Quotes about the truth
page 56

“A thought is an arrow shot at the truth; it can hit a point, but not cover the whole target. But the archer is too well satisfied with his success to ask anything farther.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Jnana

Success

“Both in verse and in prose [Karl] Shapiro loves, partly out of indignation and partly out of sheer mischievousness, to tell the naked truths or half-truths or quarter-truths that will make anybody’s hair stand on end; he is always crying: “But he hasn’t any clothes on!” about an emperor who is half the time surprisingly well-dressed.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Fifty Years of American Poetry”, p. 331
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Love, Time, Cry, Clothes

“All of these credited for righteousness, going back from Abraham to the first man, could be described as Christians in fact if not in name, without exceeding the truth. For the name means that the Christian, through the knowledge and teaching of Christ, excels in self-control and righteousness, in disciplines and virtue, and in the confession of the one and only God over all, and in all this they showed no less zeal than we.”

Eusebius of Caesarea book Church History

1.4
Ecclesiastical History

God, Knowledge, Christ

“This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
'My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.”

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) English poet and soldier (1893-1918)

Draft for a preface http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/projects/jtap/tutorials/intro/owen/preface.html to a collection of war poems he hoped to publish in 1919 (c. May 1918) and used in Poems of Wifred Owen (Memoir and notes).ed Edmund Blunden (1933).Chatto & Windus 1964.ASIN: B000GLY9CI

War, Books, Sense

“It may not be factually true that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but the saying has passed into common usage because the image has the ring of truth to it. Time and time again, the good and decent common people have manned the walls of the city, and have been ready to give their lives in its defense, only to discover too late that some silk-robed (expletive) has snuck out of the palace at midnight and thrown open the gates to the barbarians outside.”

Bill Whittle (1959) author, director, screenwriter, editor

The Undefended City https://www.nationalreview.com/2008/09/undefended-city-bill-whittle/, National Review (19 September 2008) 2000s

People, Time

“Art is nothing but the expression of our dream; the more we surrender to it the closer we get to the inner truth of things, our dream-life, the true life that scorns questions and does not see them.”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

quote from Franz Marc's note in 1907, he wrote down on his return from Paris; as cited by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 126
1905 - 1910

Life, Dreams, Art, Question

“It is recorded in the American Cyclopaedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, that I, David Whitmer, have denied my testimony as one of the three witnesses to the divinity of the Book of Mormon; and that the other two witnesses, Oliver Cowdery and Martin Harris, denied their testimony to that Book. I will say once more to all mankind, that I have never at any time denied that testimony or any part thereof. I also testify to the world, that neither Oliver Cowdery or Martin Harris ever at an time denied their testimony. They both died reaffirming the truth of the divine authenticity of the Book of Mormon. I was present at the death bed of Oliver Cowdery, and his last words were, “Brother David, be true to your testimony to the Book of Mormon."”

David Whitmer (1805–1888) Book of Mormon witness

An Address to All Believers in Christ, page 8 (1887)

Death, Books, World, Time

“Two gates there are for our evanescent dreams,
one is made of ivory, the other made of horn.
Those that pass through the ivory cleanly carved
are will-o'-the-wisps, their message bears no fruit.
The dreams that pass through the gates of polished horn
are fraught with truth, for the dreamer who can see them.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

Δοιαὶ γάρ τε πύλαι ἀμενηνῶν εἰσὶν ὀνείρων·
αἱ μὲν γὰρ κεράεσσι τετεύχαται, αἱ δ' ἐλέφαντι.
οἵ ῥ' ἐλεφαίρονται, ἔπε' ἀκράαντα φέροντες·
οἳ δὲ διὰ ξεστῶν κεράων ἔλθωσι θύραζε,
οἵ ῥ' ἔτυμα κραίνουσι, βροτῶν ὅτε κέν τις ἴδηται.
XIX. 563–568 (tr. Robert Fagles); spoken by Penelope.
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)

Dreams

“I wonder why I bother to tell the truth when people ask me what I think of this and that and how I feel about this and that. I get so complicated and introspective that people often don't understand and are frankly puzzled and (naturally enough) bored. So why bother! It would be so much easier to say what they expected you to, and everything would be easy and pleasant.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) American aviator and author

Bring Me a Unicorn (1971)

People, Feeling, Understanding, Nature

“I have spoken of the advantages of leisure and opportunity for improvement, as of a right to which you were entitled. I must now remind you that every right involves a responsibility. The greater our freedom from external restrictions, the more do we become the rightful subjects of the moral law within us. The less our accountability to man, the greater our accountability to a higher power. Such a thing as irresponsible right has no existence in this world. Even in the formation of opinion, which is of all things the freest from human control, and for which something like irresponsible right has been claimed, we are deeply answerable for the use we make of our reason, our means of information, and our various opportunities of arriving at a correct judgment. It is true, that so long as we observe the established rules of society, we are not to be called upon before any human court to answer for the application of our leisure; but so much the more are we bound by a higher than human law to redeem to the full our opportunities. Tho application of this general truth to the circumstances of your present position is obvious. A limited portion of leisure in the evening of each day is allotted to you, and it is incumbent upon you to consider how you may best employ it.”

George Boole (1815–1864) English mathematician, philosopher and logician

George Boole, "Right Use of Leisure," cited in: James Hogg Titan Hogg's weekly instructor, (1847) p. 250 : Address on the Right Use of Leisure to the members of tho Lincoln Early Closing Association.
1840s

World, Law, Freedom

“And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Gates of Eden

“Let us face the inevitable truth. There can be no Americanization from the top down or in the mass. It will not come from the court that grants a citizenship certificate; nor from the school that teaches English; nor from the speakers that talk patriotism; nor from the patriotic society that prints platitudes. It will come from basic conditions being right, and none is more vital than industrial relations. It will live as we shorten the distance between the Constitution and the shop. It will be believed in as we square every act in the shops of America with every utterance in public print.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

School

“The time has come for the dismantling of fantasies. That is already happening to our universe. Now that we have this one chance of survival we must finally rid ourselves of fantasies and seize that chance!
For centuries our race has built on false assumptions. If you build a fantasy based on a false assumption and continue to build on such a fantasy, your whole existence becomes a lie which you implant in others who are too lazy or too busy to question its truth.
In this manner you threaten the very existence of reality, because, by refusing to obey its laws, those laws engulf and destroy you. The human race has for too long been manufacturing convenient fantasies and calling them laws. For ages this was so. Take war, for instance. Politicians assume that something is true, assume that strife is inevitable, and by building on such false assumptions, lo and behold, they create further wars which they have, ostensibly, sought to prevent.
We have, until now, accepted too many fantasies as being truths, too many truths as fantasies. And we have one last chance to discover the real nature of our existence. I am prepared to take it!”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Source: The Sundered Worlds (1965), Chapter 7 (pp. 229-230)

War, Lie, Age, Law

“When the people of one country understand how the people in another country are duped, like themselves, in war-time, they will be more disposed to sympathize with them as victims than condemn them as criminal, because they will understand that their crime only consisted in obedience to the dictates of authority and acceptance of what their Government and Press represented to them as the truth.”

