Quotes About Truth

Though frankly… Tarnapol, as he is called, is beginning to seem as imaginary as my Zuckermans anyway, or at least as detached from the memoir-ist – his revelations coming to seem like still another "useful fiction," and not because I am telling lies. I am trying to keep to the facts. Maybe all I'm saying is that words, being words, only approximate the real thing, and so no matter how close I come, I only come close.

It did not matter that the idea made no sense. Sabbath's sixty-four years of life had long ago released him from the falsity of sense.

Of course it should not be too surprising to find out that your life story has included an event, something important, that you have known nothing about – your life story is in and of itself something that you know very little about.

This man did not deal in fairy tales. You could see that as soon as you walked into his office. Schevitz was somebody who liked to be proved right, somebody whose wish to prevail was his vocation.

Everything undeniably true struck me as transparently false as soon as I wrote it down, and the greater the effort to be sincere, the worse it went.

To have enslaved America with this hocuspocus! To have captured the mind of the world's greatest nation without uttering a single word of truth! Oh, the pleasure we must be affording the most malevolent man on earth!

Realism: if Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.

un gran porcentaje de las cosas de las que suelo estar automáticamente seguro resultan ser completamente erróneas y fruto de engañarme a mí mismo.

Scegli in cosa credere, la vera libertà è la consapevolezza del reale.

If we're the only animals who know in advance we're going to die, we're also probably the only animals who would submit so cheerfully to the sustained denial of this undeniable and very important truth.

nothing from nature is good or bad. Natural things just are...

Mark has been more comfortable with the general drift of a conversation before, lots of times. What if the stories that really stab him are really other people's stories? What if they're bullshit? What if he alone isn't clued into this, and there's no way to know ?

What looks like the cage's exit is actually the bars of the cage.

If concentrating on the Divine or the universal in the form of a rock aids in preparing the mind for meditation, such a rock is a great dharma, a noble truth.

Have you ever known anyone swindled by a scam? It's remarkable how determined they remain, and for how long, to defend the swindler—and to shift blame to those who tried to warn them of the swindle. The pain of being seen as a fool hurts more than the loss of money; it's more important to protect the ego against indignity than to visit justice upon the perpetrator. We human beings so often prefer a lie that affirms us to a truth that challenges us.

The truth. Men will blind themselves with hot irons, rather than face it.

True. The one certainty about riding, Braygan, is that - at some time - you will fall off. It is a fact. Another fact you might like to consider, in your life of perpetual terror, is that you will die. We are all going to die, some of us young, some of us old, some of us in our sleep, some of us screaming in agony. We cannot stop it, we can only delay it.

When a fool sees himself as he is, then he is a fool no longer; and when a wise man learns of his own wisdom, then he becomes a fool." This caused me great trouble, for it seemed mere word play. But after many years I have come to this conclusion: that only in certainty is there moral danger. Doubt is the gift we must cherish, for it forces us to question our motives constantly. It guides us to truth.

If a million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing

The truth? What the Hell is the truth? We're born, we live and we die. Everything else is just shades of opinion.

It is baffling to me why so many people find it difficult to say, I was wrong. The words, when spoken with repentance, always turn away wrath. But those who cling to their absolute lightness, despite any evidence to the contrary, will always arouse anger in their comrades or superiors.

People believe what they want to believe. The truth rarely makes a difference.

Well," said Decado, "the great Tertullian was once asked what he would do if he was attacked by a man stronger, faster, and infinitely more skillful than he." "What did he say?" "He said he would cut off his damned head for being a liar.

How can we run away with you when it's us you've been running away from all this time?