Quotes About Truth

It's not right to spend money you don't have to perpetuate a lie about who you are.

Yes. That's exactly right.

The German Romantics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries rejected the Atlantic West's new materialist, individualistic and imperialistic civilization in the name of local religious and cultural truth and spiritual virtue.

Pankaj Mishra (#iampm)

Nothing is permanent. This is the central teaching of the Buddha. Not a career, not an institution, not a wife, not a tree ... All is change; change is the only truth.

Non si riferisce il reale, lo si proferisce.

But some things are best grasped without the sense of sight.

Come in," she tells her, and she invites her in to see her treasures, all affectionately addressed by diminutive nicknames: taters, carotelles, strawbabies, peasies, and so on. "Explain to your readers that it's a sin not to cultivate the earth," she says to Monika, and her elementary truth startles me. Why don't our priests thunder from the pulpit against this first of all sins?

Beyond the gods, beyond all that falsifies and coarsens the world of holiness, beyond all lies and distortion, all twisted divinities and all the abortions of human imagination, there must be something stupendous which is inaccessible to us. Which, by our very failure to capture it, demonstrates how inaccessible it is. Beyond all the sacred clutter the holy thing must exist. That I believe, of that I am certain.

Sorcery has been called Magic: but Magic is Wisdom, and there is no wisdom in Sorcery

Truth is exact correspondence with reality.

she knows the truth: being free and facing the world with all its monsters is better than being safe and leaving your life unlived.

I felt that lightning bolt you feel when someone speaks a hard truth you've always known but never heard anyone say out loud.

Spirituality is not primarily about values and ethics, not about exhortations to do right or live well. The spiritual traditions are primarily about reality...an effort to penetrate the illusions of the external world and to name its underlying truth.

We can put the chairs in a circle, but as long as they are occupied by people who have an inner hierarchy, the circle itself will have a divided life, one more form of "living within the lie": a false community.

I cannot imagine a spiritual pain deeper than dying with the thought that during my sojourn on earth, I had rarely, if ever, shown up as my true self. And I cannot imagine a spiritual comfort deeper than dying with the knowledge that I had spent my brief time on this planet doing the best I could to be present as myself to my family, my friends, my community, and my world.

Rightly understood, a myth is an effort to tell truths that cannot be told with mere facts or known by the senses and the mind alone, truths that take form only in that integrative place called the heart.

The English word "truth" comes from a Germanic root that also gives rise to our word "troth," as in the ancient vow "I pledge thee my troth." With this word one person enters a covenant with another, a pledge to engage in mutually accountable and transforming relationship...to know in truth is to become betrothed, to engage the known with one's whole self...to know in truth is to be known as well.

teacher within is not the voice of conscience but of identity and integrity. It speaks not of what ought to be but of what is real for us, of what is true. It says things like, "This is what fits you and this is what doesn't"; "This is who you are and this is who you are not"; "This is what gives you life and this is what kills your spirit—or makes you wish you were dead.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.14

when we live behind a wall, our inner darkness cannot be penetrated by the light that is in the world. In fact, all we can see "out there" is darkness, not realizing how much of it is of our own making! As a young man, the wall allowed me to cast my own darkness on others while remaining blissfully ignorant of how they saw me.

The powers and principalities would hold less sway over our lives if we refused to collaborate with them. But refusal is risky, so we deny our own truth, take up lives of "self-impersonation," and betray our identities.2

Community can teach us that our grip on truth is fragile and incomplete, that we need many ears to hear the fullness of God's word for our lives.

One dwells with God by being faithful to one's nature. One crosses God by trying to be something one is not. Reality-including one's own-is divine, to be not defied but honored.