Arthur Ponsonby (1871–1946) British Liberal and later Labour politician and pacifist

Falsehood in Wartime (1928), Introduction

War, People, Understanding, Time

“The results of Socrates' martyrdom and Plato's unexcelled prose that followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we know it. If the idea of truth had been allowed to perish unrediscovered by the Renaissance it's unlikely that we would be much beyond the level of prehistoric man today. The ideas of science and technology and other systematically organized efforts of man are dead-centered on it. It is the nucleus of it all.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29

World, Idea, Effort, Science

“From experience it has been observed that a newly converted Communist frequently acquires a feeling of omniscient superiority over his unconverted fellow men. He feels that at last the universe is laid out before him in a simple, comprehensible manner. If he has never wrestled with philosophical problems before he is likely to be overwhelmed by the infatuating possibility that through Dialectical Materialism man has finally solved all of the basic problems necessary to understand the universe. In this state of mind the student will often drop his attitude of critical inquiry. He will invite indoctrination in heavy doses because of his complete assurance that he has at last discovered Truth in its ultimate form.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Men, Feeling, Understanding, Problem

“Truth has not such an urgent air.”

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) French poet and critic

La vérité n'a point cet air impétueux.
Canto I, l. 198
The Art of Poetry (1674)

“For when I construct lines and colour combinations on a flat surface, it is with the aim of portraying 'universally beauty' as consciously as possible. Nature (or that which I see) inspires me, provides me – as it does every painter – with the emotion by which I am moved to create something, but I want to approach the truth as closely as possible, abstracting everything until I come to the foundation – still only an outward foundation! – of things. It is for me a clear truth that one does not want to say something 'specific', it is then that one says what is most specific: the truth (which is of great universality).”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in a letter to H. P. Bremmer, Paris 29 January 1914; ; as cited in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 81
1910's

Beauty, Nature, Universe

“Piety, then, needs a counterpoise, something to prevent it from being exercised in an excessively rigid way; and this it has, in most intellectual temperaments, in the quality I would call playfulness. We speak of the play of the mind; and certainly the intellectual relishes the play of the mind for its own sake, and finds in it one of the major values in life. What one thinks of here is the element of sheer delight in intellectual activity. Seen in this guise, intellect may be taken as the healthy animal spirits of the mind, which come into exercise when the surplus of mental energies is released from the tasks required for utility and mere survival. “Man is perfectly human,” said Schiller, “only when he plays.” And it is this awareness of an available surplus beyond the requirements of mere existence that his maxim conveys to us. Veblen spoke often of the intellectual faculty as “idle curiosity”—but this is a misnomer in so far as the curiosity of the playful mind is inordinately restless and active. This very restlessness and activity gives a distinctive cast to its view of truth and its discontent with dogmas.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 30

Life, Way, Exercises, Thinking

“There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth… than that of the perfect dependence of the "moral" sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

The Portrait of a Lady.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

Life, Art, Spring, Question

“Everything that’s miserable in the world,” Nick the dwarf once said to me, “is because of beauty.”
“Not truth or goodness?” I’d asked.
“Oh, they help. But beauty is the culprit, the real principle of evil.”
“Not wealth?”

Roger Zelazny Isle of the Dead

“Money is beautiful.”
Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 2 (p. 56)

Money, World, Beauty, Evil

“Let Christian kings therefore keep their faith and truth, and all lawful promises and bonds, not one with another only, but even with the Turk or whatsoever infidel it be. For so it is right before God; as the scriptures and ensamples of the bible testify.”

William Tyndale (1494–1536) Bible translator and agitator from England

The Obedience of A Christian Man (1528)

God, Faith, Law

“An explanation of the "institutional approach" to economic theory is a plea for a particular kind of theory. It is possible to come upon the same object from different angles; but more often those who take different routes chance upon different things. The "institutional approach" doubtless has some importance because it is a happy way to acceptable truth, but its significance lies in its being the only way to the right sort of theory. An appeal for "institutional economics" implies no attack upon the truth or value of other bodies of economic thought, but it is a denial of the claims of other systems of thought to be "economic theory." This, however, is no pointless struggle in method to be carried on by breaking syllogisms over concepts and by engaging in polemics over niceties in statement. On the contrary, it involves the very nature of the problems which the theorist should set himself; its real issue is over what economic theory is all about.”

Walton Hale Hamilton (1881–1958) Yale Law Professor

Source: The Institutional Approach to Economic Theory, 1919, p. 309: Introduction

Way, Nature, Problem, Chance

“Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

"Light on Adobe Walls"
Willa Cather on Writing (1949)

Art, Feeling, Imagination, Freedom

“When someone disagrees with you on a moral point you assume that he is one step behind in his thinking, and he assumes that he has gone one step ahead. But I take both parts, O'Hara, leapfrogging myself along the great moral issues, refuting myself and rebutting the refutation towards a truth that must be the compound of two opposite half-truths. And you never reach it because there is always something more to say.”

Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright

Source: Lord Malquist and Mr Moon (1966), Ch. 2: A Couple of Deaths and Exits.

Thinking, Parting

“And 'speak truth unto power'? What does this mean? It means giving your best advice to superiors based on the best information available and objective analysis even when you know it may not be music to their ears.”

Anson Chan (1940) Hong Kong politician

Source: From Anson Chan's speech addressing to the Asia Society Hong Kong Center in April 2001.

