Quotes About Truth

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

a book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had been able freely to handle our codices, the majority of them would no longer exist. So the librarian protects them not only against mankind but also against nature, and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion, the enemy of truth.

Beware of faking: people will believe you. People believe those who sell lotions that make lost hair grow back. They sense instinctively that the salesman is putting together truths that don't go together, that he's not being logical, that he's not speaking in good faith. But they've been told that God is mysterious, unfathomable, so to them incoherence is the closest thing to God. The farfetched is the closest thing to miracle.

stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus

Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.

Not bad, not bad at all, Diotallevi said. To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.

I did not know then what Brother William was seeking, and to tell the truth, I still do not know today, and I presume he himself did not know, moved as he was solely by the desire for truth, and by the suspicion - which I could see he always harbored - that the truth was not what was appearing to him at any given moment.

Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners to the mass media. Well, it's all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what's going on.

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Man's principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility?

I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote I am that I am, for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where to put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside.

but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.

we read novels because they give us the comfortable sensation of living in worlds where the notion of truth is indisputable, while the actual world seems to be a more treacherous place.

El diablo no es el príncipe de la materia, el diablo es la arrogancia del espíritu, la fe sin sonrisa, la verdad jamás tocada por la duda.

To make them forget how bad human beings are, they were taught too insistently that bears are good. Instead of being told honestly what humans are and what bears are.

But what use is the unicorn to you if your intellect doesn't believe in it?

Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.

The devil is not the prince of matter; the devil is the arrogance of spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns from whence he came.

The library is testimony to truth and to error

The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.

Porque no todas las verdades son para todos los oídos, ni todas las mentiras pueden ser reconocidas como tales por cualquier alma piadosa

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

Atât de mare e puterea adev?rului care, precum binele, se r?spândeÈ™te de la sine.

omnis mundi creatura / quasi liber et pictura / nobis est in speculum (all the creatures of the world / as a book and a picture / are to us a mirror)