Quotes About Truth

What do we know? What do we really know? He licks his dried cracked lips. We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foreknowledge of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement. I challenge that statement. With what? I don't know.

If I had been as capable of trust as I am susceptible to fear I might have learned something new or some truth so very old we have all forgotten it.

Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose of my art. The other half must be to tell my story in the most honest way that I can.

It's a great country: you can say whatever you like so long as it is strictly true--nobody will ever take you seriously.

To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head: if he ducks he's a liar. His logic may be airtight but his argument, far from revealing the delusions of living experience, only exposes the limitations of logic.

The romantic view, while not the whole of truth, is a necessary part of the whole truth.

I thought I was wrong once," Seldom said, "but I found out later I was mistaken.

It's a great country: you can say whatever you like so long as it is strictly true—nobody will ever take you seriously.

The shock of the real.

A part of our nature rebels against this truth and against that other part which would accept it. A second truth of equal weight contradicts the first, proclaiming through art, religion, philosophy, science and even war that human life, in some way not easily definable, is significant and unique and supreme beyond all the limits of reason and nature. And this second truth we can deny only at the cost of denying our humanity.

Beware the writer who always encloses the word "reality" in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you.

Much the same could be said of the tamarisk down in the canyon, of the blue-black raven croaking on the cliff, of your own body. The beauty of Delicate Arch explains nothing, for each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful.

It's only a story. None of it really happened. How could it? How could such people be? The prisoner is probably a professor. The sheriff loses the next election. The truck driver died of emphysema. And as for the cowboy, that character, why nobody even knows where he is anymore. Or even, to be honest, if he ever really was.

Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet.

In recording my impressions of the natural scene I have striven above all for accuracy, since I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact. But the desert is a vast world, an oceanic world, as deep in its way and complex and various as the sea. Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite.

The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow.

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.

I think that's foolishness on the part of the playwright to write about himself. People don't know anything about themselves.

A play is fiction -- and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf.

George: Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf…Martha: I… am… George… I am.

Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don't know the difference. George: No, but we must carry on as though we did. Martha: Amen.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

Fear is the only true enemy, born of ignorance and the parent of anger and hate.