Music

“People who lack the clarity, courage, or determination to follow their own dreams will often find ways to discourage yours. Live your truth and don't EVER stop!”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 152

People, Dreams, Way, Courage

“Both science and history are moving targets. Scholars in the twenty-first century are much more aware than those of earlier generations that scientists operate under the influence of powerful metaphors (science as exploration, discovery, documentation, thrust and counterthrust), and that both the scope and the tools of history undergo continual changes. Still, most scientists and most historians would concur that the broad strokes I've sketched, when viewed from sufficient distance, are accurately rendered—that is, that science and history are each in pursuit of statements that represent the truths ascertained by their respective disciplines”

Howard Gardner (1943) American developmental psychologist

Howard Gardner (2011), Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed: Educating for the Virtues in the Age of Truthiness and Twitter, p. 26-27

History, Science, Change

“Truth never damages a cause that is just.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Non-Violence in Peace and War (1948); also in Gandhi on Non-violence: Selected Texts from Mohandas K. Gandhi's Non-Violence in Peace and War (1965) edited by Thomas Merton Google Books link http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AIrLed2w1lkC ISBN 0811200973 1940s

“In all their polemics, the anti-creationists invariably avoid discussing the actual scientific evidence for macro-evolution. If there were any such evidence, they could easily settle the whole conflict, merely by presenting the evidence! Instead they seem compelled to resort to bombast ridicule, defamation, intimidation, and distortion. Surely that great body of working scientists, largely uninvolved so far in the creation/evolution conflict will soon begin to see that a two-model approach to all scientific study is salutary and will persuade their more emotional brethren to open their minds to potential truth wherever it might be found.”

Henry M. Morris (1918–2006) American young earth creationist and Christian apologist

" The Anti-Creationist http://www.icr.org/article/179/" (1981)

Study

“Maybe. A powerful. Enough. Metaphor. Grows. Its own. Truth.”

Matthew Stover book Blade of Tyshalle

(VIII.4) Del Rey, p. 284
Blade of Tyshalle (2001)
Variant: Maybe. A powerful. Enough. Metaphor. Grows. Its own. Truth.

“Many of us were taught not to tattle. It was a culture of silencing and that was normalized. I urge all of us to not only support survivors and bystanders, who are brave enough to tell their truth, but to promote restorative justice. May we also please protect and employ them. May we teach our children that speaking out without the fear of retribution, is our culture’s new North Star.”

Laura Dern (1967) American actress, director, producer

As quoted on the broadcast of the 75th Golden Globe Awards, NBC (7 January 2018) https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/laura-dern-culture-silencing-victims-golden-globes_us_5a52d805e4b089e14dbc5ac0

Children, Fear, Justice, Star

“She broke in with a question that staggered him.
"Does your idea mean that the next world is a sort of great reservoir of truth, and that what is true in us just pours into it like raindrops?"
"Well!" said he, alarmed and puzzled: "the figure is not perfectly correct, but the idea is a little of that kind."
"After all I wonder whether that may not be what Niagara has been telling me!" said Esther, and she spoke with an outburst of energy that made Strong's blood run cold.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Esther Dudley and George Strong in Ch. IX
Esther: A Novel (1884)

World, Idea, Question, Strong

“She asked, “Do you believe science has all the answers?”
“Huh?”
“Science. Does it have all the answers?”
“Everybody thinks he’s being oh-so-deep when he says science doesn’t have all the answers.”
Done. All of it. Virginity gone, flesh ratified, mother spited, mission discovered—the gospel of empirical truth! Yes! Oh, yes!
“Science does have all the answers,” said Howard, withdrawing. “The problem is that we don’t have all the science.””

James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter

Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 5 (p. 90)

Problem, Thinking, Science

“There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”

Werner Herzog (1942) German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and opera director

Minnesota declaration (1999)

Imagination

“Where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.”

Henry David Thoreau book Life Without Principle

Life Without Principle (1863)

Spring

“There was in the air the glamor of a battle, the holy battle raging for the assertion of a new truth. My youth plunged full in it.”

Joseph Stella (1877–1946) American artist

Joseph Stella (1911); Quoted in: Ruth L. Bohan. Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art, 1850–1920, (2006). p. 193

Youth, Rage

“There was no telling who this head, or this leg, or that arm, belonged to... So I scattered the limbs in my painting and realized that in this way I was getting much closer to the truth than Michelangelo did when he concentrated on every separate muscle.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

as quoted from the exhibition catalogue Fernand Legér, Paris, 1956
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1950's

Way, Painting

“The truth of matter is, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends, brothers and sisters, religion has it very much its own way in this country of ours. It's in the pledge of allegiance, thanks to a stupid intervention of President Eisenhower; it's on the money, it's in the opening of Congress every day, it's at the National Prayer Breakfast, it's when the delinquent president summons his advisors and his spiritual team in order to fend off what should have been inevitable, it's when Al Gore can't bring himself to criticize a decision of the Oklahoma school board, and it's high time that that situation was reversed and we developed a proper immunity to it, and made sure that religion can only be self-inflicted.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2000s, 2000, "Hostility Of America to Religion" (2000)

Money, Stupidity, School, Religion

“Whatever be the substance which takes possession of such a soul, it will produce the same result, and will change into a pretext for not conforming to any concrete purpose. If it appears as reactionary or anti-liberal it will be in order to affirm that the salvation of the State gives a right to level down all other standards, and to manhandle one's neighbour, above all if one's neighbour is an outstanding personality. But the same happens if it decides to act the revolutionary; the apparent enthusiasm for the manual worker, for the afflicted and for social justice, serves as a mask to facilitate the refusal of all obligations, such as courtesy, truthfulness and, above all, respect or esteem for superior individuals. … As regards other kinds of Dictatorship, we have seen only too well how they flatter the mass-man, by trampling on everything that appeared to be above the common level.”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XV: We Arrive At The Real Question

Justice, Soul, Affliction, Appearance

“I am an anarchist, a political and social Huguenot; I deny everything and affirm naught but myself: because the sole truth of which I have material and moral proof and tangible, comprehensible and intelligible evidence, the only real, startling, non-arbitrary truth not susceptible to interpretation, is myself. I am. There I have a positive fact. Everything else is abstraction and, in mathematics, would be designated as "x", and unknown quantity; and I need not trouble myself with it.”

