Quotes about fact
page 14

Keri Arthur photo
Haruki Murakami photo

“So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.”

Variant: The fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.
Source: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Janet Evanovich photo
Patti LaBelle photo
Henry David Thoreau photo

“I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Variant: I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

Max Brooks photo

“There comes a point where emotions must give way to objective facts.”

Source: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

Julian Barnes photo
Umberto Eco photo
Azar Nafisi photo
Edith Wharton photo

“Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.”

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) American novelist, short story writer, designer

Source: Xingu and other Stories

Joseph Conrad photo
Agatha Christie photo
Robert Jordan photo

“The fact that the price must be paid is proof it is worth paying.”

al'Lan Mandragoran
(15 January 1990)
Source: The Eye of the World

Sue Monk Kidd photo
Charles Bukowski photo

“I feel no grief for being called something
which
I am not;
in fact, it's enthralling, somehow, like a good
back rub”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“Heroes aren't allowed to be nervous."
"Who made up that rule?"
"It's a known fact…”

David Eddings (1931–2009) American novelist

Source: The Seeress of Kell

John Steinbeck photo
Maya Angelou photo
Richard Rohr photo

“The most amazing fact about Jesus, unlike almost any other religious founder, is that he found God in disorder and imperfection—and told us that we must do the same or we would never be content on this earth.”

Richard Rohr (1943) American spiritual writer, speaker, teacher, Catholic Franciscan priest

Source: The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See

Robin McKinley photo
U.G. Krishnamurti photo

“The fact is that we don't want to be free. What is responsible for our problems is the fear of losing what we have and what we know.”

U.G. Krishnamurti (1918–2007) Indian philosopher

Source: No Way Out (2002), Ch. 7: What Kind Of Human Being Do You Want?
Context: The fact is that we don't want to be free. What is responsible for our problems is the fear of losing what we have and what we know. All these therapies, all these techniques, religious or otherwise, are only perpetuating the agony of man.

Carson McCullers photo
Carl Sagan photo
Sherrilyn Kenyon photo
Paulo Freire photo
John Scalzi photo
Sue Monk Kidd photo
Stephen King photo

“we need ghost stories because we, in fact, are the ghosts.”

Source: Danse Macabre

Stacy Schiff photo

“And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.”

Stacy Schiff (1961) American female Author, Pulitzer Prize winner

Source: Cleopatra: A Life

Daniel Kahneman photo
Christopher Moore photo
Suzan-Lori Parks photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Colum McCann photo

“Statistically the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you would think the mere fact of existence would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise.”

"On Probability and Possibility"
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974)
Context: Statistically the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you would think the mere fact of existence would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places.

Elizabeth Gilbert photo
Elizabeth Gilbert photo
Aleister Crowley photo

“Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography
Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929), Ch. 57.
Context: Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales. … Knowing nothing and fearing everything, they rant and rave and riot like so many maniacs. The subject does not matter. Any idea which gives them an excuse of getting excited will serve. They look for a victim to chivy, and howl him down, and finally lynch him in a sheer storm of sexual frenzy which they honestly imagine to be moral indignation, patriotic passion or some equally avowable emotion. It may be an innocent Negro, a Jew like Leo Frank, a harmless half-witted German; a Christ-like idealist of the type of Debs, an enthusiastic reformer like Emma Goldman or even a doctor whose views displease the Medial Trust.

Robert Anton Wilson photo
Martin Amis photo

“My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Source: Experience: A Memoir

