Quotes About Truth

My instincts have never lied to me.

Be critical. Women have the right to say: This is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades.

But deep prayer, prolonged prayer, is a terrible mirror—kneel there long enough and everything shows. There's no way out of eventually seeing your phoniness and dishonesty.

The word "see" is often used as a direct synonym for "understand"—"I see what you mean." Yet sometimes we see but we don't understand; worse, we see, then "understand" something that isn't true at all. Done well, a picture of data is worth the proverbial thousand words.

I worry about a world in which many people will believe anything, but I worry far more about one in which people believe nothing beyond their own preconceptions.

Yes, it's easy to lie with statistics—but it's even easier to lie without them.*

Before I repeat any statistical claim, I first try to take note of how it makes me feel. It's not a foolproof method against tricking myself, but it's a habit that does little harm and is sometimes a great deal of help. Our emotions are powerful. We can't make them vanish, nor should we want to. But we can, and should, try to notice when they are clouding our judgment.

Hearing the anecdote, it's easy to assume that Target's algorithms are infallible—that everybody receiving coupons for onesies and wet wipes is pregnant. But nobody ever claimed that it was true.

Unfortunately, the selection mechanism is often some combination of beauty and shock value, rather than pertinence and accuracy.

But biology does not readjust to accommodate the false theories of scientists …' – James le Fanu, British physician

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.' – Upton Sinclair, American writer

For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer . . . Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

But this too is true: stories save us.

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote.

It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty... Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference- a powerful, implacable beauty- and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again. 'Daddy, tell the truth,'Kathleen can say, 'did you ever kill anybody?' And I can say, honest, 'Of course not.' Or I can say, honestly, 'Yes.

If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth.

It's sad when you learn you're not much of a hero.

By telling stories, you objectify your own experiences. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others.

There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.