Quotes About Truth

The cry of revolt against such a god [a god which just affirms the world as it is] is nearer the truth than is the sophistry with which men attempt to justify him....

Life is illusion, disillusionment is destruction.

The Socratic teacher turns his students away from himself and back onto themselves; he hides in paradoxes, makes himself inaccessible. The intimate relationship between student and teacher here is not one of submission, but of a contest for truth.

Every truth that we may think complete will prove itself untruth at the moment of shipwreck.

Truth and reality split apart.

Sometimes, where there's smoke, there's only smoke.)

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe the lies when they see them in print.

If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.

An aphorism never coincides with the truth: it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

An aphorism is never exactly true. It is either a half-truth or a truth and a half.

An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.

How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.

Der Aphorismus deckt sich nie mit der Wahrheit; er ist entweder eine halbe Wahrheit oder anderthalb.

ideology signifies a phenomenon intermediate between a simple lie at one pole, and an error, which is the result of a distorted and faulty conceptual apparatus, at the other.

As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.

This false epistemology, however, has also led to disastrous consequences. The theory that truth is manifest—that it is there for everyone to see, if only he wants to see it—this theory is the basis of almost every kind of fanaticism. For only the most depraved wickedness can refuse to see the manifest truth; only those who have reason to fear truth conspire to suppress it.

there is no reason to believe that a definition necessarily determines the ontological status of the term defined.)

The simple truth is that truth is hard to come by, and that once found may easily be lost again.

Denying realism amounts to megalomania.

Adev?rata ignoran?? nu este absen?a cunoa?terii, ci refuzul de a o dobândi.

At least some of them, I suspect, have turned to probability theory in the hope that it would give them what they had originally expected from a subjectivist or epistemological theory of the attainment of truth through verification; that is, a theory of rational and justifiable belief, based upon observed instances.

But the approach to truth is not easy. There is only one way towards it, the way through error. Only through our errors can we learn; and only he will learn who is ready to appreciate and even to cherish the errors of others as stepping stones towards truth, and who searches for his own errors: who tries to find them, since only when he has become aware of them can he free himself from them.

The wrong view of science betrays itself in the craving to be right; for it is not his possession of knowledge, of irrefutable truth, that makes the man of science, but his persistent and recklessly critical quest for truth.