Quotes About Truth

the remembrence of things past is not nessecarly the remeberance of things as they were

when a creature is so badly constituted (perhaps in nature that being is man) that he cannot love unless he suffers and that he must suffer to learn truth, the life of such a being becomes in the end very exhausting. The happy years are those that are wasted; we must wait for suffering to drive us to work.

The lie, the perfect lie, about people we know, about the relations we have with them, about our motive for some action, formulated in totally different terms, the lie as to what we are, whom we love, what we feel with regard to people who love us … that lie is one of the few things in the world that can open windows for us on to what is new and unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses for the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known.

Truth and life are very difficult to fathom, and I retained of them, without really having got to know them, an impression in which sadness was perhaps actually eclipsed by exhaustion.

For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years' time. So that to believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were not greater folly still, for from this mass of errors there have emerged in the course of time many truths.

We remember the truth because it has a name, is rooted in the past, but a makeshift lie is quickly forgotten.

Facts do not find their way into the world in which our beliefs reside - they did not produce our beliefs, there, they do not destroy them.

There is nothing like desire for obstructing any resemblance between what one says and what one has on one's mind.

Aliás, se o ciúme nos ajuda a descobrir certo pendor para a mentira na mulher que amamos, centuplica ele esse pendor quando a mulher descobre que somos ciumentos. Ela mente (em proporções como nunca nos tinha mentido antes), ou por pena, ou por medo, ou se furta instintivamente por uma fuga simétrica às nossas investigações.

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.

La vraie vie, la vie enfin découverte et éclaircie, la seule vie par conséquent pleinement vécue, c'est la littérature.

É, de resto, uma das coisas mais terríveis para o apaixonado que, sendo os fatos particulares - que só a experiência, a espionagem, entre tantas realizações possíveis, dariam a conhecer - tão difíceis de descobrir, a verdade, em compensação, seja tão fácil de conhecer ou, em todo caso, de pressentir.

We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening. The truth which one puts into one's words does not carve out a direct path for itself, it is not irresistibly self-evident. A considerable time must elapse before a truth of the same order can take shape in them.

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them. For

he loved sincerity, but only as he might love a pimp who could keep him in touch with the daily life of his mistress.

But she was wrong; it was what gave her away; she had not taken into account that this fragmentary detail of the truth had sharp edges which could not be made to fit in, except to those contiguous fragments of the truth from which she had arbitrarily detached it, edges which, whatever the fictitious details in which she might embed it, would continue to shew, by their overlapping angles and by the gaps which she had forgotten to fill, that its proper place was elsewhere.

However, it was impossible for any love of mine for Andrée to be true: she was too intellectual, too highly strung, too prone to ailment, too much like myself.

Anzi, da un punto di vista puramente realistico, i paesi che noi desideriamo tengono in ogni istante assai più posto nella nostra esistenza vera, dei paesi dove abitiamo in realtà.

A man who is in the habit of smiling in the glass at his handsome face and stalwart figure, if you shew him their radiograph, will have, face to face with that rosary of bones, labelled as being the image of himself, the same suspicion of error as the visitor to an art gallery who, on coming to the portrait of a girl, reads in his catalogue: "Dromedary resting.

True life life at last discovered and illuminated the only life therefore really lived that life is literature.

I fatti non penetrano nel mondo in cui vivono le nostre convinzioni, non le hanno create e non possono distruggerle. Possono infliggere loro continue smentite senza appannarle.

But in exchange for what our imagination leads us to expect and we give ourselves so much futile trouble trying to find, life gives us something which we were very far from imagining.

Assim trocamos palavras mentirosas. Mas uma verdade mais profunda do que a que diríamos se fôssemos sinceros pode às vezes ser expressa e anunciada por outro meio que não o da sinceridade.

The truth was, though as yet it was hardly apparent, that she was highly intelligent, and that in the things that she said the stupidity was not her own but that of her environment and age