Quotes About Truth

So I simply said one of the great trite truths: There is generally more than one side to a story.

If they come upon one who still has not seen it and they speak to him of fire, he does not know what they mean. So they, in turn, fall back upon telling him what fire is like. As they do so, they know from their own experience that what they are telling him is not the truth, but only a part of it. They know that this man will never know reality from their words, though all the words in the world are theirs to use.

Much of the world is illusion, yet the forms of that illusion follow a pattern which is a part of divine reality.

I believe everything I say, though I know I'm a liar.

To speak is to name names, but to speak is not important. A thing happens once that has never happened before. Seeing it, a man looks upon reality. He cannot tell others what he has seen. Others wish to know, however, so they question him saying, 'What is it like, this thing you have seen?' So he tries to tell them.

The great burning blossom squats, flowing, upon the limb of the world, excreting the ash of the world, and being none of these things I have named and at the same time all of them, and this is reality, the Nameless.

Don't know why I should have to lie beside anyone I wouldn't want next to me now, and there aren't many." "You're getting morbid, Corwin. Or drunk. Or both. Bitter, too. You don't need that.

This is because one can never be sure whether wisdom produces or merely locates, and the Prince is wise.

The shadows will not bear me away, for there are no Shadows here.

I'll bare the basics, bridle the beast Unreason, and wrest from murky mystery the pearl of sweetest sense.

How many people get their stories right from day to day?

We spend so much time lying to one another that I decided it would be amusing to say what I really felt. Just to see whether anyone noticed.

Don't you see, said Father, that you are confusing fiction with facts, fiction does not create facts, fiction can come from facts, it can grow out of facts by compounding, transposing, augmenting, diminishing, or altering them in any way; but you must not confuse cause and effect, you must not confuse what really happened with what the story says happened, you must not lose your grasp on reality, that way madness lies.

I don't like clever books; I like honest books.

The answers were not easy to come by, they lay in the garden of the past, which memory had dug up and replanted in plots of its own choosing.

And then there were those who pretended their emotions were bigger and grander than anyone else's. A little annoyance they acted out like a gigantic rage; where a smile or chuckle would do, they laughed hysterically. Either way, it was dishonest.

But that was always the case – people hardly ever saw their children as they really were.

What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.

Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.

I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).

Suffering is a form of egoism. I speak only of myself. I am not talking about her, saying what she was, making an overwhelming portrait (like the one Gide made of Madeleine). (Yet: everything is true: the sweetness, the energy, the nobility, the kindness.)

Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often 'chimeras.

To expend oneself, to bestir oneself for an impenetrable object is pure religion. To make the other into an insoluble riddle on which my life depends is to consecrate the other as a god; I shall never manage to solve the question the other asks me, the lover is not Oedipus. Then all that is left for me to do is to reverse my ignorance into truth.

I cannot countenance the traditional belief that postulates a natural dichotomy between the objectivity of the scientist and the subjectivity of the writer, as if the former were endowed with a 'freedom' and the latter with a 'vocation' equally suitable for spiriting away or sublimating the actual limitations of their situation. What I claim is to live to the full contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.