Quotes About Truth

So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?

A verdade é aquilo que te torna livre. Mas só depois de ter acabado contigo.

This, according to the fellows who saw me as fit for a Service career, put me ahead of the curve, to understand this truth at an age when most guys are starting only to suspect the basics of adulthood--that life owes you nothing; that suffering takes many forms; that no one will ever care for you as your mother did; that the human heart is a chump.

It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms nearly always shoot themselves in...the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master." This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

Clichés earned their status as clichés because they're so obviously true

Metafiction is untrue, as a lover. It cannot betray. It can only reveal. Itself is the only object. It's the act of a lonely solipsist's self-love, a night-light on the black fifth wall of being a subject, a face in a crowd. It's lovers not being lovers. Kissing their own spine. Fucking themselves. True, there are some gifted old contortionists out there. Ambrose and Robbe-Grillet and McElroy and Barthelme can fuck themselves awfully well.

LaMont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of its oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage.

Show me somebody who really knows what irony means and I'll show you a bullshit artist.

La verdad es lo que te hará libre. Pero no hasta que haya acabado contigo.

Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn't even know he believed until it exits his mouth

I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.

None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death.

Everybody who really wants to knows what's true. Most people just don't want to. It means listening from deep inside. Most people just don't want to. But the special people listen. You can hear what's true, inside. Listen.

Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting?

It's like there's some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy.

Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn't even know he believed until it exits his mouth in front of five anxious little hairless plump trusting clueless faces.

JAY: Why is a story more upfront than life? LENORE: It just seems more honest, somehow. JAY: Honest meaning closer to the truth? LENORE: I smell trap. JAY: I smell breakthrough. The truth is that there's no difference between a life and a story? But a life pretends to be something more? But it really isn't more? LENORE: I would kill for a shower.

Gentlemen- by which I mean, of course, latter adolescents who aspire to manhood gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither you nor I have made, heroism. Heroism

David Foster Wallace

Talk about solid turds all you want. The molecular integrity of shit is small potatoes.

You believe you would die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its sentiment.

The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. States as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

It's painful to believe that the would-be 'public servants' you're forced to choose between are all phonies whose only real concern is their own care and feeding and who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they've just got to believe you're an idiot.