Quotes About Truth

All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

Franklin knew that the truth lay with the winter night: the world was silent and black-and-white.

Do you believe that the actor on the stage is really a villain? Let me ask you something else. If he isn't a villain, then is he a liar?

The more the mouse pursues this line of of thought, the more it seems to him that the cat is a large, soft mouse.

În definitiv, s? nu uit?m ce spunea Sherlock Holmes:"Când ai eliminat imposibilul, orice r?mâne, oricât de imposibil ar p?rea, trebuie s? fie adev?rul". De?i, judecând dup? ferocitatea cu care un alt eminent filozof modern a fost atacat de criticii s?i, n-ai b?nui asta.

Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.

Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.

Oh to be blissfully ignorant, he thought. But in truth there was nothing he hated more in this life. Ignorance was the root of every manmade evil he had ever encountered.

But surely, to ascribe certain events, clearly the outcome of deliberate human acts, to the Fates or the gods does the immortals a disservice as well—indeed, it approaches impiety. It is certainly not 'truth' in any meaningful sense. I might as well simply make it all up, as if I were writing a novel about imaginary people, set in some invented land!

My talents, such as they are, have usually been employed in finding the truth of some event that's already taken place. I've never claimed to have any talent for prevention or precognition. I can't foretell the future.

There was no reasoning with a mortal who believed the whole world was wrong about everything, and only he and a handful of others were right—and not merely right but absolutely sure of their rightness because of an imaginary authority that could not be questioned.

Because, Lucius, without the discipline of philosophy to give rigour to their thinking, people can and will believe anything, no matter how absurd.

That's the problem with Domitian, isn't it?" said Lucius. "We never know what's real and what's not. All the city is a stage. Everything that happens is a spectacle put on by the emperor. One wonders if he himself knows any longer what's real.

Severus said to him, "I have been everything—and gained nothing." Everything and nothing: the remark had stopped Galen cold. In the end, did the material world and the realm of the senses amount to nothing, then? In the end, could it be that everything and nothing were the same?

The problem was me. I was...I was a pathological liar. Or am, I should say. Lying is like alcoholism, one is always "recovering".

This is reality, Greg.-Elliot from E.T.

But ignoring something doesn't make it less real, y'know. Something isn't fiction just because you choose not to acknowledge it.

at its most fundamental level science is not undertaken for any practical reason.

I have in mind here poetry in a broader sense: language chosen for aesthetic effect, rather than in an attempt to say clearly what one actually believes to be true.

Away with them, away; we should not believe fairy stories if we wish to be good. Think of them as persons from the fairy wood.

The clothes have no emperor.

ExperienÈ›a[..] este cap?tul unor încerc?ri fructoase, întreprinse cu cel mai des?vârÈ™it cinism, de a nega toate acele lucruri pe care le-au preÈ›uit ca adev?rate,curate,drepte. Ei unii nu-È™i dau seama de teribilul cinism care zace în aceast? permanent? definire a experienÈ›ei ca suprem scop al vieÈ›ii.

Jag tycker inte om trohet därför att den är vacker, men därför att den är nödvändig. Den som bedrar en människa dödar henne långsamt.