Quotes About Truth

At some point, I picked up an old library copy of 'To The Lighthouse' someone had bought for 25 cents. I began to read and didn't stop until the sun had blistered my back. A mysterious rightness, a beautiful submerged truth had invaded me, one that has ever since seemed slightly beyond my grasp.

I knew all the right Bible answers and the Sunday school answers.

When you start hiding things away, that's when the darkness creeps up. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

You get quick money, it's beautiful, there's sunshine, but at the end of the day, you find out it's all a masquerade, baby. It's not what it seems.

Photography can be a deceitful, superficial medium that leads us into believing something even though we know it's not necessarily true. It lulls us into a false sense of complacency.

Photography does deal with 'truth' or a kind of superficial reality better than any of the other arts, but it never questions the nature of reality - it simply reproduces reality. And what good is that when the things of real value in life are invisible?

Pessimists are not boring. Pessimists are right. Pessimists are superfluous.

Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.

When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid - in which case all comment is superfluous - or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.

I'm not gay, and I'm not a superhero.

If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.

I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, as it goes toward action. And in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times, when something is coming near, I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone... I want to unfold. I don't want to be folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

We discover that we do not know our role; we look for a mirror; we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot still sticks to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our mouth are bent. And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors.

Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of things.

A kind of memory that tells us that what we're now striving for was once nearer and truer and attached to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath. After the first home the second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.

I want to unfold. I don't want to be folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.

Du, dem ich's nicht sage, daß ich bei Nacht weinend liege, dessen Wesen mich müde macht wie eine Wiege. Du, der mir nicht sagt, wenn er wacht meinetwillen: wie, wenn wir diese Pracht ohne zu stillen in uns ertrügen? Sieh Dir die Liebenden an, wenn erst das Bekennen begann, wie bald sie lügen.

In the depths everything becomes law.

Everywhere I am folded, there I am a lie.

Don't be confused by surfaces; in the depths everything becomes law. And those who live the mystery falsely and badly (and they are very many) lose it only for themselves and nevertheless pass it on like a sealed letter, without knowing it.

Eskiden insan biliyordu (ya da belki de seziyordu) ki, meyvenin çekirdeÄŸini ta??mas? gibi, ölümü kendi içinde ta??maktad?r.

And the expenditure of energy only seems so great because you put too much importance on the victory. It is not victory that is the 'great thing' you think you have achieved, though the feeling itself is not in error. What is great is that there was already something there that you were able to set in place of that deception, something true and real.

Almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.