Quotes About Truth

For Ehrman as for Schweitzer, Jesus must be acknowledged to have been a failed apocalyptic seer, whipping up excitement about the imminent end of the world and predicating upon that false prophecy his demand for repentance. Both Jesus scholars showed great courage in refusing to euphemize or sugarcoat the shocking truth.

This is from a biography of Saint Anthony, written by Ambrose in the fourth century." His finger underlining the words, he read aloud, " 'And Anthony told the monks that followed him, "When, therefore, the demons come by night to you and wish to tell the future, or they say, 'We are the angels,' give no heed, for they lie . . .

Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not." He still believed that to be true; there was an order to everything in the universe, and the greatest achievement would lie in deciphering it. Shuffling across the study, he repeated, "I'm coming." But

Gödel freely admitted that the intuition of a concept was not proof; he argued that it was the opposite. "We do not analyze intuition to see a proof, but by intuition we see something without a proof." Recently, however, he'd gone beyond that conclusion, too, and asserted that there must then logically be a realm unknowable to our simple senses, where ultimate truth resided.

Story isn't a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality

If the scene is about what the scene is about, you're in deep shit.

The weakest possible excuse to include anything in a story is: "But it actually happened." Everything happens; everything imaginable happens. Indeed, the unimaginable happens. But story is not life in actuality. Mere occurrence brings us nowhere near the truth. What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.

Fact, no matter how minutely observed, is truth with a small "t." Big "T" Truth is located behind, beyond, inside, below the surface of things, holding reality together or tearing it apart, and cannot be directly observed.

The only way to know the truth is to witness him make choices under pressure to take one action or another in the pursuit of his desire.

An honest story is at home in one, and only one, place and time.

When society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates.

Values are the soul of storytelling.

The storyteller leads us into expectation, makes us think we understand, then cracks open reality

When society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a cean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society. If not, as Yeats warned, "...the centre can not hold.

La escena no trata de lo que parece tratar en la escena. Trata de otra cosa.

A rule says, "You must do it this way." A principle says, "This works … and has through all remembered time.

In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.

If the story you're telling, is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit.

Deus ex machina not only erases all meaning and emotion, it's an insult to the audience. Each of us knows we must choose and act, for better or worse, to determine the meaning of our lives...Deus ex machina is an insult because it is a lie.

What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.

Belief and seeing are both often wrong.

We see what we want to believe.

It is a simple but sometimes forgotten truth that the greatest enemy to present joy and high hopes is the cultivation of retrospective bitterness.

First you guess. Don't laugh, this is the most important step. Then you compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experience, it's wrong. That's all there is to it. – Richard Feynman