is reincarnated into a new body, or that you lie around in your coffin clothes until the Second Coming. And, of course, only one of these can be true. Which means that for millions of people, religion will turn out to have been a bum steer as regards the hereafter. (13)

a man may shout the eternal virtues and be unheard forever, but if he babble nonsense in a wilderness it will travel around the world.

The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen.

There are lies and lies. Now and then the Great Recorder must put one on the credit side of the balance, one that has saved intolerable suffering, or has made well and happy a sick soul.