Quotes About Truths

All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords.

Embedded in the gospel of Jesus Christ there are eternal principles and truths that will last far longer than the principles of building ships and roofs. You and I, as members of the Lord's true Church, have special access and insight into these eternal principles and truths, especially when we listen to the Spirit for individual guidance and hear the prophet's voice as he declares the will of God to the members of the Church. You and I both know how important these eternal principles and truths are in our lives.

Apostasy occurs when a church leaves its historic moorings, abandons its historic confessional position, and degenerates into a state where either essential Christian truths are blatantly denied or the denial of such truths is widely tolerated.

True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion.

I'm plotting revolution against this lie that the majority has a monopoly of the truth. What are these truths that always bring the majority rallying round? Truths so elderly they are practically senile. And when a truth is as old as that, gentlemen, you can hardly tell it from a lie.

This can never become popular, and, indeed, has no occasion to be so; for fine-spun arguments in favour of useful truths make just as little impression on the public mind as the equally subtle objections brought against these truths. On the other hand, since both inevitably force themselves on every man who rises to the height of speculation, it becomes the manifest duty of the schools to enter upon a thorough investigation of the rights of speculative reason, and thus to prevent the scandal which metaphysical controversies are sure, sooner or later, to cause even to the masses.

The higher arithmetic presents us with an inexhaustible store of interesting truths - of truths, too, which are not isolated, but stand in a close internal connection, and between which, as our knowledge increases, we are continually discovering new and sometimes wholly unexpected ties.

I was in my late thirties and decided my intention in life had nothing to do with the acquiring of material things, but rather it was now my intention to experience the evolution of my own soul and to grow spiritually. I wanted to come to know the highest truths of life and to express those truths in action, through myself. I wanted to become the grandest version of the greatest idea I ever held about who I am in regards to my relationship with God.

When truth is no longer free, freedom is no longer real: the truths of the police are the truths of today.

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.

The truths which are represented in England and Western countries generally, are those which refer to force of character, earnestness of purpose, conscientious strictness, noble charity, practical duty, whilst the truths which I find peculiarly developed in India - developed to a greater extent than anywhere else, - and in the Eastern countries generally, are those which have reference to sweetness of communion, sweetness of temper, meekness and resignation unto God.

The phenomenal success of the recovery movement reflects two simple truths that emerge in adolescence: all people love to talk about themselves, and most people are mad at their parents. You don't have to be in denial to doubt that truths like these will set us free.

People seldom tell the truths that are worth telling. We ought to choose our truths as carefully as we choose our lies and to select our virtues with as much thought as we bestow upon the selection of our enemies.

To make the best use of your life, you must never forget two truths: First, compared with eternity, life is extremely brief. Second, earth is only a temporary residence. You won't be here long, so don't get too attached.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family's, and my country's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I've figured out. I know this much is true.

The maxims of Christian life, which should draw upon the truths of the Gospel, are always partially symbolic of the mind and temperament of those who teach them to us. The former, by their natural sweetness, show us the quality of God's mercy; the latter, by their harshness, show us God's justice.

I have learned as a journalist that if you look long enough and hard enough and carefully enough, most truths are discoverable.

There is little hope for us until we become tough-minded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and downright ignorance. The shape of the world today does not permit us the luxury of soft mindedness. A nation or a civilization that continues to produce soft minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.

Those who don’t read the newspapers are better off than those who do insofar as those who know nothing are better off than those whose heads are filled with half-truths and lies.

Women are hungry for things of the Spirit, for truths that counter the slide of virtues all around them. Visiting teaching is a measure of the heart, an unselfish work, a sacred trust that blesses both giver and receiver.

The possible truths, hazily perceived in the world of abstraction, like those inferred from observation and experiment in the world of matter, are forced upon the profane multitudes, too busy to think for themselves, under the form of Divine revelation and scientific authority. But the same question stands open from the days of Socrates and Pilate down to our own age of wholesale negation: is there such a thing as absolute truth in the hands of any one party or man?

It should be noted, as with so many legends and popularly accepted truths created out of political motivation: There, in fact, is no evidence that the hundreds of murders historically attributed to the werewolves of Gévaudan were actually caused by wolves. As with all witchhunts, the endless battle against ignorance requires one to always keep an open mind and sharp wits when considering such rumors - especially the rumors we choose to enjoy.

Man needs two important things: Firstly, to know the truths; secondly, to change them if they are not ideal!

