Quotes About Truth

The truth is that God is to be found in all things--even and most especially in the painful, tragic and unpleasant things.

A mere inference or theory must give way to a truth revealed; but a scientific truth must be maintained, however contradictory it may appear to the most cherished doctrines of religion.

science demands a terrible price - that we accept what experiments tell us about the universe, whether we like it or not.

where were answers to the truly deep questions? Religion promised those, though always in vague terms, while retreating from one line in the sand to the next. Don't look past this boundary, they told Galileo, then Hutton, Darwin, Von Neumann, and Crick, always retreating with great dignity before the latest scientific advance, then drawing the next holy perimeter at the shadowy rim of knowledge.

The species greatest harvest ? words.

This ain't no party. This ain't no disco. This ain't no fooling around.

I read the NY Times but I don't trust all of it.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

Facts just twist the truth around.

Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late. Facts all come with points of view. Facts don't do what I want them to. Facts just twist the truth around. Facts are living turned inside out.

Maybe this is all a bit of a myth, a willful desire to give each place its own unique aura. But doesn't any collective belief eventually become a kind of truth? If enough people act as if something is true, isn't it indeed "true," not objectively, but in the sense that it will determine how they will behave? The myth of unique urban character and unique sensibilities in different cities exists because we want it to exist.

Even if I had amazing recall, and I don't, recollection is often just self-fashioning. Some of it is reflexive, designed to bury truths that cannot be swallowed, but other "memories" are just redemption myths writ small. Personal narrative is not simply opening up a vein and letting the blood flow toward anyone willing to stare. The historical self is created to keep dissonance at bay and render the subject palatable in the present.

To be an addict is to be something of a cognitive acrobat. You spread versions of yourself around, giving each person the truth he or she needs—you need, actually—to keep them at one remove. How, then, to reassemble that montage of deceit into a truthful past?

Even if I had amazing recall, and I don't, recollection is often just self-fashioning. Some of it is reflexive, designed to bury truths that can not be swallowed, but other "memories" are just redemption myths writ small. Personal narrative is not simply opening up a vein and letting the blood flow toward anyone willing to share. The historical self is created to keep dissonance at bay and render the subject palatable in the present.

Everyone is told just as much as he needs to know, including the self.

And because I had been in some tight corners before and had known real fear, if I found something that was true, I was happy to just write it up and deal with the fallout. No big.

After reading four pages of continuous ten-year-old dialogue magically recalled by someone who was in the throes of alcohol withdrawal at the time, I wondered how he did it. No I didn't. I knew he made it up. It was easy and defendable, really, sublimating and eliding the past in service of a larger Emotional Truth.

Drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons, they access them. Was I faking it then, or am I faking it now? Which, you might ask, of my two selves did I make up?

No scientific theory can claim absolutely certainty.

I think that one should recognize reality even when one doesn't like it; indeed, especially when one doesn't like it.

know that without night there is no day; without lies, no truth;without despair,no hope. Beware above all of hate, but call to its opposite too. For all things have an opposite and, if you choose it, with will and care, you may turn one thing into its reflection.

But life is not a legend or a story. Reality is far more precious than a story...

I'm frightened of nothing anymore," answered Fell simply, "except lies. For they're the real killers.

The problem was Republicans---the voters, the people. Not just those few thousand in the January 6 rage-driven mob, but the millions who accepted trump's reality free and irrational assertions, who looked to this dissembling power-mad egotist for the truth... His prejudices, his lies, his resentments were theirs. Millions love trump for that. Their fervor was the real threat to the nation.