Monday, June 23, 2008

The Quote File: Truth

There are only two mistakes one can make on the road to truth, not beginning and not finishing. -- Buddha

. . . when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Education is not merely a means for earning a living or an instrument for the acquisition of wealth. It is an initiation into a life of spirit, a training of the human soul in the pursuit of truth and the practice of virtue. -- Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit

There are few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic. -- Anais Nin

We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it. -— William Butler Yeats

You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes. -- Moses ben Maimon

Like many of the people I had read about, I set out on a long journey to find truth and beauty. As usual, the road led straight back to the beginning: home, country roads, the sun setting through the woods. –- Joyce Sutphen

A fact is not a truth until you love it. –- John Keats

Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself. -- Simone de Beauvoir

Love truth, but pardon error. -– Voltaire

It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry. -- Thomas Paine

Everyone wishes to have truth on his side, but not everyone wishes to be on the side of truth. -- Richard Whately

Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. -- Flannery O'Connor

The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think. -- Aristotle

How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in the truth. -- Sophocles

It does not require many words to speak the truth. -- Chief Joseph

Truth may be stretched but cannot be broken. It always gets above falsehood as oil does above water. -- Miguel de Cervantes

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. -- Andre Gide

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us. -- Paul Valery

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. -- Arthur Schopenhauer

One owes respect to the living. To the dead, one owes only the truth. -- Voltaire

What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup. -– Boris Pasternak

5 comments:

  1. Loved the ones by O'Connor and Voltaire. There's something Emily Dickekson said about poetry that our professor told us about in our Literature class. She said, "Tell the truth, but tell it slant."

    I liked this Quote File most, of all the ones you've done.

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  2. Keats's is my favorite.

    Thanks for sharing.

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  3. Seeking truth within ourselves is what the creative process is all about. Unfortunately in education today it is test scores, not creativity that we value.

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  4. "Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies" --Ralph Waldo Emerson

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  5. "A truth may have nothing to do with anything factual." -- Me

    "It's not a lie if you believe it." -- George Costanza

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