Quotes About Truth

What is the truth and how do you know it when you have it?... How do we really know anything? Is there an I a soul, which knows, or is this soul merely cells coordinating senses?... Is reality basically changing, or is it fixed and permanent?... When it's said that something means something, what's meant by that?

What I am is a heretic who's recanted, and thereby in everyone's eyes saved his soul. Everyone's eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.

The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn't the way it ever is. People should see that it's never anything other than just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance. It's never been anything else, ever, but you can't get that across in an essay.

That is impractical, but practicality isn't the whole thing with gloves or with anything else.

and he sees that what he is talking about can never really be accepted here because to see it one has to be free from social authority and this is an institution of social authority.

the reality of the Good, represented by the Sophists, and the reality of the True, represented by the dialecticians, were engaged in a huge struggle for the future mind of man. Truth won, the Good lost, and that is why today we have so little difficulty accepting the reality of truth and so much difficulty accepting the reality of Quality, even though there is no more agreement in one area than in the other.

Kad jedna osoba pati od iluzije, to se naziva poreme?enoš?u uma. Kad mnogo ljudi pati od iluzije, to se naziva religijom.

The mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this world is unreal, that is insane!

What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.

He isn't so interested in what things mean as in what they are.

Cuando una persona sufre espejismos, eso se denomina locura. Cuando muchas personas sufren espejismos, se denomina religión.

And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phaedrus said, is "insane." To

The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you don't actually know.

This is the source of the trouble. Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about. But no one is willing to give up the truth as he sees it, and as far as I know, no one now living has any real reconciliation of these truths or modes. There is no point at which these visions of reality are unified. And

Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.

One student laid it wide open when she said with complete candor, "Of course you can't eliminate the degree and grading system. After all, that's what we're here for." She spoke the complete truth. The idea that the majority of students attend a university for an education independent of the degree and grades is a little hypocrisy everyone is happier not to expose.

Is Euclidian geometry true or is Riemann geometry true? He answered, The question has no meaning. As well ask whether the metric system is true and the avoirdupois system is false; whether Cartesian coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false. One geometry can not be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

It's proper to begin with the regular facts, but after a rule is established beyond all doubt, the facts in conformity with it become dull because they no longer teach us anything new. Then it's the exception that becomes important. We seek not resemblances but differences, choose the most accentuated differences because they're the most striking and also the most instructive.

The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away.

Robert M. Pirsig

institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions.

And what is good, and what is not good- need we ask anyone to tell us this things?

The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.

Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.