Quotes About Truth

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.

I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life; I should not be honest otherwise.

Un om este liber din punct de vedere moral când [...] judec? lumea ÅŸi îi judec? pe ceilalÅ£i oameni cu o sinceritate care nu face compromisuri.

Science is the response to the demand for information, and in it we ask for the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.

The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

There are but few saints amongst scientists, as among other men, but truth itself is a goal comparable with sanctity.

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.

Humor is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another; rather, it teaches us to abide with the fact that, in their own way, all things are true, and helps us, in the face of this terrifying knowledge, continually push ourselves in the direction of Open the Hell Up.

What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It's good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It's good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes necessary someone says: war is large-scale murder, us at our worst, the stupidest guy doing the cruelest thing to the weakest being.

At five, I had the intuitive, instinctive faith that my cosmos, my family and the world were good and true and beautiful. That somehow I had always been and always would be. And I knew in a way of a five-year-old that I had worth and dignity and individuality. Later, when I read Nietzsche's statement that these are not given to us by nature but are tasks that we must somehow solve, I knew him to be wrong. We all had them once. We

When you race you are under oath. You are testifying as to who you are.

If you would write the truth, you must first become the truth.

The truth and treasure of the universe is its own existence, and our quest for that truth and treasure will be eternal, like the universe itself.

Politicians will respect, rather than manipulate, reality only if the public cares about the truth and punishes politicians when it catches them in deliberate deception.

If the cognitive function operated in isolation, without any interference from the manipulative function, it could produce knowledge. Knowledge is represented by true statements. A statement is true if it corresponds to the facts. But if the manipulative function is at work, the facts no longer serve as an independent criterion of truth.

Unfortunately, we find systems of education today which have departed so far from the plain truth, that they now teach us to be proud of what we know and ashamed of ignorance. This is doubly corrupt. It is corrupt not only because pride is in itself a mortal sin, but also because to teach pride in knowledge is to put up an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bonds imposed by one's ignorance.

after Spinoza, philosophers know that they are using language to clarify language, like cutters using diamonds to shape other diamonds. Language is seen no longer as a road to demonstrable truth, but as a spiral or gallery of mirrors bringing the intellect back to its point of departure.

Memory is a wily keeper of the past, usually dependable, but at times, deceptive. Childhood memories are especially slippery. Sweet and so full of joy, they can often be a misrendering of the truth. For a child, that sweetness, out of context and intensely subjective, remains forever real. I know that I will always be haunted by the larger, vaguely remembered reality of the circumstances surrounding my childhood.

People forget that stereotypes aren't bad because they are always untrue. Stereotypes are bad because they are not always true. If we allow ourselves to judge another based on a stereotype, we have allowed a gross generalization to replace our own thinking.

As with the douchebags of the world, calling an asshole an asshole sometimes is exactly what needs to happen.