c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.
— Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God
I am older than you. Believe me, there is no other way to live on earth. Men are not open to truth or reason. They cannot be reached by a rational argument. The mind is powerless against them. Yet we have to deal with them. If we want to accomplish anything, we have to deceive them into letting us accomplish it. Or force them. They understand nothing else. We cannot expect their support for any endeavor of the intellect, for any goal of the spirit. They are nothing but vicious animals. They are greedy, self-indulgent, predatory dollar-chasers
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Bitter though it may be to many, Cadfael concluded, there is no substitute for truth, in this or any case.
— Ellis Peters, The Raven in the Foregate
And if we do not stand now, then when will a stand be taken against evil?
— Bodie Thoene, A Daughter of Zion
But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian's lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man's truths - if other men had truths - and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.
— Stephen Fry, The Liar
And whatever my life had been up to that day, it was another life after that. And that is the gospel truth.
— Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
I don't believe that aliens exist,but I do believe that any new facts can strengthen foundation of my belief.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
When it rains," her father said "it pours.
— Jodi Picoult, Salem Falls
It's amazing how easy the truth is to accept...No matter how strange.
— K.C. Randall, Immortal Awakening
Suddenly I began to find a strange meaning in old fairy-tales; woods, rivers, mountains, became living beings; mysterious life filled the night; with new interests and new expectations I began to dream again of distant travels; and I remembered many extraordinary things that I had heard about old monasteries. Ideas and feelings which had long since ceased to interest me suddenly began to assume significance and interest. A deep meaning and many subtle allegories appeared in what only yesterday had seemed to be naive popular fantasy or crude superstition. And the greatest mystery and the greatest miracle was that the thought became possible that death may not exist, that those who have gone may not have vanished altogether, but exist somewhere and somehow, and that perhaps I may see them again. I have become so accustomed to think "scientifically" that I am afraid even to imagine that there may be something else beyond the outer covering of life. I feel like a man condemned to death, whose companions have been hanged and who has already become reconciled to the thought that the same fate awaits him; and suddenly he hears that his companions are alive, that they have escaped and that there is hope also for him. And he fears to believe this, because it would be so terrible if it proved to be false, and nothing would remain but prison and the expectation of execution.
— P.D. Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe
Yawns are not the only infectious things out there besides germs.Giggles can spread from person to person.So can blushing.But maybe the most powerful infectious thing is the act of speaking the truth.
— Vera Nazarian
The life that I have lived was no more than a mask covering the real me. What has happened was not to kill me but to reveal me.
— E'yen A. Gardner
Good is never accomplished except at the cost of those who do it, truth never breaks through except through the sacrifice of those who spread it.
— John Henry Newman
Knowing is not simply a material act, since the object that is known always conceals something beyond the empirical datum. All our knowledge, even the most simple, is always a minor miracle, since it can never be fully explained by the material instruments that we apply to it. In every truth there is something more than we would have expected, in the love that we receive there is always an element that surprises us.
— Pope Benedict XVI, Charity in Truth: Caritas in Veritate
A bitter reality of truth can be wisely told in a sweet tale of lullaby.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Intellectual freedom begins when one says with Socrates that he knows that he knows nothing, and then goes on to add: Do you know what you don’t know and therefore what you should know? If your answer is affirmative and humble, then you are your own teacher, you are making your own assignment, and you will be your own best critic. You will not need externally imposed courses, nor marks, nor diplomas, nor a nod from your boss . . . in business or in politics. (from the essay The Last Don Rag)
— Scott M. Buchanan
Think of something useless, and that's probably what I'll be doing. Listen, Virginia, we need to love the useless. We need to raise pigeons without a thought of eating them, plant rose bushes without expecting to pick roses, write without aiming at publication. We need to do things without expecting benefits in return. The shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but it's in the curving paths that the best things are found. . . . We must love the useless, because there is beauty in uselessness.
— Lygia Fagundes Telles, Ciranda de Pedra
It's written, 'seek and ye shall find'. But first, 'imagine what you seek'.Otherwise, you will end up searching everything everywhere forever.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader
Truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. . . A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure
— Francis Bacon
Smartass Disciple: Master, you keep preaching the truth. They don't listen.Master of Stupidity: Oh that's not bad. That attitude keeps us in the business.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
There are a lot of people like me, people who need books the way they need air.
— Richard Marek
This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique...something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard.
— Václav Havel
Truth has to be credible or it makes as much trouble as any lie!
— Sidney Howard
There are times when I think that the ideal library is composed solely of reference books. They are like understanding friends—always ready to meet your mood, always ready to change the subject when you have had enough of this or that.
— J. Donald Adams
Klar sieht, wer von ferne sieht, nebelhaft, wer Anteil nimmt.
