Quotes About Truth

reality doesn't care about winning arguments: survival is what matters.

the distance between opinions is remarkably narrower than the distance between the average of opinions and truth.

To accept it takes both understanding and courage.

True and False (hence what we call "belief") play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates—and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other

Even popular opinion warns that bad information is worse than no information at all.

The floor of the Parthenon is curved in reality so we can see it as straight.

The idea is simple, yet potent and universal.

But it was incredible how fear and danger never produced ignoble words but always true ones, words that were torn from your very heart.

Il rifiutarsi al presente, l'isolarsi nel rimpianto d'un passato defunto, vuol dire rifiutarsi di pensare. Mi sembra però ancora più melenso, e ancora più colpevole, l'atteggiamento inverso: cioè il costringere noi stessi ad amare e inseguire tutto quanto di nuovo compare intorno a noi. Questa è ancor più un'offesa contro il vero. Vuol dire aver paura di mostrarci come siamo, cioè stanchi, amari, ormai immobili e vecchi.

Il signor Paolo Ferrari era in sala da pranzo che beve-va il tè. Nel vederlo io riconobbi Turati, che era venuto in via Pastrengo una volta. Ma siccome m'avevan detto che si chiamava Paolo Ferrari, credetti, per ubbidienza, che fosse insieme Turati e Ferrari; e di nuovo verità e menzogna si mescolarono in me.

Facts are the barren branches on which we hang the dear, obscuring foliage of our dreams.

Winnie did not believe in fairy tales. She had never longed for a magic wand, did not expect to marry a prince, and was scornful—most of the time—of her grandmother's elves. So now she sat, mouth open, wide-eyed, not knowing what to make of this extraordinary story. It couldn't—not a bit of it—be true. And yet:

Pretty' doesn't mean 'good,' you know, Geneva. Real life isn't like fairy tales. 'Pretty' simply means that by accident you've got things arranged on your outside in an extra-pleasing manner. It doesn't tell a thing about your inside.

Mae Tuck must never go to the gallows. Whatever happened to the man in the yellow suit, Mae Tuck must not be hanged. Because if all they had said was true, then Mae, even if she were the cruelest of murderers and deserved to be put to death--Mae Tuck would not be able to die.

Midville's best street was High Street. It was up on a hill. Not much of a hill, to tell the truth, but in that part of the state, the flat south-central part, hills are not taken for granted.

Like all magnificent things, it's very simple.

anything difficult to say must be shouted from the rooftops.

What he'd wanted before had crumbled away, leaving the truth of what Kennedy did to him. It was new, and there was a long way to go before it could be right, but that was the path he wanted to take.

Montaigne admits to getting carried away in the heat of an argument, exaggerating the naked truth by the vigor of his words. Yet we all insist upon our opinions, forcing them upon others by iron and fire. Better to be tentative than to be recklessly sure, to be an apprentice at sixty than to present oneself as a doctor at ten.

There is only one reality - the reality knowable to reason. And if man does not choose to perceive it, there is nothing else for him to perceive; if it is not of this world that he is conscious, then he is not conscious at all

Living consciously implies that my first loyalty is to truth, not to making myself right.

We are not moved to change those things whose reality we deny.

The tragedy of many people's lives is that, given a choice between being "right" and having an opportunity to be happy, they invariably choose being "right." That is the one ultimate satisfaction they allow themselves.

In attempting to counterfeit a self-esteem he does not possess, he makes his perception of reality conditional; he establishes, as a principle of his mind's functioning, that certain considerations supersede reality, facts, and truth in their importance to him.