Entry (1954)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)
Context: How terribly hard and almost impossible it is to tell the truth. More than anything else, the artist in us prevents us from telling aught as it really happened. We deal with the truth as the cook deals with meat and vegetables.
as quoted by Paul Krassner in Lenny Bruce: Swear to tell the truth 1998 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0175844/
“Most of these poems are concerned with the linguistic impossibility of telling truth.”
Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself (1994)
Context: Under that title Kawabata talked about a unique kind of mysticism which is found not only in Japanese thought but also more widely Oriental thought. By 'unique' I mean here a tendency towards Zen Buddhism. Even as a twentieth-century writer Kawabata depicts his state of mind in terms of the poems written by medieval Zen monks. Most of these poems are concerned with the linguistic impossibility of telling truth. According to such poems words are confined within their closed shells. The readers can not expect that words will ever come out of these poems and get through to us. One can never understand or feel sympathetic towards these Zen poems except by giving oneself up and willingly penetrating into the closed shells of those words.
G 4
Variant translations:
It is almost impossible to carry the torch of wisdom through a crowd without singeing someone's beard.
It is virtually impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd, without singeing someone's beard
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook G (1779-1783)
“It is easy to lie with statistics. It is hard to tell the truth without it.”
cited in: Andrea Varsavsky, Iven Mareels, Mark Cook (2010). Epileptic Seizures and the EEG. p. 89
“Tell the truth, work hard, and come to dinner on time.”
As quoted in Time and Chance (1994) by James Cannon, p. 411.
“Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.”
Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 8. Battle of the Generations
