Quotes About Truth

A liar always knows he is lying, and that is why liars travel in packs: in order to be reassured that the judgment day will never come for them. They need each other for the well-being, the health, the perpetuation of their lie.

One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from the experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.

Not everything that is face can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

I do not think you have ever lied to me but I know that you have never told me the truth—why?

All the white people she has ever met needed, in one way or another, to be reassured, consoled, to have their consciences pricked but not blasted; could not, could not afford to hear a truth which would shatter, irrevocably, their image of themselves. It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror.

Perhaps I did not succumb to ideology, as you put it, because I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on the how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art. - Autobiographical Notes

The author must rob us of our myths, and give us our history, which will destroy our attitudes and give us back or personalities.

It is one thing to demand justice in literature, and another thing to face the price that one has got to pay for it in life.

She worked for a life insurance company that had only recently become sufficiently progressive to hire Negroes. This meant that she worked in an atmosphere so positively electric with interracial good will that no one ever dreamed of telling the truth about anything.

You accept life as it is, you see it as it is before you can change it.

The American sense of reality is dictated by what Americans are trying to avoid; and if you're trying to avoid reality, how can you face it?

An artist's) role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.

If you're an artist, you're guilty of a crime: not that you're aware, which is bad enough, but that you see things other people don't admit are there.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism. This means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority. Vile as I am, states one of the characters in Dostoevsky's The Idiot, I don't believe in the wagons that bring bread to humanity. For the wagons that bring bread to humanity, may coldly exclude a considerable part of humanity from enjoying what is brought.

And in Uncle Tom's Cabin we may find foreshadowing of both: the formula created by the necessity to find a lie more palatable than the truth has been handed down and memorized and persists yet with a terrible power.

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, "I refute it thus.

The value of every story depends on its being true. A story is a picture either of an individual or of human nature in general: if it be false, it is a picture of nothing.

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

Every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong

There is, moreover, a sign by which you may distinguish Thragnar. For if you deny what he says, he will promptly concede you are in the right. This was the curse put upon him by Miramon Lluagor, for a detection and a hindrance." "By that unhuman trait," says Jurgen, " Thragnar ought to be very easy to distinguish.

You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts. The good-to-great companies operated