Quotes About Truth

There is only one true legitimacy, and it's bestowed by love, not male lineage.

everything is relative, one man's absolute belief is another man's fairy tale;

What's the use of stories that aren't even true?

The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.

All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,' said Birbal, 'and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.

You will see, as time goes by, said Ibn Rushd, that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God's worst advocates.

A little bird whispers in my ear: Be fair! Nobody, no country, has a monopoly of untruth.

Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman's body was like that. If you watched it carefully enough you could see how it moved to the rhythm of the world, the deep rhythm, the music below the music, the truth below the truth. He believed in this hidden truth the way other men believed in God or love, believed that truth was in fact always hidden, that the apparent, the overt, was invariably a kind of lie.

Straight answers were beyond the powers of Rashid Khalifa, who would never take a short cut if there was a longer, twistier road available.

People think they are all sort of things they aren't' he had sad. 'They think they are talented when they're not; they think they're powerful when they're actually just bullies; they think they're good when they're bad. People fools themselves all the time, and they don't know that they're fools

A figure of speech is a shifty thing; it can be twisted or it can be straight.

When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories.

in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe

Be so good as to cease to cast yourself in fictions. Pinch yourself, or slap yourself across the face if that's what it takes, but understand, please, that you are nonfictional, and this is real life.

this is our tragedy, she said in his words, our fictions are killing us, but if we didn't have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.

Our lives teach us who we are. I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own ... then you might as well be dead.

History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise,and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive. The weak, the anonymous, the defeated leave few marks: field-patterns, axe-heads, folk-tales, broken pitchers, burial mounds, the fading memory of their youthful beauty. History loves only those who dominate her: it is a relationship of mutual enslavement.

You will see, as time goes by," said Ibn Rushd, "that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God's worst advocates. It may take a thousand and one years but in the end religion will shrivel away and only then will we begin to live in God's truth.

Honesty is not the best policy in life. Only, perhaps, in art.

So the film was a kind of lie, because by existing it said: 'Observe the lengths we'll go to for your security. We'll even make you a movie about it.' Style instead of substance, the image instead of the reality

This is known, and what is not known does not undermine it. This is the scientific way. To be open about the limits of one's knowledge increases public confidence in what one says is known.

we can best understand the nature of this culture if we say that it found its truest mirror in a corpse

Africa, have you seen it? No? Then is it truly there?...And the past, did it happen? And the future, will it come? Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble'.

Reality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less real.