“The mind can only create errors. Truths are not created, they exist; one can only see them, disentangle them, discover them, and expose them.”
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Joseph Joubert 253
French moralist and essayist 1754–1824Related quotes
Source: 1920s, Prejudices, Third Series (1922), Ch. 3 "Footnote on Criticism", pp. 85-104
Context: Truth, indeed, is something that is believed in completely only by persons who have never tried personally to pursue it to its fastness and grab it by the tail. It is the adoration of second-rate men — men who always receive it as second-hand. Pedagogues believe in immutable truths and spend their lives trying to determine them and propagate them; the intellectual progress of man consists largely of a concerted effort to block and destroy their enterprise. Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed. In whole departments of human inquiry it seems to me quite unlikely that the truth ever will be discovered. Nevertheless, the rubber-stamp thinking of the world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth — that error and truth are simply opposites. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one. This is the whole history of the intellect in brief. The average man of today does not believe in precisely the same imbecilities that the Greek of the Fourth Century before Christ believed in, but the things that he does believe in are often quite as idiotic.
Perhaps this statement is a bit too sweeping. There is, year by year, a gradual accumulation of what may be called, provisionally, truths — there is a slow accretion of ideas that somehow manage to meet all practicable human tests, and so survive. But even so, it is risky to call them absolute truths. All that one may safely say of them is that no one, as yet, has demonstrated that they are errors. Soon or late, if experience teaches us anything, they are likely to succumb too. The profoundest truths of the Middle Ages are now laughed at by schoolboys. The profoundest truths of democracy will be laughed at, a few centuries hence, even by school-teachers.
“There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.”
Le Coq et l’Arlequin (1918)
Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 173-174
Human, All Too Human (1878)
Provisions of the Last Will and Testament of Dr. James Rush http://books.google.com/books?id=lSowTqXCyyUC&pg=PA13&dq=%22dreaded+by+the+advocates+of+error%22&hl=en&ei=NCJGTP-fBJ-QnwfB8K2uBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=13&ved=0CGQQ6AEwDA#v=onepage&q=%22dreaded%20by%20the%20advocates%20of%20error%22&f=false
“But if they don't exist, how can a man see them?”
Source: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), Ch. 7
Source: Systems Design of Education (1991), p. 20
Source: The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 21
Context: It is a significant fact and worth pondering upon that the Bible commences with the words: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth....", while the Dhammapada … opens with the words "Mind precedes things, dominates them, creates them". These momentous words are the quiet and uncontending, but unshakeable reply of the Buddha to that biblical belief. Here the roads of these two religions part: the one leads far away into an imaginary Beyond, the other leads straight home, into man's very heart.