Quotes About Truth

It is one of the many paradoxes of life he has come to accept, that learning the truth often requires acts of deception.

That's all beliefs are; stories we tell ourselves to stop being afraid. Beliefs have very little to do with the truth.

Beware the things of this world that can mean everything or nothing.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events

I don't have any illusions that Hollywood is a place of integrity.

As any magician knows, it is not the smoke and mirrors that trick people; it is that the human mind makes assumptions and misunderstands them as truths.

I know that no one's story is simple. And no single story tells the whole truth.

I turned to memory, knowing full well that it is revisionist and that each time we remember something, we alter it slightly, massaging our perspective and layering it with new understanding in order to make meaning in the present.

If there was one truth that I'd learned from all my reading, it was this: Happy endings do not apply to everyone. Someone is always left out of that final, jubilant scene. This time, that someone was me.

Does your life feel authentically your own?

Deception takes commitment, vigilance, and a very good memory. To keep the truth buried, you must tend to it. For years and years, my job was to pile on sand - fistfuls, shovelfuls, bucketfuls, whatever the moment necessitated - in an effort to keep my mother's secret buried.

In our family, being right trumped being truthful. There was no room for uncertainty, so you never let down your guard.

A buried truth, that's all a lie really is.

We all know the adage that one lie begets the next. Deception takes commitment, vigilance, and a very good memory. To keep the truth buried, you must tend to it.

I'm telling you this because you didn't ask. I've got it all here, growing like a tumor in my throat. I'm telling you because if I don't, I will choke on it. Everybody knows what happened, but nobody asks. And Elvis the EMT doesn't count because when he asked, he didn't even listen to me answer because he was listening to my sister's heart not beat with his stethoscope. I want to tell. It's mine to tell. Even if you didn't ask, you have to hear it.

When someone tells me a piece of the truth which has been withheld from me, and which I needed in order to see my life more clearly, it may bring acute pain, but it can flood me with a cold, sea-sharp wash of relief.

The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.

There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet

Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.

The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from "Transcendental Etude

She had to possess the courage to enter, through language, states which most people deny or veil with silence.

There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.

We are not supposed to go down into the darkness of the core. Yet, if we can risk it, the something born of that nothing is the beginning of truth.