Quotes About Truth

Vladimir Nabokov

Once transmuted by you into poetry, the stuff will be true, and the people will come alive. A poet's purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.

am quite willing to admit that they are also a deception but right now I believe in them so much that I infect them with truth.

repeat however for the benefit of those who like books to provide them with "real people" and "real crime" and a "message" (that horror of horrors borrowed from the jargon of quack reformers) that Dead Souls will get them nowhere.

Van... even then, at fourteen, recognized that the old myths, which willed into helpful being a whirl of worlds (no matter how silly and mystical) and situated them within the gray matter of the star-suffused heavens, contained, perhaps, a glowworm of strange truth. His nights in the hammock... were now haunted not so much by the agony of his desire for Ada, as by that meaningless space overhead, underhead, everywhere, the demon counterpart of divine time...

Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man in the tale.

Oh, to shout it so that all of you believe me at last, you cruel, smug people...

reality" (one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes)

He wants everything to be so simple—as, alas, it never is in real life!

Vladimir Nabokov

the only real, genuinely unquestionable thing here was only death itself

That Voice in the Mist rang out in the dimmest passage of my mind. It was but the echo of some possible truth, a timely reminder: don't be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present. Beware of the most honest broker. Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale.

Biliriz ki bu arada denilerek an?lan Avustralya aksanl? yabanc? yada komik bir hobisi olan Amca birazdan sahneye gelmeyecek olsalar, adlar? piyeste hiç geçmeyecekti. Gerçekten de bu arada sözü, basmakal?p edebiyat?n masonik simgesi, an?lan kiÅŸinin asl?nda piyesin ana karakeri olduÄŸunu göreceÄŸimizin kesin emaresidir.

But reality soon asserted itself.

Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.

You lie — she's not." "I beg your pardon?" "I said: July was hot.

The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales... literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.

We shall do our best to avoid the factual error of looking for so-called real life in novels. Let us not try and reconcile the fictions of facts with the facts of fiction. ... A master piece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

We shall do our best to avoid the factual error of looking for so-called real life in novels. Let us not try and reconcile the fiction of facts with the facts of fiction. ... A master piece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

letting go of judgments does not mean ignoring errors. It simply means seeing events as they are and not adding anything to them.

You can fool some of the people some of the time -- and that's enough to make a decent living.

History is lies agreed upon

If you want to know what's really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty.

The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.