Quotes About Truth

We are face to face with reality now; let us look at it well and pronounce our sentence; for this is the moment when we hold the proofs in our hands, when the elements of crime are hot before us and shout out the truth that soon will fade from our memory.

A superior atmosphere exists, in which we all know each other; and there is a mysterious truth – deeper far than the material truth - to which we at once have recourse, when we try to form a conception of a stranger. Have we not all experienced these things, which take place in the impenetrable regions of almost astral humanity?

We believe we have dived down to the most unfathomable depths, and when we reappear on the surface, the drop of water that glistens on our trembling finger-tips no longer resembles the sea from which it came. We believe we have discovered a grotto that is stored with bewildering treasure; we come back to the light of day, and the gems we have brought are false – mere pieces of glass – and yet does the treasure shine on, unceasingly, in the darkness!

Il y a parfois du côté de l'ombre des vérités tout aussi intéressantes que du côté de la lumière.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being.

It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.

the real is coherent and probable because it is real, not real because it is coherent...

Perhaps the truth is simply that one would need many lives to enter each realm of experience with the total abandon it demands.

A regime which is nominally liberal can be oppressive in reality. A regime which acknowledges its violence might have more genuine humanity.

We are human precisely insofar as we always intend a singularity across the thickness of our lives, insofar as we are grouped around this unique interior where there is no one, which is latent, veiled, and escapes from us always leaving behind in our hands truth which are like traces of its absence.

Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.

the real is coherent and probable because it is real, and not real because it is coherent...

Rather than a mind and a body, man is a mind with a body, a being who can only get to the truth of things because its body is, as it were, embedded in those things.

A 'world' has dimensions. By definition they are not the sole possible ones.

The imaginary is lodged in the world.

Any commemoration is also a betrayal.

Everything is science and everything is philosophy.

Each one of us knows for his own part that the world as it is, is unacceptable.

How could it limit its investigation to one sector of reality? How could it help being pluralistic? How could it help finding the same truth everywhere?

It has always been easy to hide violence with declarations of peace.

But where are these reference events and these landmarks themselves? They refer us to others, and the answer satisfies us only because we do not attend to it, because we think we are 'at home.' The question would arise again and indeed would be inexhaustible, almost insane, if we wished to situate our levels, measure our standards in their turn, if we were to ask: but where is the world itself? And why am I myself? Am I really alone to be me? Have I not somewhere a double, a twin?

Faith--in the sense of an unreserved commitment which is never completely justified-enters the picture as soon as we leave the realm of pure geometrical ideas and have to deal with the existing world. Each of our perceptions is an act of faith in that it affirms more than we strictly know, since objects are inexhaustibJe and our information limited.

Perception, which is an event, opens onto the thing perceived, which appeared to be prior to perception and to be true before it. And if perception always reaffirms the preexistence of the world, it is precisely because it is an event, because the subject who perceives is already at grips with being through the perceptual fields, the "senses.