Quotes About Truth

What is valid for the individual is also valid for the development of a wider social consciousness. Here, too, the monstrous truth regarding the causes and consequences of child abuse and the way that violence can be bred into human beings cannot be admitted to the consciousness all at once, but must proceed slowly, step by step.

The truth is that as soon as I feel well, you destroy everything until I feel bad again, because the life that gives me relief provokes you to anger…. But it is saddening that I cannot have your affection and my health at the same time."6 The

They are able to listen, to identify with others; they are outgoing, concerned, and usually less prone to illusions than the figures we see them encountering. As they have experienced honesty and unconditional affection in their early years, they are better able to cope with their lives than those who are fed on illusions and later have to fight to find out the truth about themselves, like Claudia, Anika, Helga, or Lilka.

It is hard enough to recognize lies for what they are if only one person, from whom we anticipate help, insists on maintaining the lie. Inbred tact and our own distress hamper us in contradicting that person. How much more difficult is it, then, to see through lies when everyone around us takes them for the truth, simply because they themselves are victims of such lies. Thus, yesterday's victims become the opinion-makers and power-brokers of tomorrow.

And yet the truth is so essential that its loss exacts a heavy toll, in the form of grave illness.

It's just that when we were younger we were not free enough to live our lives the way we really were.

True adulthood would mean no longer denying the truth. It would mean feeling the repressed suffering, consciously acknowledging the story remembered by the body at an emotional level, and integrating that story instead of repressing it.

Only if young people are allowed to know exactly what happened and why, if they no longer allow themselves to be deflected in their curiosity and do not fear the truth, can they free themselves from the burden of their forefathers' blindness. Such young people will certainly not condone the production of poisoned gas.

Once the adult self has decided to find out the whole truth about itself, the body feels understood, respected, and protected.

The feminist movement will forfeit none of its strength if it finally admits that mothers also abuse their children. Only the truth, even the most uncomfortable, endows a movement with the strength to change society, not the denial of the truth.

Consciously experiencing our legitimate emotions is liberating, not just because of the discharge of long-held tensions in the body but above all because it opens our eyes to reality (both past and present) and frees us of lies and illusions

As the sociologist Lucien Lombardo wrote in his introduction to a chapter of my recent book, The Truth Will Set You Free, "childhood is not the shortest age in our life but rather the longest because it stays with us until our death.

To recognize and integrate something monstrous from our collective past as a society requires considerable time, just as it does on the individual level, in therapy. To rush the process may mean that the mechanisms of denial are further strengthened. We still need our illusions, our crutches, as we confront a new and painful aspect of the truth on our journey toward a complete perception of the child's situation.

The path to adulthood lies not in tolerance for the cruelties we have been exposed to but in the realization of our own truth and the development of empathy for the maltreated child. It lies in the appreciation of the way in which cruelties have handicapped our whole

But a person who is no longer a child and has the courage to mature by wanting to see the truth must be capable of clearly and unequivocally rejecting the cruelty he or she suffered. Only then will he or she refuse to contribute to the success of evil.

One of our most vital functions is an ability to listen to the true story of our own lives. Accordingly, the central issue in this book is the conflict between the things we feel—the things our bodies register—and the things we think we ought to feel so as to comply with moral norms and standards we have internalized at a very early age.

I was not out to paint beautiful pictures; even painting good pictures was not important to me. I wanted only to help the truth burst forth.

People who delegate their own responsibility to higher powers are willfully ignoring what the facts tell them. They don't care about the truth. They want to be left in peace. Goodness they attribute to God, evil to the devil or their children's innate wickedness.

The body would become aware of this sooner or later, and no amount of fine-sounding words would be able to deceive it for long.

Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after -- like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word

the world is tumbling with innocent-seeming objects ready to declare themselves, slippery and obliging.

Detestaba la palabra «evasión» aplicada a la ficción. Podría haber argumentado, y no solo por llevar la contraria, que la evasión era la vida real.

Lies of that nature could be waiting around in the corners of a person's mind, hanging like bats in the corners, waiting to take advantage of any kind of darkness.

I went on to say that no lies, after all, were as strong as the lies we tell ourselves and then unfortunately have to keep telling to make the whole puke stay down in our stomachs, eating us alive, as he would find out soon enough.