“Which perspective is true? he thought. Which do I want to be true?”

— Tim Powers , book Declare

Source: Declare (2001), Chapter 10 (p. 285)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Which perspective is true? he thought. Which do I want to be true?" by Tim Powers?

Tim Powers photo

Tim Powers 63

American writer 1952

Related quotes

“Finally, the argument from personal existence - this is perhaps the coup de grace against naturalism:
# According to Dr. Rosenberg, if naturalism is true then I do not exist. He says there are no selves, there are no persons, no first-person perspectives.
# But, I do exist! I know this as certainly as I know anything. From which it follows:
# Therefore, naturalism is not true.”

William Lane Craig (1949) American Christian apologist and evangelist

“When the child comes to draw things as he sees them, it will be precisely because he has given up taking isolated objects in and for themselves and has begun to construct real systems of relations which take account of the true perspective in which things are connected.”

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) Swiss psychologist, biologist, logician, philosopher & academic

Source: The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932), Ch. 2 : Adult Constraint and Moral Realism 
Context: To perceive is to construct intellectually, and if the child draws things as he conceives them, it is certainly because he cannot perceive them without conceiving them. But to give up gradually the spurious absolutes situated away and apart from the context of relations that has been built up during experience itself is the work of a superior kind of rationality. When the child comes to draw things as he sees them, it will be precisely because he has given up taking isolated objects in and for themselves and has begun to construct real systems of relations which take account of the true perspective in which things are connected.

“Thus he had a double thought: the one by which he acted as king, the other by which he recognized his true state, and that it was accident alone that had placed him in his present condition.”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

Discourses on the Condition of the Great

“I don’t want to be anything special. I only want to try to be true to that in me which seeks to fulfill its promise.”

Etty Hillesum (1914–1943) Jewish diarist

“Being true is different from being taken as true, whether by one or by many or everybody, and in no case is it to be reduced to it. There is no contradiction in something's being true which everybody takes to be false. I understand by 'laws of logic' not psychological laws of takings-to-be-true, but laws of truth. …If being true is thus independent of being acknowledged by somebody or other, then the laws of truth are not psychological laws: they are boundary stones set in an eternal foundation, which our thought can overflow, but never displace. It is because of this that they have authority for our thought if it would attain truth. They do not bear the relation to thought that the laws of grammar bear to language; they do not make explicit the nature of our human thinking and change as it changes.”

Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) mathematician, logician, philosopher

Introduction, Tr. Montgomery Furth (1964)
Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, 1893 and 1903

“A frightening thing, which is perhaps true: "old men want to survive."”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

“I do not mean to affirm that the description which I have given of the soul and her missions is exactly true—a man of sense ought hardly say that. But I do say that, inasmuch as the soul is shown to be immortal, he may venture to think, not improperly or unworthily, that something of this kind is true.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

“We cannot think any true thought unless we want the true. Thinking is itself an aspect of practice.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Source: Lectures on Negative Dialectics (1965-66), p. 45

“The popularity of the paranormal, oddly enough, might even be grounds for encouragement. I think that the appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for that which we do not understand, is healthy and to be fostered. It is the same appetite which drives the best of true science, and it is an appetite which true science is best qualified to satisfy.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1996)

“Facts, facts, facts,' cries the scientist if he wants to emphasize the necessity of a firm foundation for science. What is a fact? A fact is a thought that is true. But the scientist will surely not recognize something which depends on men's varying states of mind to be the firm foundation of science.”

Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) mathematician, logician, philosopher

Gottlob Frege (1956). "The thought: A logical inquiry" in: Peter Ludlow (1997) Readings in the Philosophy of Language. p. 27

Related topics