Quotes About Truth

One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.

Science promised us truth, or at least a knowledge of such relations as our intelligence can seize: it never promised us peace or happiness.

Crowds always, and individuals as a rule, stand in need of ready-made opinions on all subjects. The popularity of these opinions is independent of the measure of truth or error they contain, and is solely regulated by their prestige.

The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.

However great or true an idea may have been to begin with, it is deprived of almost all that which constituted its elevation and its greatness by the mere fact that it has come within the intellectual range of crowds and exerts an influence upon them.

Notwithstanding all its progress, philosophy has been unable as yet to offer the masses any ideal that can charm them; but, as they must have their illusions at all cost, they turn instinctively, as the insect seeks the light, to the rhetoricians who accord them what they want. Not truth, but error has always been the chief factor in the evolution of nations,

To give to men that portion of hope and illusion without which they cannot live, such is the reason for the existence of gods, heroes, and poets. During fifty years science appeared to undertake this task. But science has been compromised in hearts hungering after the ideal, because it does not dare to be lavish enough of promises, because it cannot lie.

Las masas no tienen jamás sed de verdades. Ante las evidencias que las desagradan, se apartan, prefiriendo divinizar al error, si el error las seduce. Quien sabe ilusionarlas se convierte fácilmente en su amo; el que intenta desilusionarlas es siempre su víctima.

Science promised us truth, or at least a knowledge of such relations as our intelligence can seize: it never promised us peace or happiness. Sovereignly indifferent to our feelings, it is deaf to our lamentations. It is for us to endeavour to live with science, since nothing can bring back the illusions it has destroyed.

history is scarcely capable of preserving the memory of anything except myths.

Les foules n'ont jamais eu soif de vérités. Devant les évidences qui leur déplaisent, elles se détournent, préférant déifier l'erreur, si l'erreur les séduit. Qui sait les illusionner est aisément leur maître; qui tente de les désillusionner est toujours leur victime.

Man is firmly convinced that he is awake in reality he is caught in a net of sleep and dreams which he has unconsciously woven himself.

Me cuesta trabajo saber qué cosas he soñado y cuáles me han sucedido. Mis afectos se reparten entre fantasmas de la imaginación y personajes reales.

Lord, I do not attempt to comprehend Your sublimity, because my intellect is not at all equal to such a task. But I yearn to understand some measure of Your truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand in order to believe but I believe in order to understand. For I believe even this: that I shall not understand unless I believe.3

I always tell the truth when I'm drunk. In vino vomitas.

But I want more. I want reasons to have faith in my faith, to have a reasonable confidence that there is actually truth in what my religion teaches me about God and my relation to God. And that faith has to be based on something within myself that I already trust: it has to be consonant with my experience of the universe and my abilities to reason about that universe.

Edwin tells us that he became an atheist in college; but as he grew to know the limits of science and then began seeing what he called "too many coincidences" in the universe, his atheism slipped to agnosticism. Then, he recalls, a professor showed him that you could find truth in poetry and once said to him that "an agnostic is an atheist with no courage." That clearly shook Edwin's easy agnosticism.

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.