Quotes About Truth

People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty.

I use logic all the time in mathematics, and it seems to yield "correct" results, but in mathematics "correct" by and large means "logical", so I'm back where I started. I can't defend logic because I can't remove my glasses.

There are desires we haven't named yet, loves so impossible they have to be true. — Richard Jackson, from "Incompleteness," The Heart as Framed: New and Selected Poems (Press 53, 2022)

Maybe we have to betray ourselves in order just to be ourselves. In the end, Truth taps at the window of our souls. What quivers on the lake are only the footprints of Fate. Even our astronomers hear the funeral sounds of dying galaxies before they ever see them. Gusts of time are filling my lungs.

In other words, every party will be permitted to contend for their truths so long as they acknowledge that they are their truths, and not the truth. Each will be permitted to propagandize, each will have to propagandize if it is to hold its own, because it is acknowledged that there is no common ground for the alternative to propaganda, which is reasonable persuasion.

The human eye is a wonderful device. With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.

Face the facts. Then act on them. It's the only mantra I know, the only doctrine I have to offer you, and it's harder than you'd think, because I swear humans seem hardwired to do anything but. Face the facts. Don't pray, don't wish, don't buy into centuries-old dogma and dead rhetoric. Don't give in to your conditioning or your visions or your fucked-up sense of . . . whatever. Face the facts. Then act. QUELLCRIST

When a man you know to be of sound mind tells you his recently deceased mother has just tried to climb in his bedroom window and eat him, you only have two basic options. You can smell his breath, take his pulse and check his pupils to see if he's ingested anything nasty, or you can believe him.

Sometimes there's nothing worse than the truth. It can be harder and sharper and hurt more than a knife. The truth can clear a room faster than tear gas.

You have to burn beliefs when they become convenient lies solely for the purpose of gaining and holding power.

I don't believe in conspiracies. Guys will say anything to get laid.

Nothing good has ever come from anything that begins with "God has a message for you.

Why don't you tell me about why you're here?" says Ray. Before I can answer, Carlos says. "Despite appearances, Stark here is dead." Ray cocks his head and looks at me. "I wouldn't have guessed," says Ray. "You wear death well.

Next you'll tell me that Mickey Mouse is just a guy in a costume.

A little boy came home and told his mother he had gotten first prize in an examination. The question had been How many legs does a horse have He had answered, Three. When his mother asked how he had gotten the first prize, he replied that all the other children had said, Two.

All the time we tell ourselves stories about ourselves. We have to: there is no objective truth. You might as well choose positive rather than negative stories. By doing so you will increase the sum of human happiness, starting with yourself and radiating out to others.

We also maintain - again with perfect truth - that mystery is more than half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through the imagination.

What good, after all, do these two things do the man, who both admits that what has been said is true, and has high praise for the speech it has been said in, and still does not yield that full assent,

Get into your heart more of that good Bible. It will give you light.

Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth to see it like it is, and tell it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth.

People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook.

The scientists have given [modern man] the impression that there is nothing he cannot know, and false propagandists have told him that there is nothing he cannot have.

The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one's view of the nature and destiny of man.

The hero can never be a relativist.