Quotes About Truth

Knowing something may be a terrible burden to bear, but it holds no danger to them as arent afraid of truth.

Im neutral on lying, seeing as how theres times when the truth just hurts people.

When people say perhaps its cause theyre lying. Either they dont believe the thing theyre saying, or they do believe it only they dont want to admit they do.

When both parties are lying and they both know the other party's lying, it comes powerful close to being the same thing as telling the truth.

Just because you believe it doesnt make it so.

I believe in everything that seems true to me right now. I just refuse to be surprised when some of those things I believe in now turn out to be false later.

Money only buys the illusion of power. Real power is in the force of will will strong enough that others bend to it for its own sake, and follow it willingly. Power that is won through deception will evaporate under the hot light of truth.

You are so intent that you believe only what you believe that you believe, that you remain utterly blind to what you really believe without believing that you believe it.

Self-knowledge can be painful, but not half so damaging as self-ignorance.

No man can bear to live with a woman who speaks nothing but the truth to him.

Honesty always sounds like impudence to the vain and stupid.

Keeping secrets was the beginning of freedom.

To me, the truth is what actually happened. Yet it is impossible to know anything approaching the whole truth about past events. Even the people living them could not possibly understand. That truth is always out of reach.

I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. --From the Introduction

Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.

Fake is as old as the Eden tree.

I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.

Women are another race. They are always changing, like the moon. You can only win by being the cool center of their being. You have to represent something solid and loving. The anchor. Even if you are not. You can't tell them the truth. You have to lie and play games. I've never in my entire life been with someone with whom I didn't have to play a game. I've never been with anyone with whom I could be exactly who I am.

Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie.

If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.

If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true were really true, there would be little hope of advance.

If we worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance.

Balaam's ass is the patron saint of apologists. Madness, as we shall see, is an appropriate term for the unreality of unbelief.