Quotes About Truth

especially what it has to say to me personally or to my society.

my case does not rise or fall depending on whether the visions were veridical or not.

Only literary cultures have a concern for exact replication of the facts "as they really are.

because it intends to lead readers astray. But in another sense plagiarism can be seen as the flip side of forgery. Forgers write their own words and claim they are the words of another; plagiarists take the words of another and claim they are their own.

Jesus almost certainly delivered some such message.

but by a forger

in situations of conflict: the "enemy" is portrayed as massive and unstoppable, an inherent threat to decency and truth.

ancient religions were almost never interested in "true beliefs.

any stories in the Gospels that do not coincide with what we know the early Christians would have wanted to say about Jesus, or indeed, any stories that seem to run directly counter to the Christians' self-interests in telling them, can stake a high claim to being historically accurate.

the criterion of dissimilarity. It states that if a tradition about Jesus is dissimilar to what the early Christians would have wanted to say about him, then it more likely is historically accurate.

Hawthorne, like most of my professors at Wheaton, was a committed evangelical Christian. But he was not afraid of asking questions of his faith. At the time, I took this as a sign of weakness (in fact, I thought I had nearly all the answers to the questions he asked); eventually I saw it as a real commitment to truth and as being willing to open oneself up to the possibility that one's views need to be revised in light of further knowledge and life experience.

it does not have to be veridical. It has to be believed.

Come, see the true flowers of this pained world.

It's how we see the world that keeps the darkness beyond at bay. Keeps it from pouring through and devouring us. I think all of us might know that, way down deep.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie

Charity had discovered there were things you didn't want to tell. Shame wasn't the reason. Sometimes it was just better-kinder- to keep up a front

He could not even kid himself that everything had not been up front, because it had been. And he hadn't even done it alone. There were currently ninety-five other fools in this parade.

And what do you do when you can't use anger to fall back on? You admit the truth.

What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common

Oh, about beer I never lie,' Crandall said. 'A man who lies about beer makes enemies.

Well then, I'm going to tell you a secret almost every newspaper man and woman who's been at it awhile knows: in real life, the number of actual stories - those with beginnings, middles, and ends - are slim and none. But if you can give your readers just one unknown thing (two at the very outside) and then kick in what Dave Bowie there calls a musta-been, your reader will tell himself a story.

That in turn made him think of some poem or other, one about how you could spend years running, but in the end you always wound up facing yourself in a hotel room, with a naked bulb hanging overhead and a revolver on the table.

The world's most brilliant confabulators are in asylums.

Most politicians lie for the same reason a monkey swings by his tail, which is to say because he can.