Anselme Bellegarrigue book Anarchist Manifesto

Anarchist Manifesto (1850)

Intelligence, Mathematics

“One has a feeling that one has a kind of home in this timeless community of human beings that strive for truth. … I have always believed that Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God the small group scattered all through time of intellectually and ethically valuable people.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein's God (1997), p. 98

God, People, Feeling, Home

“The dominant feature in his character was his devotion to the pursuit of truth”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

A. Wolf, from the introduction to Spinoza's Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being (1910)
S - Z

“And then there is a second thing, a second principle that we've got to go back and rediscover. And that is that all reality has spiritual control. In other words, we've got to go back and rediscover the principle that there is a God behind the process. Well this you say, "Why is it that you raise that as a point in your sermon, in a church? The mere fact we are at church, we believe in God, we don't need to go back and rediscover that. The mere fact that we are here, and the mere fact that we sing and pray, and come to church—we believe in God." Well, there's some truth in that. But we must remember that it's possible to affirm the existence of God with your lips and deny his existence with your life. The most dangerous type of atheism is not theoretical atheism, but practical atheism […]. And the world, even the church, is filled up with people who pay lip service to God and not life service. And there is always a danger that we will make it appear externally that we believe in God when internally we don't. We say with our mouths that we believe in him, but we live with our lives like he never existed. That is the ever-present danger confronting religion. That's a dangerous type of atheism.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1950s, Rediscovering Lost Values (1954)

Life, God, People, World

“We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other married couples they sometimes live apart.”

Saki (1870–1916) British writer

The Unbearable Bassington (1912), Ch. 13

Wedding

“Though Truth and Falsehood be
Near twins, yet Truth a little elder is.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

Satyre III (c. 1598)

“When this intelligence reached the Amír, he considered it false, as being opposed to the usual habits of Jaipál; but after repeated accounts to the same effect were brought, when the curtain which obscured the truth was withdrawn, and he knew that God has set his seal upon Jaipál's heart, so that he might obtain the reward of his evil deeds, and placed a veil between it and rectitude, so that he might obtain punishment for his wickedness and infedelity. The Sultan therefore sharpened the sword of intention in order to make an incursion upon his kingdom, and cleanse it from impurity and from his rejection of Islam. So he departed with his valiant servants and allies, relying upon the one God, and trusting in the fulfilment of the promise of the victory; and he went on till he arrived with his troops in the country of Hind, and he killed everyone who, on the part of Jaipál, came out to oppose him.”

Sabuktigin (942–997) Founder of the Ghaznavid Empire

Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, Volume II, p. 22. Translation of Tarikh-i-Yamini of al-Utbi.

God, Intelligence, Evil, Victory

“All I can hope to teach my son is to tell the truth and fear no man.”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) Television journalist

Speech to his staff (1954)

Fear, Hope

““Time devours our feeble mortality, leaving us with but the sour residue of memory.”
Marvin nodded. “Yet this ineffable and ungraspable quantity,” he replied, “this time which no man may possess, is in truth our only possession.””

Robert Sheckley book Mindswap

Source: Mindswap (1966), Chapter 24 (p. 110)

Memory, Time

“For as long as I can remember,' I said, continuing to speak to the figure standing in the archway, 'I have had an intense and highly aesthetic perception of what I call the icy bleakness of things. At the same time I have felt a great loneliness in this perception. This conjunction of feelings seems paradoxical, since such a perception, such a view of things, would seem to preclude the emotion of loneliness, or any sense of a killing sadness, as I think of it. All such heartbreaking sentiment, as usually considered, would seem to be on its knees before artworks such as yours, which so powerfully express what I have called the icy bleakness of things, submerging or devastating all sentiment in an atmosphere potent with desolate truths, permeated throughout with a visionary stagnation and lifelessness. Yet I must observe that the effect, as I now consider it, has been just the opposite. If it was your intent to evoke the icy bleakness of things with your dream monologues, then you have totally failed on both an artistic and an extra-artistic level. You have failed your art, you have failed yourself, and you have also failed me. If your artworks had really evoked the bleakness of things, then I would not have felt this need to know who you are, this killing sadness that there was actually someone who experienced the same sensations and mental states that I did and who could share them with me in the form of tape-recorded dream monologues. Who are you that I should feel this need to go to work hours before the sun comes up, that I should feel this was something I had to do and that you were someone that I had to know? This behavior violates every principle by which I have lived for as long as I can remember. Who are you to cause me to violate these long-lived principles?”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

The Bungalow House

Sadness, Dreams, Art, Behavior

“Without the eros toward truth, theology would not exist.”

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) German-American theologian and philosopher

Source: Love, Power and Justice (1954), p. 31

“.. translated by instinct, without any method, not merely an artistic truth but above all a human one.”

Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958) French painter

Quote of De Vlaminck; as cited in Les Fauves, The Museum of Modern Art; Simon & Schuster, New York, 1952; quoted in 'Becoming an Artist' on Widewalls https://www.widewalls.ch/artist/maurice-de-vlaminck/ Quotes undated

“Nothing is as unpopular as the truth.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 61

“The truth, of course, is that libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but that it in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which now is called private.Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf–master relationship to political–economic power concentrations.”

Karl Hess (1923–1994) American journalist

"Letter From Washington," http://www.panarchy.org/hess/libertarianism.html The Libertarian Forum 1, no. 6 http://web.archive.org/web/20071201123614/http://mises.org/journals/lf/1969/1969_06_15.pdf (15 June 1969), p. 2

People, Way

“The moral government of God is a movement in a line onwards towards some grand consummation, in which the principles, indeed, are ever the same, but the developments are always new,— in which, therefore, no experience of the past can indicate with certainty what new openings of truth, what new manifestations of goodness, what new phases of the moral heaven may appear.”

Mark Hopkins (educator) (1802–1887) American educationalist and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 284.

