Quotes About Truth

To imagine that we are not always in control of what we do is a frightening thought, but in fact it is the reality.

Appearance Bias I understand the people I deal with; I see them just as they are. We see people not as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

Your first impulse should always be to find the evidence that disconfirms your most cherished beliefs and those of others. That is true science.

People do not want truth and honesty, no matter how much we hear such nonsense endlessly repeated. They want their imaginations to be stimulated and to be taken beyond their banal circumstances. They want fantasy and objects of desire to covet and grope after.

They are there, before our eyes, for us to see—"Yes, now the statue's nose does look just right." There are no offensive words, no possibility of misinterpretation. No one can argue with a demonstrated proof. As Baltasar Gracián remarks, "The truth is generally seen, rarely heard.

And as with Louis, he will not admit the truth, but will find an excuse to rid himself of your presence.

Your honesty is likely to offend people; it is much more prudent to tailor your words, telling people what they want to hear rather than the coarse and ugly truth of what you feel or think. More important, by being unabashedly open you make yourself so predictable and familiar that it is almost impossible to respect

Look at things as they are, not as your emotions color them.

Con demasiada frecuencia creemos que el poder cambia a la gente, cuando en realidad la muestra tal como es.

From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.

If people were rational and morally superior, the world would be suffused with goodness and peace. We know, however, the reality, and so some people, perhaps all of us, are merely deceiving ourselves.

As Winston Churchill said, "Truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

No one can argue with a demonstrated proof. As Baltasar Gracián remarks, "The truth is generally seen, rarely heard.

Truth was like any other material necessary for the making of war: it had to be beaten and bent and cut into the required shape.

Quod volimus credimus libenter we always believe what we want to believe

March had a routine for reading the paper. He started at the back, with the truth. If Leipzig was said to have beaten Cologne four-nil at football, the chances were it was true: even the Party had yet to devise a means of rewriting the sports results. The sports news was a different matter. COUNTDOWN

A crock of shit," Rick had called it. But actually this was worse. Shit, to quote Gore Vidal, has its own integrity. This was a crock of nothing.

ma a Roma un uomo onesto era un uomo raro: cioè un cretino.

Everybody tends to heighten his own reality. We start with a private fantasy about our lives and perhaps one day, for fun, we turn it into an anecdote. No harm is done. Over the years, the anecdote is repeated so regularly it becomes accepted as a fact. Quite soon, to contradict this fact would be embarrassing. In time, we probably come to believe it was true all along. And by these slow accretions of myth, like a coral reef, the historical record takes shape.

I lay aside the papers. Really, it is beyond hypocrisy; it is beyond even lying: it has become a psychosis.

It was only later that he recognised the folly he had fallen into, a human trait he had long observed: that merely because one wishes to believe in a thing, it does not follow that it is true.

Looking out from his window, he felt he had been granted a glimpse of a great truth, one that had been whispering at his conscience for many years: that God was not to be pressed into service merely to suit the needs of men, however righteous they believed their cause to be; that such presumption was itself a sin. He felt both despair and a bitter vindication.

From the subjective perspective, he may seem cruel, even wicked. But the glory of the man is to be found in the objective perspective.

What do you do,' he said, 'if you devote your life to discovering criminals, and it gradually occurs to you that the real criminals are the people you work for?