Quotes About Truth

I have known strong minds, with imposing, undoubting, Cobbett-like manners; but I have never met a great mind of this sort. The truth is, a great mind must be androgynous." —SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

Lies come as natural as the babbling of a creek.

Nobody knows nothing for sure. If they say they do, they're either a preacher or selling something. Deal

A deeper truth exists, waiting to be found... inviting me to go every direction at once, and none.

My grandfather used to say the world is full of hidden truths, if only you open your eyes and look. New frontiers are waiting to be explored, no matter what the schoolteachers say or how many books have been written. Maps are just a lie we tell ourselves to feel safe.

I don't know it for sure. Nobody knows nothing for sure. If they say they do, they're either a preacher or selling something.

The true knowledge is not in the things, but in finding the connections between the things.

humanity learns true lessons only in cataclysm.

I'm telling you why we broke up, Ed. I'm writing this letter, the whole truth of why it happened. And the truth is that I goddamn loved you so much.

There are so many movies like this, where you thought you were smarter than the screen but the director was smarter than you, of course he's the one, of course it was a dream, of course she's dead, of course, it's hidden right there, of course it's the truth and you in your seat have failed to notice in the dark.

How wrong to think I was anyone else, like thinking grass stains make you a beautiful view, like getting kissed makes you kissable, like feeling warm makes you coffee, like liking movies makes you a director. How utterly incorrect to think it any other way, a box of crap is treasures, a boy smiling means it, a gentle moment is a life improved.

Mais, c'est évident !".

I'm not saying that this is how things should be. I'm saying that this is how things are.

The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance -- it is the illusion of knowledge.

There's something beautifully soothing about a fact — even (or perhaps especially) if we're not sure what it means.

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality.

The shadow has become the substance.

The lie that terrorists want you to believe is that you are in immediate and great peril.

We're assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumor, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting, and at the same time, we are all doing more.

What artists and scientists have in common is the ability to live in an open-ended state of interpretation and reinterpretation of the products of our work. The work of artists and scientists is ultimately the pursuit of truth, but members of both camps understand that truth in its very nature is contextual and changeable, dependent on point of view, and that today's truths become tomorrow's disproven hypotheses or forgotten objets d'art.

It's not just that we remember things wrongly (which would be bad enough), but we don't even know we're remembering them wrongly

This has to be what we teach our children: how to evaluate the hordes of information that are out there, to discern what is true and what is not, to identify biases and half-truths, and to know how to be critical, independent thinkers.