“I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.”
J'aime fort la vérité, mais je n'aime point du tout le martyre.
Letter to Jean le Rond d'Alembert (8 February 1776)
Citas
Original
J'aime fort la vérité, mais je n'aime point du tout le martyre.
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Voltaire 167
French writer, historian, and philosopher 1694–1778Related quotes
“Only an idiot could believe that scientific truth needs martyrdom”
Hilbert (2nd edition, 1996) by Constance Reid, p. 92
Context: But he (Galileo) was not an idiot,... Only an idiot could believe that scientific truth needs martyrdom — that may be necessary in religion, but scientific results prove themselves in time.
The Great Infidels (1881)
Context: All the martyrs in the history of the world are not sufficient to establish the correctness of an opinion. Martyrdom, as a rule, establishes the sincerity of the martyr, — never the correctness of his thought. Things are true or false in themselves. Truth cannot be affected by opinions; it cannot be changed, established, or affected by martyrdom. An error cannot be believed sincerely enough to make it a truth.
“I am very driven when it comes to poetry, a complete obsessive of the truth be told.”
Poetry Quotes
[Sam Harris, 7 February 2006, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060207_reality_islam/, Sam Harris on the Reality of Islam, Truthdig.com, 2006-10-16]
2000s
Ana al-Haqq
As quoted in From Primitives to Zen : A Thematic Sourcebook of the History of Religions (1967) by Mircea Eliade, p. 523; this is the primary assertion for which he was condemned as a heretic. "al-Haqq" ("The Truth") is one of the most holy names and attributes of Allah (God), and by this statement his persecutors asserted that Al Hallaj was claiming to be God.
“And I am left behind
Corrupted crushed and blind
All for a dream
That in truth was never really mine.”
The Dream
Song lyrics, All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu (2010)
Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Context: I am well aware of how anarchic much of what I say may sound. Expressing myself thus abstractly and briefly, I may seem to despair of the very notion of truth. But I beseech you to reserve your judgment until we see it applied to the details which lie before us. I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.