Henry Miller photo

“Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

"The Absolute Collective", an essay first published in The Criterion on The Absolute Collective : A Philosophical Attempt to Overcome Our Broken State by Erich Gutkind, as translated by Marjorie Gabain
The Wisdom of the Heart (1941)
Context: All about us we see a world in revolt; but revolt is negative, a mere finishing-off process. In the midst of destruction we carry with us also our creation, our hopes, our strength, our urge to be fulfilled. The climate changes as the wheel turns, and what is true for the sidereal world is true for man. The last two thousand years have brought about a duality in man such as he never experienced before, and yet the man who dominates this whole period was one who stood for wholeness, one who proclaimed the Holy Ghost. No life in the whole history of man has been so misinterpreted, so woefully misunderstood as Christ's. If not a single Man has shown himself capable of following the example of Christ, and doubtless none ever will for we shall no longer have need of Christs, nevertheless this one profound example has altered our climate. Unconsciously we are moving into a new realm of being; what we have brought to perfection, in our zeal to escape the true reality, is a complete arsenal of destruction; when we have rid ourselves of the suicidal mania for a beyond we shall begin the life of here and now which is reality and which is sufficient unto itself. We shall have no need for art or religion because we shall be in ourselves a work of art. This is how I interpret realistically what Gutkind has set forth philosophically; this is the way in which man will overcome his broken state. If my statements are not precisely in accord with the text of Gutkind's thesis, I nevertheless am thoroughly in accord with Gutkind and his view of things. I have felt it my duty not only to set forth his doctrine, but to launch it, and in launching it to augment it, activate it. Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery. I am one man who can truly say that he has understood and acted upon this profound thought of Gutkind's —“the stupendous fact that we stand in the midst of reality will always be something far more wonderful than anything we do."

Edward Albee photo
Sarah Dessen photo
Georges Bataille photo
Hunter S. Thompson photo
Cassandra Clare photo
John F. Kennedy photo
Aleister Crowley photo

“Paganism is wholesome because it faces the facts of life….”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography

Elizabeth Gilbert photo
Malcolm Gladwell photo

“In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: Outliers: The Story of Success

Umberto Eco photo
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin photo
Emma Goldman photo
Philip Pullman photo
Elizabeth Cady Stanton photo
Werner Herzog photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo

“Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism
Dave Barry photo
Bill Gates photo
Dallas Willard photo

“Our failure to hear His voice when we want to is due to the fact that we do not in general want to hear it, that we want it only when we think we need it.”

Dallas Willard (1935–2013) American philosopher

Source: Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

George Bernard Shaw photo

“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”

Preface, The importance of hell in the salvation scheme
Source: 1910s, Androcles and the Lion (1913)
Context: The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.

U.G. Krishnamurti photo

“The plain fact is that if you don't have a problem, you create one. If you don't have a problem you don't feel that you are living.”

U.G. Krishnamurti (1918–2007) Indian philosopher

Source: No Way Out (2002), Ch. 7: What Kind Of Human Being Do You Want?

Alyson Nöel photo
Sigmund Freud photo
Robin S. Sharma photo

“one must not allow the clock and the calender to blind him to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle --and mystery”

Robin S. Sharma (1965) Canadian self help writer

Source: The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Fable About Fulfilling Your Dreams Reaching Your Destiny

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary.”

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

Source: 1960s, Strength to Love (1963), Ch. 1 : A tough mind and a tender heart
Context: Softmindedness often invades religion. … Softminded persons have revised the Beautitudes to read "Blessed are the pure in ignorance: for they shall see God." This has led to a widespread belief that there is a conflict between science and religion. But this is not true. There may be a conflict between softminded religionists and toughminded scientists, but not between science and religion. … Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary.

Marilyn Monroe photo
David Byrne photo
Albert Einstein photo

“I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.”

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

Letter to Michele Besso (8 October 1952). According to Scientifically speaking: a dictionary of quotations, Volume 1 (2002), p. 154 http://books.google.com/books?id=FFIBzawsfPEC&lpg=PR1&pg=PA154#v=onepage&q&f=false, the letter is reprinted on p. 487 of Correspondance 1903-1955 (1972) by Michele Besso.
1950s

Franz Kafka photo
Neal Stephenson photo

“To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.”

Source: Snow Crash

Nadine Gordimer photo

“The facts are always less than what really happened.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer
Patrick Rothfuss photo
David Sedaris photo
Haruki Murakami photo
Jack Kornfield photo
David Hume photo

“… no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.”

Section 10 : Of Miracles Pt. 1
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
Source: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding/An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals

Robert Greene photo
James Baldwin photo

“The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

Source: The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985

Erich Fromm photo

“I'm a big believer in putting things off, In fact, I even put off procrastinating.

-Ella Varner”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Smooth Talking Stranger

Thomas Merton photo
Chelsea Cain photo

“Our relationship is complicated by the fact that I am emotionally retarded.”

Chelsea Cain (1972) American journalist and writer

Source: Heartsick

Yann Martel photo