Quotes About Truth

William Makepeace Thackeray

The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.

One of the great conditions of anger and hatred is, that you must tell and believe lies against the hated object, in order, as we said, to be consistent.

Science by itself has no moral dimension. But it does seek to establish truth. And upon this truth morality can be built.

They never get ahead an inch, because they are always hugging some coward maxim, which they can only interpret literally.... Of what use is it "to be sawing about a set of maxims to which there is a complete set of antagonist maxims"? Proverbs, it has been well said, should be sold in pairs, a single one being but a half-truth.

I don't like questions. They invent the answers. The real answers are discovered, before you even know what the question is.

William McIlvanney

I've gone to the bottom of the well," Hunter said, "and the animal's not down there.

Es gibt keine gute Nachricht. Nur weil es eine schlechte Nachricht gibt, muss es nicht zwangsläufig gute Nachrichten geben.

If we piled them up, they would reach God.' 'But God does not exist, Comrade Farmer.' 'Nor do the potatoes, Comrade Stalin.' " "Old one." "Jokes only get old if they're good. Otherwise, who keeps telling them?" "People like you who aren't funny?

Your mother and sister weren't on the radio telling us all to be brave. Look, I don't expect composers and poets to be heroes. I just don't like hypocrites.

De waarheid mag dan vreemder zijn dan de verbeelding, maar vraagt wel om een betere redacteur. Het grootste deel van het leven van een mens is de moeite van het onthouden niet waard.

Too many words for one book--truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.

might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.

You can not lie in your paintings, because you cannot hide from yourself.

When anything and everything goes, there are no real values, no definite right and wrong.

If everyone's perspective is equally right, she warned her husband, then there is no absolute right, and everything goes. It could leave you without bearings, adrift and lost.

Perhaps there is more sense in our nonsense and more nonsense in our 'sense' than we would care to believe.

In the long run it is far more dangerous to adhere to illusion than to face what the actual fact is.

If we supposed that theories gave true knowledge, corresponding to 'reality as it is', then we would have to conclude that Newtonian theory was true until around 1900, after which it suddenly became false, while relativity and quantum theory suddenly became the truth. Such an absurd conclusion does not arise, however, if we say that all theories are insights, which are neither true nor false but, rather, clear in certain domains, and unclear when extended beyond these domains.

we merely say that man is continually developing new forms of insight, which are clear up to a point and then tend to become unclear. In this activity, there is evidently no reason to suppose that there is or will be a final form of insight (corresponding to absolute truth)

There's a terror in knowing what the world is about

The truth is, of course, that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.

All Cretans are liars, as a Cretan poet once told me.