Quotes About Truth

The first lesson a watcher learns is to separate truth from illusion. Because in the world of magicks, it's the hardest thing to do.

Live with a man 40 years. Share his house, his meals. Speak on every subject. Then tie him up, and hold him over the volcano's edge. And on that day, you will finally meet the man.

Sometimes you might say something you think is true.

later you might discover that what you said is not true. When you do not know that what you are saying is untrue, you are making a mistake.

Sometimes you might purposely tell someone something that is not

true. When you do this: You are not telling a fantasy. You are not making a mistake. You are lying. Lying is trying to make someone believe something that is not true. It is deceiving or

Lying is not a good thing to do. When you lie:

There are many ways to tell lies. You can tell lies with your actions.

You might cause someone to believe something that is not true by acting a certain way. You are lying when you do this.

People usually find out when you lie to them.

When a despot ineptly sought to turn a country to a totalitarian nightmare, where was poetry? It wasn't sleeping. It kept the poets up at night. We wrote against despair toward beauty, toward a truth that could imprison us for making liars out of the fools deposited in the seats of power, kept there by puppets who kneeled in piles of promissory notes.

You must speak in the language of justice.

She had said that she preferred to be alone for so many years that it was now one of those things that equally well might or might not be true.

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to overcome doubt.

you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.

Fiction that adds up, that suggests a logical consistency, or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.

I love insult, it's always honest.

there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.

But he doesn't love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love--the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn't happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another's faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn't happen.

Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted? If it were not for language, could we lie?

And the thought consoled me, as it does now: everything you believe you have imagined is real. You have only to outlive it.

To the young there are no degrees of old just as there are no degrees of dead - either you are, or you are not.