Quotes About Truth

In my chair by the hearth, I lifted my cup. "Sometimes," I told him, "you must be content with ignorance." He did not like that answer, yet that was the perversity of him: in a way he liked it best of all. I had seen how he could shuck truths from men like oyster shells, how he could pry into a breast with a glance and a well-timed word. So little of the world did not yield to his sounding. In the end, I think the fact that I did not was his favorite thing about me.

I am no coward". My voice rose, and my skin went hoy. "Your father thinks you are" His words were deliberate, as if he were savoring them. "I heard him tell my father so." "He did not" But I knew he had.

I do not plan to tell her. Telegonus, these are gods. You must keep your tricks close or you will lose everything.

As it turns out, I did kill pigs that night after all

Some people might have mistaken this for simplicity. But is it not a sort of genius to cut always to the heart?

Diceva ciò che pensava e restava stupito quando gli altri non facevano lo stesso. Qualcuno avrebbe potuto scambiare quel tratto per ingenuità. Ma non è una caratteristica del genio andare sempre dritto al cuore?

Love is a myth.' 'Love is a myth,' Grandfather Trout said. 'Like summer.' 'What?' 'In winter,'Grandfather Trout said, 'summer is a myth. A report, a rumor. Not to be believed in. Get it? Love is a myth. So is summer.

Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories.

There was after all no mystery in the end of love, no mystery but the mystery of love itself, which was large certainly but as real as grass, as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch and their growth.

The better you tell an old story, the more you are talking about right now.

History is full of people who thought they were right -- absolutely right, completely right, without a shadow of a doubt. And because history never seems like history when you are living through it, it is tempting for us to think the same.

A name is a promissory note that it cannot itself keep.

Death is a difficulty, but it is not a punishment for the wrongdoings of our first parents; life is difficult, but it is not a trial through which we must pass to earn an eternal reward. Mortality is not a wounding disability but the enabling condition that lends life its intensity, tenderness, poignancy, and beauty, let us say its wounded glory, the difficult glory, that has tasted the bitter truth.

My friend Meyer, the economist, says that cretins are the only humans who can be absolutely certain of their own sanity. All the rest of us go rocketing along rickety rails over spavined bridges and along the edge of bottomless gorges. The man who believes himself free of any taint of madness is a damned liar.

The nonreader in our culture wants to believe. He is the "one born every minute". The world is so vastly confusing and baffling to him that he feels there has to be some simple answer to everything that troubles him.

You design the vulgar pots and sell them to the vulgar people. When you start believing them, you become fraudulent, Miss Nina. You make a plausible adjustment to the facts of life. I don't. And that isn't a virtue on my part. It's the disease of permanent adolescence. Honey, when you take your tongue out of your cheek, you become suspect.

John D. MacDonald

Bahá'ís believe that the individual's right to unfettered enquiry is the most fundamental of all freedoms: 'There is nothing of greater importance to mankind than the investigation of truth... Look into all things with a searching eye' (Abdu'l-Bahá) This process should be free from imitation, heredity and blind faith: 'Set aside superstitious beliefs, traditions and blind imitation of ancestral forms of religion and investigate reality' (Abdu'l-Bahá)

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself but undoubting about the truth. This has been exactly reversed … We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.5

tomes on the meaning of life. Poets and playwrights were

I am two fools, I know, For loving, and for saying so.

When you talk you talk with the little lying tips of your tongues. You dont dare lay bare your real souls. . . . But now you must listen to me for the last time. . . . For the last time I say. . . . Come here waiter you too, lean over and look into the black pit of the soul of man. And Herf is bored. You are all bored, bored flies buzzing on the windowpane. You think the windowpane is the room. You dont know what there is deep black inside.

Only the individual, or that part of life which is in the firm grasp of the individual, is real.

Think, man, think of all the oceans of lies through all the ages that must have been necessary to make this possible! Think of this new particular vintage of lies that has been so industriously pumped out of the press and the pulpit. Doesn't it stagger you?