Quotes About Truth

Unless religion leads us on a path to both depth and honesty, much religion is actually quite dangerous to the soul and to society.

In general, we taught that love and action were more important than intellect or speculative truth. Love is the highest category for the Franciscan School (the goal), and we believe that authentic love is not possible without true inner freedom of conscience,18 nor will love be real or tested unless we somehow live close to the disadvantaged (its method), who remind us about what is important.

The spiritual journey is a constant interplay between moments of awe, followed by a general process of surrender to that moment. We must first allow ourselves to be captured by the goodness, the truth, or beauty of something beyond and outside ourselves. Then we universalize from that moment to the goodness, truth, and beauty of the rest of reality, until our realization eventually ricochets back to include ourselves. This is the great inner dialogue we call prayer.

The Biblical revelation is about awakening, not accomplishing. You cannot get there, you can only be there, but the foundational Being-in-God, for some reason, is too hard to believe, and too good to be true for most people. Only the humble will usually believe it and receive it, because it affirms more about God than it does about us. Proud people are not attracted to such explanations.

Great spiritual teachers learn to balance knowing with not knowing, as illustrated in this oft-quoted aphorism: It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. The true biblical notion of faith, which balances knowing with not knowing, is rather rare today, especially among many religious folks who think faith is being certain all the time--when the truth is the exact opposite. But we have little theology of darkness today.

He did not come to change God's mind about us. It did not need changing. Jesus came to change our minds about God—and about ourselves—and about where goodness and evil really lie.

Whatever you trust to validate you and secure you is your real god, and the Gospel is saying, "Will the real God please stand up?

If we are created in the image and likeness of God, then whatever good, true, or beautiful things we can say about humanity or creation we can say of God exponentially.

This mystery has been called the conspiracy ("co-breathing") of God, and is still one of the most profound ways to understand what is happening between God and the soul. True spirituality is always a deep "co-operating" (Romans 8:28) between two. True spirituality is a kind of synergy in which both parties give and both parties receive to create one shared truth and joy.

The juniors are made to think that the container is all there is and all they should expect; or worse, that they are mature and home free because they believe a few right things or perform some right rituals.

pride. If there's too much "I know," it will lead to illusion and ignorance. Isn't that ironic? Jesus says, "The person who says 'I know,' is precisely the blind one" (John 9:41).

15:9). Big Truth is intended to deeply change the seer himself or herself, or it is not Big Truth—or truth at all. Some form of contemplative practice is the key to this larger seeing and this larger knowing.

God will always give you exactly what you truly want and desire. Desire deeply, desire yourself, desire God, desire everything good, true and beautiful.

If our postmodern world seems highly subject to cynicism, skepticism, and what it does not believe in, if we now live in a post-truth America, then we "believers" must take at least partial responsibility for aiming our culture in this sad direction. The best criticism of the bad is still the practice of the better.

As we often tell newcomers at our meetings, give it a try—and if, after a month or so, you are not feeling happier and more peaceful, we will gladly refund your misery. And if you do give the path described in this book a try, buckle up, because Brother Rohr may just take you to places you've both avoided and longed for, to truth, union, joy, laughter, and, greatest of all, to your own precious self, here on earth with us, child of God. —Anne Lamott

To those who cling to Anselm's understanding, I would say, as J. B. Phillips wrote many years ago, "Your God is too small.

The feminine insight is a rediscovery of Jesus' spirit, a reemergence of a well-suppressed truth, an eventual political upheaval, a certain reform of our hearing of the Gospel and someday perhaps the very structures of the churches – and all proceeding from a "knowing" in the mother's womb, the exact place from which we received Christ for the first time.

I told him the truth, that I loved him and didn't regret anything about our lives together. But do we ever 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God' as my father used to say, to those we love? Or even to ourselves? Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been?

aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.

Lives are rivers. We imagine we can direct their paths, though in the end there's but one destination, and we end up being true to ourselves only because we have no choice.

if making things seem prettier than they are is a lie, then making them seem uglier must be another.

Though here his voice faltered, because he knew as well as she did what came next, what words came next. If he could speak them, he might even convince her they were true, as his father had convinced his mother that Browning summer. It was the worst lie there was, imprisoning and ultimately embittering the hearer, playing upon her terrible need to believe. He could feel the I love you forming on his lips. Would he have said it if she hadn't interrupted?

His carefully calculated sincerity is almost entirely indistinguishable from the real thing.

La verdad no sirve como sustituto de una buena respuesta.