Quotes About Truth

Mma Lentswe looked into her teacup. "Children say these things. They never admit they did anything. I was a teacher, Mma—I know that.

the truth sometimes seemed too thin to satisfy our yearnings.

When you don't talk about something, then something will talk about itself for you.

There's no excuse," said Isabel firmly. "Biscuits are trivial, but lies are not.

Sometimes people simply did not want to find things out. Nobody was missing, nobody was cheating on their wives, nobody was embezzling. At such times, a private detective may as well hand a closed sign on the office door and go plant melons.

It was perfectly possible to portray scientific knowledge as socially determined – and therefore not true in any real sense – when one was safe on the ground in Paris; but would you ask the same question in a jet aircraft at thirty-five thousand feet, when that same knowledge underpinned the very engineering that was keeping one up in the air?

Do not think that in any case where there are two competing arguments one of them has to be right: both can be wrong.

Sometimes the truth can't be put on anybody's bill," Mma Makutsi pronounced, and then continued, "but it's still important to get to it, Mma—to get to the truth behind all the…all the things that cover up the truth.

At some stage, of course, you're going to discover that good does not always triumph and that evil can very easily win the battle; I hope, though, that when that truth dawns you will be old enough and strong enough to make the deliberate effort not to believe it. Because only if we pretend that it is not true can we steel ourselves to fight against it—like those young men in the Spitfires who did not stop to consider the impossible, daunting odds and went up nonetheless.

If everybody is a villain, then nobody is a villain

Some knowledge is a fish," she muttered. "Some is a serpent.

The country must be full of liars," she continued. "There must be liars around every corner. Liars hiding behind every bush. Liars just waiting to tell lies about something. Unrepentant liars. Old liars, young liars; perhaps even babies whose first word is a lie. Perhaps

Mma Makutsi was unconvinced. "Where there is smoke there's fire, Mma. I have always said that." Mma Ramotswe could not let that pass. "But what does Clovis Andersen say in The Principles of Private Detection, Mma? Does he not say that you must be very careful to decide where the smoke is coming from? Smoke can drift, Mma. Those were his exact words, I think.

But she would not participate in that sort of thing, even if it meant that she lost the election. If you won on the basis of lies and false promises—bribes, really—then your victory would be a hollow one.

all those things that sound so right were often just poetry, really—the gravy we put on reality to make it taste a bit better.

The obvious, Ulf once observed, is rarely the obvious until the passage of time has proved it so.

A marriage, she had learned, is seldom what it seems to be on the surface; what appears to be the most equable, well settled of arrangements might be a seething mass of discontent and resentment underneath. And conversely, chaotic and noisy relationships, littered with conflict and infidelity, might prove to be the most durable of unions.

She should not have taken any of these people at face value. She had been naive. But this conclusion, she realized, pointed unambiguously in the direction of cynicism. And she would not be a cynic. It was better to be naive, much better.

And where does religion come into it? Are Protestant countries inherently less corrupt?" "No," she said. "I don't think it's that simple. The issue, I suppose, is whether a culture stresses telling the truth. That's the real point. It's not religion.

You are innocent in your heart," she had said to him. "That is the most important thing." And he had thought about that for a few moments before shaking his head and saying, "I would like that to be true, Mma, but it is not. It is what other people think. That is the most important thing.

I saw the snake myself, and I am not one to exaggerate. It was two metres long, at the very least. And it was a mamba. I know those snakes. It was a mamba—not a hyperbole." "I would not like to be bitten by a hyperbole," muttered Mma Ramotswe. She could not stop herself; she had to say this, although more or less immediately she regretted it. "They are very dangerous, Mma," said Mma Potokwane.

Why do you ask that dog if he has a soul?" Mma Ramotswe sighed. "It's very complicated, Rra. You see…Well, you see: Mma Makutsi said dogs were just meat inside. Those were her actual words." "She's wrong," he said. "I think so. I

This advertisement let you be yourself, which is what most people really wanted, when you came to think of it.

That was the problem with being a philosopher: it was not easy. As a philosopher one could not believe in just one thing; one had to explore the possibility that what one thought was true might be false; that what one wanted to believe might not be what one really should hold to be true. So much for the examined life: how uncomfortable it could be. But at least she knew what she wanted for lunch.