God, Appearance, Past

“[I]f you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason-responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to [participate]. I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith as a way of getting to the truth, and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other (a worthy function that I do take seriously). But you must not expect me to go along with your defense of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify. Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side. You are sightseeing with a loved one in a foreign land, and your loved one is brutally murdered in front of your eyes. At the trial it turns out that in this land friends of the accused may be called as witnesses for the defense, testifying about their faith in his innocence. You watch the parade of his moist-eyed friends, obviously sincere, proudly proclaiming their undying faith in the innocence of the man you saw commit the terrible deed. The judge listens intently and respectfully, obviously more moved by this outpouring than by all the evidence presented by the prosecution. Is this not a nightmare? Would you be willing to live in such a land? Or would you be willing to be operated on by a surgeon you tells you that whenever a little voice in him tells him to disregard his medical training, he listens to the little voice? I know it passes in polite company to let people have it both ways, and under most circumstances I wholeheartedly cooperate with this benign agreement. But we're seriously trying to get at the truth here, and if you think that this common but unspoken understanding about faith is anything better than socially useful obfuscation to avoid mutual embarrassment and loss of face, you have either seen much more deeply into the issue that any philosopher ever has (for none has ever come up with a good defense of this) or you are kidding yourself.”

Daniel Dennett book Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

Love, People, Faith, Way

“Just as what is in the jar, when broken, becomes one with the surroundings, death offers the opportunity to recognize the basic truth of all existence through non-discriminating one-pointedness. Like space, the essence of mind is unaffected by transition and death.”

Lama Ole Nydahl (1941) Danish lama

Fearless Death: Buddhist Wisdom on the Art of Dying (2012)

Death

“If insistence on them tends to unsettle established systems … self-evident truths are by most people silently passed over; or else there is a tacit refusal to draw from them the most obvious inferences.”

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist

Ethics (New York:1915), § 68, p. 187
The Principles of Ethics (1897), Part I: The Data of Ethics

People, Drawing

“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.”

Halldór Laxness book Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

Bishop
Kristnihald undir Jökli (Under the Glacier/Christianity at Glacier) (1968)

Falseness, People, Lying, Forgetting

“It’s time for us to wake up and face the truth, that we are a captive species on a prison planet, but the fact that we are so close to understanding the science of our imprisonment means that we are also just beginning to touch the key that locks the door, and if we are strong, if we defy and defeat the sinister forces that rule us now, we have a chance at last to unlock this place and do what we are able to do, that we are richly capable of doing, that those who love us—and they are out there, too—have hoped and sought that we should do from time immemorial.”

Whitley Strieber (1945) American writer

Whitley Strieber The Danger of Being Right http://www.unknowncountry.com/journal/?id=190 unknowncountry.com June 16, 2016

Love, Hope, Understanding, Strong

“Those who say that all historical accounts are ideological constructs (which is one version of the idea that there is really no historical truth) rely on some story which must itself claim historical truth. They show that supposedly "objective" historians have tendentiously told their stories from some particular perspective; they describe, for example, the biasses that have gone into constructing various histories of the United States. Such an account, as a particular piece of history, may very well be true, but truth is a virtue that is embarrassingly unhelpful to a critic who wants not just to unmask past historians of America but to tell us that at the end of the line there is no historical truth. It is remarkable how complacent some "deconstructive" histories are about the status of the history that they deploy themselves.”

Bernard Williams (1929–2003) English moral philosopher

Source: Truth and Truthfulness (2002), p. 2

History, Idea, Past

“The day the peasants will be educated in the truth, tyrants and slaves will be impossible on earth.”

Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) Italian general and politician

Il giorno in cui i contadini saranno educati nel vero, i tiranni e gli schiavi saranno impossibili sulla terra.
Alla Società del Tiro in Ganzo, Caprera, 29 August 1864, in Scritti politici e militari, ricordi e pensieri inediti, p. 356.

Education

“The decay of our culture since 1941 can be measured by the fact that academic historians today are no longer interested in historical truth or interested in it only marginally; what really interests them is jobs. They match the anthropologists and geneticists who, with practiced effrontery, can say that all races are equal and there is no difference between them. There are now 'scientists' who boast they are so versatile they can prove anything, for a suitable fee, while others abuse spectroscopes to prove that a painted rag is a 'Holy Shroud,' or use quantum mechanics to prove that the old Jew-god converted mud into Adam. 'Truth' is whatever pays the most. The academicians have conformed to what is now the American ethic. Whether any nation so decadent and depraved can or should survive is a question I am unwilling to consider.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"A World Grown Grey With Their Breath", Liberty Bell magazine (January 1988)
1970s, 1980s

God, Question, Painting

“Science will never be used chiefly to pursue truth, or to improve human life. The uses of knowledge will always be as shifting and crooked as humans are themselves. Humans use what they know to meet their most urgent needs – even if the result is ruin.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Truth and Consequences (p. 28)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Life, Knowledge, Science

“The success of the missions need not have been so meagre but for certain factors which may be discussed now. In the first place, the missionary brought with him an attitude of moral superiority and a belief in his own exclusive righteousness. The doctrine of the monopoly of truth and revelation, as claimed by William of Aubruck to Batu Khan when he said 'he that believeth not shall be condemned by God', is alien to the Hindu and Buddhist mind. To them the claim of any sect that it alone possesses the truth and others shall be `condemned' has always seemed unreasonable. Secondly the association of Christian missionary work with aggressive imperialism introduced political complications. National sentiment could not fail to look upon missionary activity as inimical to the country's interests. That diplomatic pressure, extra‑territoriality and sometimes support of gun‑boats had been resorted to in the interests of the foreign missionaries could not be easily forgotten. Thirdly, the sense of European superiority which the missionaries perhaps unconsciously inculcated produced also its reaction. Even during the days of unchallenged European political supremacy no Asian people accepted the cultural superiority of the West. The educational activities of the missionaries stressing the glories of European culture only led to the identification of the work of the missions with Western cultural aggression.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

God, People, Education, Support

“I am SO tired of this trope. It may indeed be the case that we can’t justify a priori via philosophical lucubrations that we arrive at the truth about nature only by using the methods of science. My answer to that is increasingly becoming, “So bloody what?” The use of science is justified because it works, not because we can justify it philosophically. If we are interested in finding out what causes malaria, no amount of appeal to a deity, philosophical rumination, listening to music, reading novels, or waiting for a revelation will answer that question. We have to use scientific methods, which, of course, is how causes of disease are found.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" A belated reply from Francis Spufford, who defends his faith http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/a-belated-reply-from-francis-spufford-who-defends-his-faith/" October 2, 2012