— Lao Tzu
Smartass Disciple: Master, why should people love each other ?Master of Stupidity: Well, orgasm is felt better than kill each other.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
The blame of course belonged to Clyde, who just was not much given to talk. Also, he seemed very little curious himself: Grady, alarmed sometimes by the meagerness of his inquiries and the indifference this might suggest, supplied him liberally with personal information; which isn't to say she always told the truth, how many people in love do? or can? but at least she permitted him enough truth to account more or less accurately for all the life she had lived away from him. It was her feeling, however, that he would as soon not hear her confessions: he seemed to want her to be as elusive, as secretive as he was himself.
— Truman Capote, Summer Crossing
You can't get decent Mexican food in DC.
— Michael Crichton, State of Fear
Truth does not surround itself with lies.
— John Christopher, The Sword of the Spirits
Although the pure truth has never been stated, nevertheless it has never been lost. Its existence does not depend upon human statement but upon human sensitivity. In this it is unlike all other knowledge.
— Paul Brunton, The Notebooks of Paul Brunton
It took me years to realize that I could do all kinds of drastic acts like quitting jobs, relationships, towns (or all of the above), but what showed up at the next job, relationship, & town was still ME.
— Summer Pierre, The Artist in the Office: How to Creatively Survive and Thrive Seven Days a Week
Smartass Disciple: I've been searching for so long.I still can't find the truth.Master of Stupidity: Until you've lost and felt desperate, you won't be found.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
She's my daughter. She's my sister.
— Robert Towne
If there was no free will in men, then there is no sins. When sins happened, it was 'free will' that made them doable. This is true, unless God has predestined human to do and to have sins.
— Toba Beta
All art is abstract, because art is an abstraction of the truth.
— Milford Zornes
Schmerz ist Wahrheit
—  alles andere wird angezweifelt.
I willingly accept Cassandra's fateTo speak the truth, although believed too late.
— Anne Killigrew
... the four noble truths: that there is suffering, that it has an origin, that there is a cessation of suffering, and that there is a path to that cessation.
— Sid Brown, Journey of One Buddhist Nun the: Even Against the Wind
Reconnect with the highest truth and ignite the divine sparks in you.
— Amit Ray, Enlightenment Step by Step
If you want the answer—ask the question.
— Lorii Myers
To be haunted is to glimpse a truth that might best be hidden.
— James Herbert, Haunted
Spiritually is finding the truth in you.
— Wes Adamson
Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
The business man who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. "Yes, I see, dear; it's about halfway between," Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility
— E.M. Forster, Howards End
The plain truth can be the hardest thing to see when it's about yourself. If you don't want to know the truth, you'll do anything to disguise it.
— Sara Pennypacker, Pax
The more doors you open to the mysteries, or sacred knowledge, the smaller you feel. And because you begin to feel smaller and smaller until your ego disappears, the more humble you become. Therefore, any man who behaves arrogantly with what little he knows, or claims to know all, only reveals to all that he really knows nothing. Real greatness does not reside inside those who feel large. The truly wise are meek. Yet being small and meek do not make one weak. Arming oneself with true knowledge generates strong confidence and a bold spirit that makes you a lion of God. The Creator does not want you to suffer, yet we are being conditioned by society to accept suffering, weak and passive dispositions under the belief that such conditions are favorable by God. Weakness is not a virtue praised by God. How could he desire for you to be weak if he tells us to stand by our conscience? Doing so requires strength. However, there is a difference between arrogance when inflating your ego, and confidence when one truly gets closer to God. One feels large, while the other feels small. Why? Because a man of wisdom understands that he is just a small pea in a sea of infinite atoms, and that in the end — we are all connected. And did you not know that the smaller a creature is, the bolder its spirit?
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Only courageous hearts can endure the bitterness of truth.
— Michael Bassey Johnson, Master of Maxims
The truth, the all moving magic, the single handed spark of it all wasI found art. And this saved my life.
— Mia Hollow
Ignoring your conscience is the first violation of Truth.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Profit should never come at the cost of human blood. Any government that places profit before people is pure evil.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Always listen to your conscience. If your conscience conflicts with your faith, question everything.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
And now, for something completely the same:Wasted time and wasted breath,'s what I'll make, until my death.Helping people 'd be as good,but I wouldn't, if I could.For the few that help deserve,have no need, or not the nerve,help from strangers to accept,plus from mine a few have wept.Wept from joy, or from despair,or just from my vengeful stare.Ways I have, to look at stupid,make them see I am not Cupid.Make them see they are in error,for of truth I am a bearer.Most decide I'm just a bear,mauling at them, - like I care.
— Will Advise, Nothing is here...
Stand up for what is right even if it means standing alone.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job... The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress.
— Gary  Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Cocaine Explosion
In the underworld, reality itself has elastic properties and is capable of being stretched into different definitionsof the truth.
— Roderick Vincent, The Cause
Everyone is just walking along concerned with his own problems, his own life, his own worries. And we're all expecting other people to tune into our own agenda. "Look at my worry. Worry with me. Step into my life. Care about my problems. Care about me.
