Quotes About Truth

If I could give you just one thing, I'd want it to be a simple truth that took me many years to learn. If you learn it now, it may enrich your life in hundreds of ways. And it may prevent you from facing many problems that have hurt people who have never learned it. The truth is simply this: No one owes you anything.

Mildred ließ sich auf einen Stuhl fallen. "Du weißt ja: Wer im Glashaus sitzt... Vielleicht hab ich 'n Sprung in der Schüssel. Und wennschon. Ich werd' euch mal ein Geheimnis verraten: Wenn die Schüssel 'nen Sprung hat, dann kommt mehr Licht rein. Also bin ich doch schlauer als ihr.

Reality is only just a word.

Now sometimes words can serve me well Sometimes words can go to hell For all that they do

I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit . . . If you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we'll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can't do it—you can't bullshit. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world.

The writers job is to get naked, To hide nothing. To look away from nothing. To look at it. To not blink. To be not embarrassed or shamed of it. Strip it down and lets get down to where the blood is, the bone is. Instead of hiding it with clothes and all kinds of other stuff, luxury!

The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth.

The Horatian Spanish poet Antonio Machado defined poetry as 'a few true words', a definition that sounds minimal, even despairing, until you reflect on what a few true words can do.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstance require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.

Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial—notoriously less stable and less inherent than the nature of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

After all, every use of language without exception has some, if not all, of the characteristic features of lies.

The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Civilizations... cannot flourish if they are beset with troublesome infections of mistaken beliefs.

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.

To establish and to sustain an advanced culture, we need to avoid being debilitated either by error or by ignorance. We need to know—and, of course, we must also understand how to make productive use of—a great many truths.

Is truth something that in fact we do—and should—especially care about? Or is the love of truth, as professed by so many distinguished thinkers and writers, itself merely another example of bullshit ?

However, it must not be assumed that bullshit always and necessarily has pretentiousness as its motive.

Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial — notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.

There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed.

We may seek to distance ourselves from bullshit, but we are more likely to turn away from it with an impatient or irritated shrug than with the sense of violation or outrage that lies often inspire. The problem of understanding why our attitude towards bullshit is generally more benign than our attitude toward lying is an important one...

What the eyes see and the ears hear the mind believes

Manchmal denke ich – und es fällt mir schwer das zu sagen -, daß er die Menschen besser kennt als der Chef. Der Chef ist ein Idealist, ein großer Schatz, der das Beste für die Menschen will, ohne zu wissen, mit wem er es eigentlich zu tun hat. Luzifer aber weiß, daß sie lieber Himmel und Erde untergehen lassen würden, als ihr Auto abzumelden.