Quotes About Truth

If you talk a good line without being changed by what you say, then you are not just hypocritical and doomed; you have become an agent of the disease.

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true. And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease. The crisis of this line of thought is the realization that we are at once limited and unendingly responsible for what we know and do.

But I had read all of [the Bible] by then, and I could see that it changed. And if it changed, how could all of it be true?

Big Ellis giggled. "We heard you were dead, Burley." "So did I," Uncle Burley said. "But I knew it was a lie as soon as I heard it.

Actual experience subjects and exposes us to the actual world, in which we must make a living under the obligation to be honest, form opinions under the obligation to be just, and in general suffer the mysteries, obscurities, and complexities that make truth difficult and righteousness imperfect.

In grief, part of the pain comes from our feeling that we should not suffer so - that it is fundamentally alien to our being, this even though we all suffer, and frequently. Yet we reject suffering as a basic human truth, while greeting joy as integral to our very substance.

The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.

As Plato said, all poets are liars. This does not mean we should mistrust them.

The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination.

Things can only be true in a specific way, for one reader at a time, at a particular moment in a reader's life.

Maybe some things aren't meant to be known. maybe there just meant to be accepted.

They say the eyes are the window to the soul.

I hate the thought that I'm just some kind of Russian nesting doll with the big outside and inevitably, rattling around under all the layers, a crude little peg with a face is the truth of me.

Who will speak of Africa's silences? Who will know where the work of true excavation must be done? •

I could convince future storytellers, Father, that what guided you was the desire for beauty and greatness, a thirst for the absolute. It doesn't really matter where it leads us; we all decide what we want to keep in our bag, rags or riches. The truth is not always pretty or merciful. •

The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.

There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.

The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.

Revere those things beyond science which really matter and about which it is so difficult to speak.

Truth itself wanders through the forests.

One more thing: Philippe, you are not a coward-so what I want to hear from you is the ecstatic truth about the twin towers.

Ein jüngerer, intelligent aussehender Mann mit langem Haar fragte mich, ob Filmen, bzw. Gefilmtwerden, Schaden anrichten könne, ob es eine Person vernichten könne. In meinem Herzen war die Antwort ja, aber ich sagte nein.

Most details are factually correct; some are not. What was important to the author was something other than accuracy, some essence he thought he glimpsed when he encountered the protagonist of this story.

Only if this were a film would I consider it real.