Quotes About Truth

That's the trouble with a story spinner. You never know what's real and what's made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can't stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it.

Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

The closest we can come to the truth about reality is in the fictions that we create about it.

Calvinism emphasizes divine sovereignty and free grace; Arminianism emphasizes human responsibility. The one restricts the saving grace to the elect: the other extends it to all men on the condition of faith. Both are right in what they assert; both are wrong in what they deny. If one important truth is pressed to the exclusion of another truth of equal importance, it becomes an error, and loses its hold upon the conscience.

Every church, yea, every truth and every good cause, has its martyrs, who stood the fiery trial and sacrificed comfort and life itself to their sacred convictions. The blood of martyrs is the seed of toleration; toleration is the seed of liberty; and liberty is the most precious gift of God to every man who has been made in his image and redeemed by Christ.

The facts must rule philosophy, not philosophy the facts.

The Vietnamese never asked themselves, any more than had the French, whether the Cambodians wanted the new system they were introducing. They acted in the unassailable certitude of a superior truth.

I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only recognized much later, when the story and the characters have faded into darkness.

The only thing I know is that I know nothing' Socrates

Falsehood is merely limitation, the incomplete understanding of the absolute. This entails that, for Hegel, falsified scientific theories are not in themselves wholly wrong, but merely do not tell the whole story. They are limited conceptions of a more all-embracing truth.

It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously," Daniel Kahneman noted, "but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true."17

if you have the time to think before making a big decision, do so—and be prepared to accept that what seems obviously true now may turn out to be false later.

but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.

Reading contemporary accounts brings home the fact that of any battle or campaign there are at least for different versions. One is that of those who fought in it, two is of the generals who commanded it, three is of those who reported on it at the time and made what they could of a mass of confused and often misleading information, and four is the version of those who had a theory about it and reported those facts which happened to fit the version they were trying to portray.

Imagination pointed toward truth but could not disclose it directly.

But we're left stunted, compromised, by the burden of having to always lie and censor ourselves.

fundamental truth: that in the end, death is only a matter between you and yourself?

Ik weet dat dit net is gebeurd, ik ben niet gek, en toch lijkt het me onwaarschijnlijk.

It's the most simple words that destroy us.

C'est lui qui reprend la parole : et vous ? Vous allez écrire sur cette histoire, n'est-ce pas ? Vous n'allez pas pouvoir vous en empêcher. Je répète que je n'écris jamais sur ma vie, que je suis un romancier. Il sourit : encore un de vos mensonges, pas vrai ? Je souris en retour.

À ceux-là, en général, j'explique que la vraisemblance importe plus que la vérité, que la justesse compte davantage que l'exactitude et surtout qu'un lieu, ce n'est pas une topographie mais la manière dont on le raconte, pas une photographie mais une sensation, une impression.

Et puis, il l'a dit, c'est toute sa vie : on ne s'excuse pas de ce qui fait sa vie.

What one believes when one is sixteen is more powerful than any truth.

I need to say everything before I die, I cannot die carrying this secret, this amazing secret.