The knowledge that mankind needs is not the way or principle which has an absolute existence, but the particular truths for here and now and for particular individuals. Absolute truth is imaginary, abstract, vague, without evidence, and cannot be demonstrated.

Many people correctly make the point that our only hope is to turn to God. For example, Charles Lindbergh, who said that in his young manhood he thought "science was more important than either man or God," and that "without a highly developed science modern man lacks the power to survive," . . . went to Germany after the war to see what Allied bombing had done to the Germans, who had been leaders in science. There, he says, "I learned that if his civilization is to continue, modern man must direct the material power of his science by the spiritual truths of his God."

I was like so many others passion-ately involved in trying to bring those truths to the world's attention. We did our very best to peacefully do that. The city, state, and federal governments did their very best to quell our efforts. They were used to using heavy-handed tactics to silence us.

Let nothing of the truths that have been defined be lessened, nothing altered, nothing added, but let them be preserved intact in word and in meaning.

Healing... is an active and internal process that includes investigating one's attitudes, memories and beliefs with the desire to release all negative patterns that prevent one's full emotional and spiritual recovery. This internal review inevitably leads one to review one's external circumstances in an effort to recreate one's life in a way that serves activation of will - the will to see and accept truths about one's life and how one has used one's energies; and the will to begin to use energy for the creation of love, self-esteem, and health.

Paradoxes are the only truths.

What happened to that man I was seven autumns ago? What happened to that country? Time heals, yes - and thank God the pain and terror of that time has abated, at least for most of us. In that sense time is a mercy. But time also obscures the life-giving truths we perceive in the light of the shadow of death. In that way, time is a curse.

The divine life is the spirit in everything that exists, from the atom to the archangel; the grain of dust could not be were God absent from it; the loftiest seraph is but a spark from the eternal fire, which is God. Sharers in one life all form one brotherhood. The immanence of God, the solidarity of man, such are the basic truths of theosophy.

Man is made for error; it enters his mind naturally, and he discovers a few truths only with the greatest effort.

Better a child should be ignorant of a thousand truths than have consecrated in its heart a single lie.

Socrates, whose mother was a midwife, used to say that his art was like the art of the midwife. She does not herself give birth to the child, but she is there to help during its delivery. Similarly, Socrates saw his task as helping people to 'give birth' to correct insight, since real understanding must come from within. . . . Everybody can grasp philosophical truths if they just use their innate reason.

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle... Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into four chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short.

Everybody wants life to speak to them with special kindness. Every personal story begs to be steered toward reverie, toward some relief from unpleasant truths: That you are a self, that beyond anything else you want the best for that self. That, if it is to be you or someone else, you need it to be you, no matter what.

There is little hope for us until we become tough-minded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and down-right ignorance.

The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so.

Eyes Tell Stories But do they know how to craft fiction? Do they know how to spin lies? His eyes swear forever, flatter with vows of only me. But are they empty promises? I stare into his eyes, as into a crystal ball, but I cannot find forever, only movies of yesterday, a sketchbook of today, dreams of a shared tomorrow. His eyes whisper secrets. But are they truths or fairy tales? I wonder if even he knows.

Perhaps the safest thing to do at the outset, if technology permits, is to send music. This language may be the best we have for explaining what we are like to others in space, with least ambiguity. I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging of course, but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later.

What impressed me about Plato and Sartre was their conviction that we should live our lives in the light of big truths about reality and human existence.

We do not read in order to turn great works of fiction into simplistic replicas of our own realities, we read for the pure, sensual, and unadulterated pleasure of reading. And if we do so, our reward is the discovery of the many hidden layers within these works that do not merely reflect reality but reveal a spectrum of truths, thus intrinsically going against the grain of totalitarian mindsets.

The primary ambition of Nietzsche's critique of knowledge is ... to demonstrate that 'truths' are fictions masking moral commitments.

Two half truths do not make a truth.

There exists, if I am not mistaken, an entire world which is the totality of mathematical truths, to which we have access only with our mind, just as a world of physical reality exists, the one like the other independent of ourselves, both of divine creation.

Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.

"Transcending the ego" thus actually means to transcend but include the ego in a deeper and higher embrace, first in the soul or deeper psychic, then with the Witness or primordial Self, then with each previous stage taken up, enfolded, included, and embraced in the radiance of One Taste. And that means we do not "get rid" of the small ego, but rahter, we inhabit it fully, live it with verve, use it as the necessary vehicle through which higher truths are communicated. Soul and Spirit include body, emotions, and mind; they do not erase them.