Quotes About Truth

As Zapffe concluded, we need to hamper our consciousness for all we are worth or it will impose upon us a too clear vision of what we do not want to see,

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

Renowned for stating his convictions in the form of a paradox, as above, Chesterton, along with anyone who has something positive or equivocal to say about the human race, comes out on top in the crusade for truth. (There is nothing paradoxical about that.) Therefore, should your truth run counter to that of individuals who devise or applaud paradoxes that stiff up the status quo, you would be well advised to take your arguments, tear them up, and throw them in someone else's garbage.

What begins as a solitary truth soon proliferates like malignant cells in the body of a dream, a body whose true outline remains unknown. Perhaps, then, we should be grateful to the whims of chemistry, the caprices of circumstance, and the enigmas of personal taste for giving us such an array of strictly local realities and desires.

Question: How could we know we were keeping certain truths from ourselves regarding how things truly are in this world at its deepest level? Answer: Because we have done it before.

Something is back there. She feels this to be a horrible truth. She almost knows what the thing is, but, afflicted with some kind of oneiric aphasia, she cannot find the word for what she fears. She can only wait, hoping that sudden shock will soon bring her out of the dream, for she is now aware that "she is dreaming," thinking of herself in the third person.

I have only recorded what everyone is saying (though they may not know they are saying it), and sometimes what they have seen (though they may not know they have seen it).

the finale is always the same: simple heart failure. And all the time you thought that life was so complex.

Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that is, in fact, real.

it is as easy to make fun of religious or scientific visionaries as it is to idolize them. Which attitude is adopted depends on whether or not they tell you what you want to hear.

If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.

Devils are not so black as they are painted.

The look of the world's a lie, a face made up O'er graves and fiery depths, and nothing's true But what is horrible. If man could see The perils and diseases that he elbows Each day he walks a mile, which catch at him, Which fall behind and graze him as he passes, Then would he know that life's a single pilgrim Fighting unarmed among a thousand soldiers

Knowledge is devalued when it becomes too generally known

We no longer have those principled and informed arguments. The foundational knowledge of the average American is now so low that it has crashed through the floor of "uninformed," passed "misinformed" on the way down, and is now plummeting to "aggressively wrong." People don't just believe dumb things; they actively resist further learning rather than let go of those beliefs.

We are supposed to "agree to disagree," a phrase now used indiscriminately as little more than a conversational fire extinguisher. And if we insist that not everything is a matter of opinion, that some things are right and others are wrong … well, then we're just being jerks, apparently. It

Public debate over almost everything devolves into trench warfare, in which the most important goal is to establish that the other person is wrong.

more exasperating is that there is no way to educate or inform people who, when in doubt, will make stuff up.

The resulting flood of information, always of varying quality and sometimes of uncertain sanity, creates a veneer of knowledge that actually leaves people worse off than if they knew nothing at all. It's an old saying, but it's true: it ain't what you don't know that'll hurt you, it's what you do know that ain't so.

There aren't enough pages in this or any other book to catalog the amount of bad information on the Internet. Miracle cures, conspiracy theories, faked documents, misattributed quotes—all of these and more are the crabgrass and weeds that have rapidly overgrown a global garden of knowledge. The healthier but less sturdy grasses and flowers don't stand a chance.

A society that is post-factual is pre-fascist.

voters." Whether about science or policy, however, they all share the same disturbing characteristic: a solipsistic and thin-skinned insistence that every opinion be treated as truth. Americans no longer distinguish the phrase "you're wrong" from the phrase "you're stupid." To disagree is to disrespect. To correct another is to insult.

Colleges are supposed to be the calm environment in which educated men and women determine what's true and what's false, and where they learn to follow a model of scholarly inquiry no matter where it takes them. Instead, many colleges have become hostages to students who demand that their feelings override every other consideration.

I think it will be found that experience, the true source and foundation of all knowledge, invariably confirms its truth.