Disease, Music, Question, Nature

“Indeed at times we feel tempted to think that they had finished with their seriously meant philosophical investigations ever before their twelfth year and that at that age they had for the rest of their lives settled their view on the nature of the world and on everything pertaining thereto. We feel so tempted because after all the philosophical discussions and dangerous deviations, … they always come back to what is usually made plausible to us at that tender age and appear to accept this even as the criterion of truth. All heterodox philosophical doctrines, with which they must at times be concerned in the course of their lives, appear to them to exist merely to be refuted and this to establish those others the more firmly.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Ja, bisweilen fühlt man sich versucht zu glauben, daß sie ihre ernstlich gemeinten philosophischen Forschungen schon vor ihrem zwölften Jahre abgethan und bereits damals ihre Ansicht vom Wesen der Welt, und was dem anhängt, auf immer festgestellt hätten; weil sie, nach allen philosophischen Diskussionen und halsbrechenden Abwegen, unter verwegenen Führern, doch immer wieder bei Dem anlangen, was uns in jenem Alter plausibel gemacht zu werden pflegt, und es sogar als Kriterium der Wahrheit zu nehmen scheinen. Alle die heterodoren philosophischen Lehren, mit welchen sie dazwischen, im Laufe ihres Lebens, sich haben beschäftigen müssen, scheinen ihnen nur dazu- seyn, um widerlegt zu werben und dadurch jene ersteren desto fester zu etabliren.
Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 5, p. 156, E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 143-144
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), On Philosophy in the Universities

Age, World, Feeling, Nature

“In many of Albrecht Dürer’s engravings there are harrowing depictions of his own melancholia; the manic wheeling stars of Van Gogh are the precursors of the artist’s plunge into dementia and the extinction of self. It is a suffering that often tinges the music of Beethoven, of Schumann and Mahler, and permeates the darker cantatas of Bach. The vast metaphor which most faithfully represents this fathomless ordeal, however, is that of Dante, and his all-too-familiar lines still arrest the imagination with their augury of the unknowable, the black struggle to come:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
Ché la diritta via era smarrita.
In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path.
One can be sure that these words have been more than once employed to conjure the ravages of melancholia, but their somber foreboding has often overshadowed the last lines of the best-known part of that poem, with their evocation of hope. To most of those who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression, hence the frustrated sense of inadequacy found in the work of even the greatest artists. But in science and art the search will doubtless go on for a clear representation of its meaning, which sometimes, for those who have known it, is a simulacrum of all the evil of our world: of our everyday discord and chaos, our irrationality, warfare and crime, torture and violence, our impulse toward death and our flight from it held in the intolerable equipoise of history. If our lives had no other configuration but this, we should want, and perhaps deserve, to perish; if depression had no termination, then suicide would, indeed, be the only remedy. But one need not sound the false or inspirational note to stress the truth that depression is not the soul’s annihilation; men and women who have recovered from the disease — and they are countless — bear witness to what is probably its only saving grace: it is conquerable.”

William Styron book Darkness Visible

Source: Darkness Visible (1990), X

Life, Death, Women, Men

“Gentlest and bravest in the battle-brunt—
The Champion of the Truth—
He bore his banner to the very front
Of our immortal youth.”

James Ryder Randall (1839–1908) American journalist

Youth

“I used to pay attention to the clouds in the sky... I paid close attention for a month to see if they ever repeated. They don't repeat. And I don't think life does either. It's continually various. That's the truth about life.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

Denise Spranger, in 'Center of Attention', Taos News/Tempo Magazine, Mar. 21–27, 2002, p. 22
after 2000

Life, Thinking

“We must enter into the spirit of the character [for making a portrait]: here the challenge is to place this figure in the human space, to work out what he represents in relation to other people, other human personalities; when you've worked this out, you're done. this truth has to stand out in the end result of the portrait.... when this task is complete, and the subject is placed in the realm of the dead that go on living, I hand over my work.”

Marino Marini (1901–1980) Italian sculptor

As quoted by the Marini Marini Museum: http://www.museomarinomarini.it/section.php?page=fondazione

People, Personality, Dead

“It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy that a just theory will always be confirmed by experiment.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Source: An Essay on The Principle of Population (First Edition 1798, unrevised), Chapter I, paragraph 9, lines 1-2

“If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play, so be it.”

Jonathan Aitken (1942) Conservative Member of Parliament, former British government Cabinet minister

Criticising press reports that he had violated the ministerial code of conduct; he later started a libel trial, which ended in his conviction for perjury.
Statement of (10 April 1995); as quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations, 3rd ed., (2007), p. 6.

Fight, Country

“There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse is often closer to the truth.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

"Down Among the Dead Men", Swamp Thing Annual #2, 1985
Swamp Thing (1983–1987)

People, Thinking

“I'm just a dark guy from a den of iniquity. A dark shadowy figure from the bowels of iniquity. I wish I could be Mike who gets an endorsement deal. But you can't make a lie and a truth go together. This country wasn't built on moral fiber. This country was built on rape, slavery, murder, degradation and affiliation with crime.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

As quoted in Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jhtml?xml=/sport/2002/05/01/sotys02.xml (2002).

Lie, Guy, Country

“When the streets are paved with brilliants and the skies made of rainbows I suppose you'll be contented and satisfied with red, blue and yellow.... how to satisfy your tawdry friends while you steal back into the mild evening gleam and quiet middle term[? ]. I'll tell you, my sprightly genius, how this is to be done. Maintain all your lights, but spare the poor abused colours till the eye rests and recovers. Keep up your music by supplying the place of noise by more sound, more harmony and more tune, and split that cursed fife and drum.... he [Mr. Garrick] must feel the truth of what I am now saying, that neither our plays, paintings or music are any longer real works of invention, but the abuse of Nature's lights and what has been already invented in former times.”

