Quotes About Truth

Anything but history, for history must be false.

I tell lies somewhere else, but not here, not in front of myself.

Joe is never sure whether they're mad or just alarmingly and uncompromisingly incapable of self-delusion.

American psychiatry has told the public a false story over the past thirty years.

The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart. ST. JEROME

Wherever I set my foot, not just a courtroom, could be a place of worship. My

We have regarded as real what is unreal. We have to give up this attitude.

Find the Source of this false I: then it will disappear.

the experience of the undivided reality".

The truth of one's own real nature is that it is an undivided oneness:

Nothing more can be predicated of the Self than its existence.

To see the false as the false, you need to lay aside all the search-oriented teachings, and focus on (contemplate) the reality that your presence and the Absolute presence cannot be other than the same presence.

Think of it: zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical, and all logically incompatible with one another : 'My hereditary material is the most important material on earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain, even death'. And you are one of those organisms, living your life in the thrall of a logical absurdity.

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" asked the Christian theologian Tertullian... Having received the revealed thruth via Christ, "we want no curious disputation." Well that was then. Today science is so powerful that theologians can't casually dismiss secular knowledge. For most... Athens and Jerusalem must be reconciled or Jerusalem will fall off the map. Philo's thoughtful answer is 'Logos')

feelings are "true" if the judgments they encode are accurate

we deceive ourselves in order to deceive others better. This hypothesis was tossed out during the mid-1970s by both Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers.

the best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.

Buddhism offers an explicit diagnosis of the problem and a cure. And the cure, when it works, brings not just happiness but clarity of vision: the actual truth about things, or at least something way, way closer to that than our everyday view of them.

What's more, when we recount an experience to someone, the act of recounting it changes the memory of it. So if we reshape the story a bit each time—omitting inconvenient facts, exaggerating convenient ones—we can, over time, transform our actual belief about what happened. Which presumably makes it easier to convince others that our story is true.

When you're feeling either very good or very bad about yourself, it probably means that a large body of evidence is being hidden from view. The most truthful times come between the extremes.

The brain is like a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth, regardless of whether they in fact have any either. Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than for virtue.

The truth depends on what we say the truth is. If men are told that the impulse to philander is deeply "natural," essentially irrepressible, then the impulse—for those men, at least— may indeed be so. In Darwin's day, though, men were told something else: that animal impulses are formidable foes but can, with constant and arduous effort, be defeated. This then became, for many men, the truth. Free will was, in an important sense, created by their belief in it.

being in closer-than-usual contact with the actual workings of your mind can lead you to confront issues with a new and perhaps unsettling honesty.

I would be approaching the truth.