Quotes About Truth

The university doesn't THINK; the university KNOWS. If the university says it's Thursday, then it's Thursday.

You can almost believe what you know is not true when you really have to.

Life is all we have, and if we can't look at it honestly, are we really living?

Love and truth have no correlation.

World is all backward… It's like…we're through the looking glass. Good is bad, bad is good. Black is white, white is black. People base their lives on convenient recollections and are considered sane. People who look too hard for truth are considered crazy.

There is truth. There is a truth. And what you want, or you feel, or you need, isn't going to change the truth.

The truth will set you free, and then you shall be free indeed.

This student takes practice tests and then lies to him about her score. He is supposed to tutor her on what she doesn't know, but she can't tell him the truth about what she doesn't know!

Evidenced in a capacity for denial so that you do not let yourself know what is really going on. You may be hurting yourself and others, but you will not acknowledge it. You may also be hurt, but you will repress that knowledge as well. Or, you believe what others say even when their perspective is directly counter to your own inner knowing.

between the conscious lie to fool others and unconscious self-justification to fool ourselves, there's a fascinating gray area patrolled by an unreliable, self-serving historian—memory. Memories are often pruned and shaped with an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.

False memories allow people to forgive themselves and justify their mistakes, but sometimes at a high price: an inability to take responsibility for their lives.

Memories create our stories, but our stories also create our memories.

Memories are often pruned and shaped with an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.

Centuries of experience show that people will tell their tormenters what they want to hear, whether it's confessing to witchcraft in Salem, admitting to counterrevolutionary tendencies in Soviet Russia or concocting stories about Iraq and Al Qaeda."20 Indeed, the Senate Intelligence report confirmed that no information gained from torturing detainees had proved useful in capturing or killing any terrorist, including Osama bin Laden.

No matter how painful it is to let go of self-justification, the result teaches us something deeply important about ourselves and can bring the peace of insight and self-acceptance.

We can try to balance sympathy and skepticism. And then we can learn to hold our conclusions lightly, lightly enough so that we can let them go if justice demands that we do.

Sometimes things are neither this nor that, neither good nor bad. Sometimes they just are what they are.

in real life, monsters weren't always vanquished, and heroes didn't always win.

Stronger men than he had collapsed beneath life's unpredictable sorrows. He could not look to others for his salvation; other people were unreliable, changeable. He could only count upon his own resources, his own courage, his own need for truth.

This book is an invention, an act of the imagination, and in no way should be mistaken for reality, the place where much good invention originates.

However, the truth of the matter is that just because you love someone it doesn't mean that they're right for you.

Ultimately what remains is a story. In the end, it's the only thing any of us really owns.

This is our task: be serene at all times, do not be vengeful, nor scorn your enemy; speak truthfully, befriend the virtuous, be equable in the face of disaster. Be aware that everything must pass, just as clouds arise, drift, and disperse, so do not seek to cling to anything.

I went to the shoemaker to collect his wastepaper. One of them asked me if my book was communistic. I replied that it was realistic. He cautioned me that it was not wise to write of reality.