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) English portrait and landscape painter

Quote in a letter of Gainbourough, 1772; as cited in Thomas Gainsborough, by William T, Whitley https://ia800204.us.archive.org/6/items/thomasgainsborou00whitrich/thomasgainsborou00whitrich.pdf; New York, Charles Scribner's Sons – London, Smith, Elder & Co, Sept. 1915, p. 88 1770 - 1788

Music, Feeling, Nature, Light

“Little by little it became evident that those who used great gifts, and even genius, to establish the truth of the after life, or to seek contact with their beloved dead, suffered from a strange blindness, and obtuseness of the spirit.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XII: The Last Terrestrials; Section 1, “The Cult of Evanescence” (p. 176)

Life, Suffering, Dead

“The last subject to which I am desirous to direct your attention as to a means of self-improvement, is that of philanthropic exertion for the good of others. I allude here more particularly to the efforts which you may be able to make for the benefit of those whose social position is inferior to your own. It is my deliberate conviction, founded on long and anxious consideration of the subject, that not only might great positive good be effected by an association of earnest young men, working together under judicious arrangements for this common end, but that its reflected advantages would overpay the toil of effort, and more than indemnify the cost of personal sacrifice. And how wide a field is now open before you! It would be unjust to pass over unnoticed the shining examples of virtues, that are found among tho poor and indigent There are dwellings so consecrated by patience, by self-denial, by filial piety, that it is not in the power of any physical deprivation to render them otherwise than happy. But sometimes in close contiguity with these, what a deep contrast of guilt and woe! On the darker features of the prospect we would not dwell, and that they are less prominent here than in larger cities we would with gratitude acknowledge; but we cannot shut our eyes to their existence. We cannot put out of sight that improvidence that never looks beyond the present hour; that insensibility that deadens the heart to the claims of duty and affection; or that recklessness which in the pursuit of some short-lived gratification, sets all regard for consequences aside. Evils such as these, although they may present themselves in any class of society, and under every variety of circumstances, are undoubtedly fostered by that ignorance to which the condition of poverty is most exposed; and of which it has been truly said, that it is the night of the spirit,—and a night without moon and without stars. It is to associated efforts for its removal, and for the raising of the physical condition of its subjects, that philanthropy must henceforth direct her regards. And is not such an object great 1 Are not such efforts personally elevating and ennobling? Would that some part of the youthful energy of this present assembly might thus expend itself in labours of benevolence! Would that we could all feel the deep weight and truth of the Divine sentiment that " No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.”

George Boole (1815–1864) English mathematician, philosopher and logician

George Boole, "Right Use of Leisure," cited in: James Hogg Titan Hogg's weekly instructor, (1847) p. 250; Also cited in: R. H. Hutton, " Professor Boole http://books.google.com/books?id=pfMEAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA153," (1866), p. 153 1840s

Men, Youth, Feeling, Star

“If high stream of dreams and truth be told
and our intentions be entwined
then from these high flung tower walls
let healing grace and blessings fall
over all this cracked and broken land
from northern crag to southern down
from Universal Hall to Camden town
from city square to village green
from parliament to housing scheme
from Iona to the the Hill of Dreams
I sacrifice my power on the altar of your love
that it may be born again on another world.”

Mike Scott (1958) songwriter, musician

"Universal Hall" (co-written with Steve Wickham)
Universal Hall (2003)

Love, World, Dreams, Universe

“It is a lonely and arduous excursion, a sufficient test of courage and sincerity: for most men prefer to dwell in comfortable ignorance upon the lower slopes, and there to make of their obvious characteristics a drapery which shall veil the naked truth.”

Evelyn Underhill book Practical Mysticism

Source: Practical Mysticism (1914), Chapter V, Self Adjustment, p. 82

Men, Courage, Sincerity

“Reason, indeed, may oft complain
For Nature's sad reality,
And tell the suffering heart, how vain
Its cherished dreams must always be;
And Truth may rudely trample down
The flowers of Fancy, newly-blown:”

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) English novelist and poet

To Imagination (1846)

Sadness, Dreams, Flowers, Nature

“Do not sit dumb in company; it will be ascribed either to pride, cunning, or stupidity: give your opinion modestly, but freely; hear that of others with candour; and ever endeavour to find out, and to communicate truth.”

James Burgh (1714–1775) British politician

The Dignity of Human Nature (1754)

Stupidity, Communication

“It seems silly and churlish to attack others for their private beliefs, unless one is entirely convinced of the greater view that harm is caused by the persistence of that belief in society; but when pressed into engaging on the matter, I recall the question I asked myself many times until I found my own faith breaking down: Bearing in mind we can all utterly convince ourselves of things that are not true – and that therefore important truths about the universe must surely always be based on more solid foundations than what my easily fooled, fickle feelings tell me – what is it that supports this belief other than my own already-existing conviction?”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

Faith, Fools, Feeling, Question

“The founders of the English laws have with excellent forecast contrived, that no man should be called to answer to the king for any capital crime, unless upon the preparatory accusation of twelve or more of his fellow subjects, the grand jury: and that the truth of every accusation, whether preferred in the shape of indictment, information, or appeal, should afterwards be confirmed by the unanimous suffrage of twelve of his equals and neighbours, indifferently chosen, and superior to all suspicion. So that the liberties of England cannot but subsist, so long as this palladium remains sacred and inviolate, not only from all open attacks, (which none will be so hardy as to make) but also from all secret machinations, which may sap and undermine it; by introducing new and arbitrary methods of trial, by justices of the peace, commissioners of the revenue, and courts of conscience. And however convenient these may appear at first, (as doubtless all arbitrary powers, well executed, are the most convenient) yet let it be again remembered, that delays, and little inconveniences in the forms of justice, are the price that all free nations must pay for their liberty in more substantial matters; that these inroads upon this sacred bulwark of the nation are fundamentally opposite to the spirit of our constitution; and that, though begun in trifles, the precedent may gradually increase and spread, to the utter disuse of juries in questions of the most momentous concern.”

William Blackstone book Commentaries on the Laws of England

Book IV, ch. 27 http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/blackstone_bk4ch27.asp: Of Trial, And Conviction. Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769)

Secret, Peace, Justice, Law

“Unreliable Memoirs was just too hard to classify: most of the first wave of American reviewers had convicted it of trying to be truthful and fanciful at the same time. Since I had clearly had no other aim in mind, I read these indictments with sad bewilderment. The most powerful reviewer, in The New York Review of Books, had seized on my incidental remark 'Rilke was a prick' in order to instruct me that Rilke was, on the contrary, an important German poet.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Dick Cavett, p. 97
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

Books, Sadness, Time, Reading

“The manchildren, the mortals, have many ideas of what happens after they die, and wrangle about who is right and who is wrong. These disagreements often come to bloodshed, as if they wished to dispatch messengers who could discover the answer to their dispute. Such messengers, as far as I know of mortal philosophy, never return to give their brethren the taste of truth they yearn for.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Stone of Farewell (1990), Chapter 28, “Sparks” (p. 707).

