Quotes About Truth

Truth is always stranger than fiction. We craft fiction to match our sense of how things ought to be, but truth cannot be crafted. Truth is, and truth has a way of astonishing us to our knees. Reminding us, that the universe does not exist to fulfill our expectations. Because we are imperfect beings who are self-blinded to the truth of the world’s stunning complexity, we shave reality to paper thin theories and ideologies that we can easily grasp – and we call them truths. But the truth of a sea in all it’s immensity cannot be embodied in one tidewashed pebble.

My feelings are not God. God is God. My feelings do not define truth. God’s word defines truth. My feelings are echoes and responses to what my mind perceives. And sometimes - many times - my feelings are out of sync with the truth. When that happens - and it happens every day in some measure - I try not to bend the truth to justify my imperfect feelings, but rather, I plead with God: Purify my perceptions of your truth and transform my feelings so that they are in sync with the truth.

If you are of the truth, if you have learned the truth, if you see the sanctity of the truth, then speak truth. We are not called to be deceivers or liars. God is a God of truth, and His people are called to have an enormously high standard of truth.

Everyone who observes himself doubting observes a truth, and about that which he observes he is certain; therefore he is certain about a truth. Everyone therefore who doubts whether truth exists has in himself a truth on which not to doubt.... Hence one who can doubt at all ought not to doubt the existence of truth.

All those formal systems, in mathematics and physics and the philosophy of science, which claim to give foundations for certain truth are surely mistaken. I am tempted to say that we do not look for truth, but for knowledge. But I dislike this form of words, for two reasons. First of all, we do look for truth, however we define it, it is what we find that is knowledge. And second, what we fail to find is not truth, but certainty; the nature of truth is exactly the knowledge that we do find.

What I hate about kitchen-sink dramas is [this idea] that the set is real, therefore you're going to be seeing truth. You have to earn truth. Truth can't be a part of the fact that people appear to talk that way and live in that room. You're looking for the poetry in something, and I don't mean poetry in the fancy sense. Naturalism believes by just replicating a thing you give the truth, rather than earning the truth.

It is not for us to imagine that we can prove the truth of Christianity by our own arguments; nobody can prove the truth of Christianity except the Holy Spirit, by his own almighty work of renewing the blinded heart. It is the sovereign prerogative of Christ's Spirit to convince men's consciences of the truth of Christ's gospel; and Christ's human witnesses must learn to ground their hopes of success not on clever presentation of the truth by man, but on powerful demonstration of the truth by the Spirit.

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Update your truth! There is no soul; there is only mind and body! Update your truth or the truth will update you! The truth and the science are the greatest updaters!

The truth that people are missing about certain things, you know when they get fearful and they get hateful, and they repress other peoples, is the greatest truth of all, you know, the truth of love and understanding and clarity about all those issues. And it's like, one day, one day, everybody's gonna know, myself included, over certain things. But, so it's like, it's alright, you know, you hate me now, but that's cool, because I see a better day and I know that there's a higher truth, and you're wrong about hating me because I'm gay.

But though every created thing is, in this sense, a mystery, the word mystery cannot be applied to moral truth, any more than obscurity can be applied to light. ... Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion. Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself.

Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth to see it like it is, and tell it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth.

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, 'How do you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?' We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake.

Christ said, The Truth shall make you free, but Truth is not found once and forever. Truth is eternal, and the quest for Truth must also be eternal.

To seek Truth is to deny Truth to being with. To seek Truth is to avoid Truth, constantly.

Be skeptical, but not as a social position, not claiming to be so intelligent that you cannot believe what other people say. It's not about being right and making everybody else wrong. No, you are skeptical because you know without a doubt that everybody lives in their own story, and in their story they have their own truth. But it's only truth in their mind, just as your truth is only truth in your mind, and nobody else's.

Don't forget that few people are likely to tell more than a small part of the truth: no one tells much of the truth, let alone the whole truth. Spoken words are facts in themselves, whether true or false. When people talk they reveal themselves, whether they're lying or telling the truth.

The true church is not made of creeds and forms, nor is it contained in walls of wood and stone; the heart of man is its temple and the Spirit of truth is the one guide into all Truth. When men learn to turn within to the Spirit of truth, who is in each one for his light and inspiration, the differences between the churches of man will be eliminated, and the one church will be recognized.

I believe that in a certain way this is proof of the truth of Christianity: Heart and reason encounter one another, beauty and truth converge, and the more that we ourselves succeed in living in the beauty of truth, the more that faith will be able to return to being creative in our time too, and to express itself in a convincing form of art.

Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse.

The truth of course was otherwise, but Lecha had never felt she owed anyone the truth, unless it was truth about their own lives, and then they had to pay her to tell them.

Truth! Truth! Truth! crieth the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations

There's a truth deeper than experience. It's beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It's an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We're helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn't always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart, just as Prabhakar told it to me, just as I'm telling it to you now.

When you are relaxed and you hear what you know is the truth, regardless of your experience, you love. You love the truth. You love hearing, knowing, responding to the truth, because all of that is really you.

There will always be One against All, one person against all others. [This is so] not because One is terribly wise and All are terribly foolish, but because the process of thinking and researching, which finally yields truth, can only be accomplished by an individual person. In its singularity or duality, one human being seeks and finds – not the truth (Lessing) –, but some truth.

There is faith in every serious doubt, namely, the faith in the truth as such, even if the only truth we can express is our lack of truth.

Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil; there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend to only one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood.

We're not talking about truth, we're talking about something that seems like truth - the truth we want to exist.

Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you might die of the truth.

Before knowing the truth, if you depend on your intelligence, you can be misled completely. Intelligence that is without the spiritual insight is your own ego. After Realization, the truth that comes to you is the real, pure truth and is not your ego.

There are two kinds of truth; The truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The fist of these is science and the second is art.

Truth is best (of all that is) good. As desired, what is being desired is truth for him who (represents) the best truth. (Gathas 27.14)

At times of writing I never think what I have said before. My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth.

The idea that a reporter has to be 'fair and balanced' is ridiculous. The fact is, the truth usually is not fair and it's not balanced. Truth stands by itself. And the idea that something called fair and balanced is a substitute for truth and fact is mindless nonsense that has captured much of the national media.

The only "definitive truth" for Buddhism is the absolute negation of any one truth as the Definitive Truth.

Every person has the truth in his heart. No matter how complicated his circumstances, no matter how others look at him from the outside, and no matter how deep or shallow the truth dwells in his heart, once his heart is pieced with a crystal needle, the truth will gush forth like a geyser.

The ultimate freedom depends on knowing the ultimate Truth. Truth is not what people say it is, it is what it is. And Truth, quite remarkably, sets one free, just like philosophers have said down the ages.

When the truth is ugly, people try to keep it hidden, because they know if revealed, the damage it will do. So they conceal it within sturdy walls or they place it behind closed doors or they obscure it with clever disguises but truth, no matter how ugly, always emerges. And someone we care about always ends up getting hurt. And someone else will revel in their pain and that's the ugliest truth of all.

I never had a brain until Freak came along and let me borrow his for awhile, and that's the truth, the whole truth. The unvanquished truth, is how Freak would say it, and for a long time it was him who did the talking.

The tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes never! You're asked an unexpected question, you don't even flinch, it takes just a second to get yourself under control, you know just what you have to say to hide the truth, and you speak very convincingly, and nothing in your face twitches to give you away. But the truth, alas, has been disturbed by the question, and it rises up from the depths of your soul to flicker in your eyes and all is lost.

Remember that the truth is in the details. No matter how you see the world or what style it imposes on your work as an artist, the truth is in the details. Of course the devil's there, too-everyone says so-but maybe truth and the devil are words for the same thing. It could be you know.

You can't demand truth and reconciliation. You have to demand truth - people have to hear it, and then they have to want to reconcile themselves to that truth.

If truth is not undergirded by love, it makes the possessor of that truth obnoxious and the truth repulsive.

You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth.

Man has his being in truth--if he sacrifices truth he sacrifices himself. Whoever betrays truth betrays himself. It is not a question of lying--but of acting against one's conviction.

All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee; All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem; In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea; Breath and bloom, shade and shine,- wonder, wealth, and-how far above them- Truth, that's brighter than gem, Truth, that's purer than pearl,- Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe- all were for me In the kiss of one girl.

Every man has a choice between love of truth and love of repose. Love of repose brings him a solid reputation and peaceful life; love of truth keeps him in suspense. A man who loves truth respects the highest law of his being.

Talking about creating truth tends to alarm people, because truth is meant to be 'just out there'. It doesn't take much thinking to appreciate that we sometimes change truths on the ground - sometimes just by words. A new law will change what is possible. I think - perhaps because the paradigm we follow tends to be scientific, and all about discovery - the creative element of truth is one upon which we don't focus so much attention. This is particularly so in anglophone philosophy, perhaps because we associate it too much with those 'pernicious' continental trends.