Quotes About Truth

I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud. —address to the Society for Psychical Research in England

We should know what our convictions are, and stand for them. Upon one's own philosophy, conscious or unconscious, depends one's ultimate interpretation of facts. Therefore it is wise to be as clear as possible about one's subjective principles. As the man is, so will be his ultimate truth.

The dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is.

Even a scientist is a human being. So it is natural for him, like others, to hate the things he cannot explain. It is a common illusion to believe that what we know today is all we ever can know. Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting truth in itself.

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

For we are all in some way or other kept asunder by our secrets; and instead of seeking through confession to bridge the abysses that separate us from one another, we choose the easy by-way of deceptive opinions and illusions.

Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be.

One cannot live from anything except what one is.

The highest truth is one and the same with the absurd.

If we do not have the depths, how do we have the heights? Yet you fear the depths, and do not want to confess that you are afraid of them. It is good, though, that you fear yourselves; say it out loud that you are afraid of yourselves. It is wisdom to fear oneself.

That the gods die from time to time is due to man's sudden discovery that they do not mean anything, that they are made by human hands, useless idols of wood and stone.

Acesta este pasul pe care Zarathustra nu l-a putut face: pasul c?tre "omul cel mai urât", omul adev?rat. Împotrivirea ÅŸi frica fa?? de el dovedesc cât de mare este puterea de atracÅ£ie ÅŸi de seducÅ£ie a ceea ce este inferior. Separarea de inferior nu este o soluÅ£ie.

Real life is always tragic and those who do not know this have never lived.

For underlying all philosophies and all religions are the facts of the human soul, which may ultimately be the arbiters of truth and error.

Toute passe–yesterday's truth is to-day's deception, and yesterday's false inference may be to-morrow's revelation.

The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life.

It is precisely the most subjective ideas which, being closest to nature and to the living being, deserve to be called the truest.

Go not outside; truth dwells in the inner man).

But the truth is that the unconscious is always there beforehand as a potential system of psychic functioning handed down by generations of man. Consciousness is a late-born descendant of the unconscious psyche. It would certainly show perversity if we tried to explain the lives of our ancestors in terms of their late descendants; and it is just as wrong, in my opinion, to regard the unconscious as a derivative of consciousness. We are nearer the truth if we put it the other way round.

Indeed, we must never forget that for us outer reality exists only in so far as we perceive it consciously, and that we cannot prove that it exists "in and by itself.

Let us therefore verify what we have said above concerning the truth, beginning with ourselves.

no man can know himself unless he know what and not who he is,51 on whom he depends and whose he is (for by the law of truth no one belongs to himself), and to what end he was made.

We must make mistakes. We must live out our own vision of life. . .If you avoid error you do not live; in a sense even it may be said that every life is a mistake, for no one has found the truth.

The truth is that poets are human beings, and what a poet has to say about his work is often far from being the most illuminating word on the subject. What is required of us, then, is nothing less than to defend the importance of the visionary experience against the poet himself.