Idea

“The design of the following treatise is to investigate the fundamental laws of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed; to give expression to them in the symbolical language of a Calculus, and upon this foundation to establish the science of Logic and construct its method; to make that method itself the basis of a general method for the application of the mathematical doctrine of Probabilities; and, finally, to collect from the various elements of truth brought to view in the course of these inquiries some probable intimations concerning the nature and constitution of the human mind.”

George Boole (1815–1864) English mathematician, philosopher and logician

Source: 1850s, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854), p. 1; Ch. 1. Nature And Design Of This Work, lead paragraph

Law, Mathematics, Nature, Science

“The influence of a woman's first love is felt on her whole after-existence: never can she dream such dream again. For a woman there is no second-love—youth, hope, belief, are all given to her first attachment; if unrequited, the heart becomes its own Prometheus, creative, ideal, but with the vulture preying upon it for ever.—If deceived, the whole poetry of life is gone; the very essence of poetry is belief, and how can she, whose sweet eager credulity has once learnt the bitter truth—that its reliance was in vain, how can she ever believe again?”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Love, Life, Youth, Dreams

“To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.”

Cornel West (1953) African-American philosopher and political/civil rights activist

"Chekhov, Coltrane, and Democracy: Interview by David Lionel Smith." in The Cornel West Reader (1998)

Suffering

“I grew up in the Bible Belt — not the buckle end, as the cliche goes, but the other end where all the holes are. You know what kind of holes. I don't mean to underestimate them, but if you laugh at these idiots enough — show them up as the phonies most of them are — they'll go away.
I'm concerned about another kind of religious fundamentalism: environmentalism. The Greenies have no more respect for scientific truth and individual liberty than the Goddies do. Both operate on faith, rather than fact. And neither of them has any qualms about dusting off the rack, the pincers, the Iron Maiden, and the red hot branding irons in order to see their mythology ensconced as beyond question.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

Interview, Ari Armstrong, "Catching Up with L. Neil Smith," http://www.freecolorado.com/2006/12/lneil.html 7 December 2006.

Faith, Question

“I think that natural truths will cease to be spat at us like insults, that aesthetics will once more be linked with ethics, and that people will become aware that in casting out aesthetics that they also cast out a respect for human life, a respect for creation, a respect for spiritual values. Aesthetics was an expression of man's need to be in love with his world. The cult of ugliness is a regression. It destroys our appetite, our love for our world.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

Love, Life, People, World

“The Romanists were forced in self-defense to issue rival translations. Such were made by Emser (1527), Dietenberger (1534), and Eck (1537), and accompanied with annotations. They are more correct in a number of passages, but slavishly conformed to the Vulgate, stiff and heavy, and they frequently copy the very language of Luther, so that he could say with truth, "The Papists steal my German of which they knew little before, and they do not thank me for it, but rather use it against me."”

Philip Schaff (1819–1893) American Calvinist theologian

These versions have long since gone out of use even in the Roman Church, while Luther's still lives.
Roman Catholic rival German versions of the Bible
Source: The last edition of Dr. Eck's Bible appeared in 1558, at Ingolstadt, Bavaria.

“It seemed, at least, that they had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, City of Illusions (1967), Chapter 8

Lie, Boy

“What of a truth that is bounded by these mountains and is falsehood to the world that lives beyond?”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Quelle vérité que ces montagnes bornent, qui est mensonge qui se tient au delà?
Book II, Ch. 12
Essais (1595), Book II

World, Mountain

“Although textbooks (and professors) like to make definite statements indicating that they know what they are talking about, there is in fact a great deal of uncertainty and ambiguity in the world. …we will not evade this question but rather explore (overexplore?) it. …great progress is often made when what was long believed to be true is now seen to be perhaps not the whole truth. Thus the text often uses words… to cause you to think about the uncertainess and even the arbitrariness of much of our current conventions and definitions, to ponder about your acceptance of them.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

World, Question, Thinking

“God deliver us all from prejudice and unkindness, and fill us with the love of truth and virtue.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

"Unitarian Christianity" http://www.americanunitarian.org/unitarianchristianity.htm, an address to The First Independent Church of Baltimore (5 May 1819)

Love, God

“I must speak the truth, and nothing but the truth.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part I, Book IV, Ch. 3.

“Though acts of reception and of understanding are in some measure fictions of ordered intuition, myths of reason, this truth does not justify the denial of intentional conduct. It is as absurd to discard as mendacious, as anarchically opaque, the bearing of contextual probability and suggestion, as it is to invest in such probability any blind trust. The negations of post-structuralism and of certain varieties of deconstruction are precisely as dogmatic, as political as were the positivist equations of archival historicism. The "emptiness of meaning" postulate is no less a priori, no less a case of despotic reductionism than were, say, the axioms of economic and psycho-sociological causality in regard to the generation of meaning in literature and the arts in turn-of-the-century pragmatism and scientism.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 3 (pp. 174-175).

Art, Literature, Understanding

“He was always seeking for a meaning in life, and here it seemed to him that a meaning was offered; but it was obscure and vague. He was profoundly troubled. He saw what looked like the truth as by flashes of lightning on a dark, stormy night you might see a mountain range. He seemed to see that a man need not leave his life to chance, but that his will was powerful; he seemed to see that self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion; he seemed to see that the inward life might be as manifold, as varied, as rich with experience, as the life of one who conquered realms and explored unknown lands.”

W. Somerset Maugham book Of Human Bondage

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 88

Life, Mountain, Passion, Chance

“One has to seek Beauty and Truth, Sir! As I always say to my pupils, you have to work to the finish. There's only one kind of painting. It is the painting that presents the eye with perfection, the kind of beautiful and impeccable enamel you find in Veronese and Titian.”

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905) French painter

Bouguereau (1895); Attributed in: Jefferson C. Harrison (1986) French paintings from the Chrysler Museum. Chrysler Museum, North Carolina Museum of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art (Birmingham, Ala.). p.45.

Beauty, Painting, Perfection

Quotes about the truth page 56

Quotes about the truth
page 56