Quotes About Truth

The elderly will tell you that although their bodies have aged and their minds have changed, their witness is much the same as always. Even in old age, it remains a young upstart voice—detached, observant, occasionally rude. Whether ignored or embraced, the witness continues to whisper the truth to us as long as we live.

The 'I' that we confidently broadcast to the world is a fiction—a jerry-built container for the volatile unconscious elements that divide and confound us. In this sense, personal history and public history share the same dynamic principle: both are fables agreed upon. – John Lahr

This is a repository of ideas, dissertations from geniuses, not a library packed with lies and fictions!

To the devil with every miserable desire to seem more than one is.

Un bel giorno mi toccherà un colpo, uno di quelli che annientano una persona, e allora tutto finirà: finirà questo intrico, questo struggimento, quest'ignoranza, tutto, tutto, gratitudine e ingratitudine, menzogna e miraggi, questo creder di sapere e invece non saper mai niente. Però desidero vivere, non importa come.

In fact, one big lesson from Buddhism is to be suspicious of the intuition that your ordinary way of perceiving the world brings you the truth about it.

Being a person's true friend means endorsing the untruths he holds dearest.

If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.

What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or at least pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes, and the eyes of others...And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?

The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.

People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth.

All real fantasy is serious. Only faked fantasy is not serious. That is why it is so wrong to impose faked fantasy on children....

Why do people all over the world, and at all times, want marvels that defy all verifiable facts? And are the marvels brought into being by their desire or is their desire an assurance rising from some deep knowledge, not to be directly experienced and questioned, that the marvelous is indeed an aspect of the real?

A world without corruption would be a strange world indeed - and a damned bad world for lawyers, let me say.

If you cling frantically to the good, how are you to find out what the good really is?

the irrational will have its say, perhaps because 'irrational' is the wrong word for it.

If I know this, I ought to be able to escape the stupider kinds of illusion. The absolute nature of things is independent of my senses (which are all I have to perceive with), and what I perceive is an image of my own psyche.

people don't want to believe the truth about themselves. They get some mental picture of themselves and then they devil the poor old body, trying to make it like the picture. When it won't obey-can't obey, of course-they are mad at it, and live in it as if it were an unsatisfactory house they were hoping to move out of.

We come to God in little steps, not a leap, and that love of police-court truth you think so much of comes very late on the way, if it comes at all. What is truth? as Pilate asked; I've never pretended that I could have told him. I'm just glad when a boozer sobers up, or a man stops beating his woman, or a crooked lad tries to go straight. If it makes him boast a bit, that's not the worst harm it can do. You unbelieving people apply cruel, hard standards to us who believe.

Who is she? That is what you must discover, Ramezay, and you must find your answer in psychological truth, not in objective truth. You will not find out quickly, I am sure. And while you are searching, get on with your own life and accept the possibility that it may be purchased at the price of hers and that this may be God's plan for you and her.

Her conception of the role of the medical examiner was to speak for the dead to help the living.

It is problematic because, taken together, the whole--composed of lies and truth--forms a truth of its own.

We must offer him Christian compassion and understanding. But we must also give him truth. Compassion doesn't mean lying to someone to save their feelings.

I wanted stories that would build me up in my Christian faith. Like in the Bible where it says to fix our thoughts on what's true, honorable and right and to think about things that are admirable, excellent and worthy of praise.