All Quotes By Tag: Truth

“That was one of the inherent flaws of faith. Belief without knowing. But worse yet: belief without action. It could be good in its own right. Beautiful, even, when embraced, but that had to be measured. Checked. Too many surrendered themselves to it. What they did not see was simple fact. Religion did not bring peace. It merely offered a means. It was up to man to create peace.”

“Against an oath; the truth thou art unsure.”

“I suppose we all have our little hiding-hole if the truth was known, but as small as it is, the whole world is in it, and bit by bit grows on us again till the day You find us out.”

“In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, for knowledge, and even beauty is only a vein sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of ones clothes in a community of blind men.”

“People stumble over the truth from time to time,but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.”

“In history, truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost . . . especially against the narrow and futile patriotism, which, instead of pressing forward in pursuit of truth, takes pride in walking backwards to cover the slightest nakedness of our forefathers.”

“Living in this world will change you,” she confides. “It makes me value life. When a friend has a healthy baby, I don’t think it’s normal; I think it’s a fucking miracle.”

“We tend to forget that words are, themselves, ideas. They might be called ideas in a state of suspended animation. When the words are mastered the ideas tend to come alive again.”

“[from Some words about ‘War and Peace’]For a historian considering the achievement of a certain aim, there are heroes; for the artist treating of a man’s relation to all sides of life there cannot and should not be heroes, but there should be men.[…]The historian has to deal with the results of an event, the artist with the fact of the event. An historian in describing a battle says: ‘The left flank of such and such an army was advanced to attack such and such a village and drove out the enemy, but was compelled to retire; then the cavalry, which was sent to attack, overthrew…’ and so on. But these words have no meaning for the artist and do not actually touch on the event itself. Either from his own experience, or from the letters, memoirs, and accounts, the artist realizes a certain event to himself, and very often (to take the example of a battle) the deductions the historian permits himself to make as to the activity of such and such armies prove to be the very opposite of the artist’s deductions. The difference of the results arrived at is also to be explained by the sources from which the two draw their information. For the historian (to keep to the case of a battle) the chief source is found in the reports of the commanding officers and the commander-in-chief. The artist can draw nothing from such sources; they tell him nothing and explain nothing to him. More than that: the artist turns away from them as he finds inevitable falsehood in them. To say nothing of the fact that after any battle the two sides nearly always describe it in quite contradictory ways, in every description of a battle there is a necessary lie, resulting from the need of describing in a few words the actions of thousands of men spread over several miles, and subject to most violent moral excitement under the influence of fear, shame and death.”

“… there is a whole hell of a lot of knowledge about the (expletive removed) human condition that we are not ready for.”

“He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds—that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.”

“I came only to report the news, to gather information. I didn’t come to find out the truth.”

“Wedded she some years, and to a manOf fifty, and such husbands are in plenty;And yet, I think, instead of such a ONE’Twere better to have TWO of five and twenty…”

“Ultimately, in the battle against lies and violence, truth and love have no other weapon than the witness of suffering.”

“It is important to speak your truth, not to convince anyone else of it. Everyone must make up their own minds.”