— Sharon Creek
There are two missions we are obligated to carry out during our life journey. The first, is to seek Truth throughout our lifetime. The second, is simply to be good. Engrave it in your mind that life is just one big board game where you have to make it from start to finish by being good. That is all you have to do. The hardest part, is dealing with all the obstacles that prevent smooth sailing. The trick is, to always strive to be the right person in all situations – regardless of personal cost to you. Your aim is to make sure the right book on your shoulder weighs more that the bad book on the left. The scales are real. Regardless of your chosen faith, there is a measurement system to be found in all of the world's religions. After all, does it make sense for all souls, good or bad, to end up in the same place? Of course not. To really secure the very best setting in the afterlife, the vibrations of your good deeds must surpass your death.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Use truth to fight the lies. Use the heart to fight the mind.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
A relationship that is truly genuine does not keep changing its colors. Real gold never rusts. If a relationship is really solid and golden, it will be unbreakable. Not even Time can destroy its shine.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
When people can get away with crimes just because they are wealthy or have the right connections, the scales are tipped against fairness and equality. The weight of corruption then becomes so heavy that it creates a dent that forces the world to become slanted, so much so — that justice just slips off.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
God is my only leader. Truth is my only sword. Guided only by my conscience, I am a true citizen of the world.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Truth will never imprison you. Only the repression of your conscience will. This is what is meant by 'THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE'.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
The way to be invisible - is to truly be imaginary. But since you cannot imagine yourself, you have to clone your imagination into being an image of yourself. Imagine that.
— Will Advise, Nothing is here...
To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life., 8 September 1935)
— Dorothy L. Sayers, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1, 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist
Too many kings can ruin an army
— Homer
The mind knows the truth when your heart denies what it feels. When you don't feel safe to let people in it is because you're not ready to deal with the pain of honesty.
— Shannon L. Alder
Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.
— Eugène Ionesco
Beauty is truth, truth beauty
— John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn and Other Poems
Don't call anyone a devil, because within you, you can experience hell and the devil, and the devil is nothing, but you!
— Michael Bassey Johnson
It always seems as though the definition of love will remain debatable by an opinionated world.
— Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile
What a laugh, though. To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never know why other people said what they said or did what they did, because they never even know themselves. Nobody understands anybody.
— Orson Scott Card, Shadow of the Hegemon
Our true nature is one of innocence and freedom to choose how we live. We need to be brave enough not to give that away. Don't give up on your right to, and sense of, TRUTH, Justice, and GRACE.
— Jay Woodman
And here's to the blues, the real blues— where there's a hint of hope in every cry of desperation.
— David Mutti Clark, Professor Brown Shoes Teaches the Blues
The truth is what you live through while you're looking for the truth.
— Marty Rubin
Love cost its like working a full time job you got to put work and effort into it,and that's why it fails with a lot of people because they on the job part time !!! #GeminiStatus
— jojo1980
The word of God came down to man as rain to soil, and the result was mud, not clear water. (Bistami) Pg. 128
— Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt
I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.
— Joan Didion, Blue Nights
Hope is bulletproof, truth just hard to hit
— Christopher Moore, Coyote Blue
Accept the universeAs the gods gave it to you.If the gods wanted to give you something elseThey’d have done it.If there are other matters and other worldsThere are.
— Alberto Caeiro, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro
Fat men take a cushion with them wherever they go.
— George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
Truthfully, wicked people reveal themselves in words first, to inhibit speech would inhibit us seeing the wicked before they act.
— Leviak B. Kelly, Religion: The Ultimate STD: Living a Spiritual Life without Dogmatics or Cultural Destruction
This is the strange thing about life, when people are confronted, they all say that the truth is what they want but when the truth disagrees with them, they balk at it as if it were an unwanted zombie apocalypse that only wants to destroy civilization.
— Leviak B. Kelly, Religion: The Ultimate STD: Living a Spiritual Life without Dogmatics or Cultural Destruction
The clash of ideas is not weakness.Truth reaches its place when tussling with error.
— Richard Henry Pratt
Like all who search for truth out of fear, I desperately wanted someone else to tell me exactly what to do.
— Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood
We can not, therefore, reserve as sacred anything that is not truth and yet we cannot turn from things of truth have inspired us in our everyday lives. We must merely embrace both hard and soft truths that must not be avoided. This does not mean we can reserve for ourselves the right to be self-righteous nor call others self-righteous simply because they disagree with us.
— Leviak B. Kelly, Religion: The Ultimate STD: Living a Spiritual Life without Dogmatics or Cultural Destruction
See with the eyes of love and a thing becomes beautiful. See with the eyes of hate and things are ugly.
— Joy Cowley, Starbright and the Dream Eater
We should gather all the good and true principles in the world and treasure them up, or we shall not come out true Mormons.
— Joseph Smith, Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith
Some people would rather be right than free.
— Vivian Amis
That's the thing with keeping up appearances, Rose; people will do anything to get one and anything to keep one.
— Skyla Madi, Without a Heartbeat
You taste like sugar," he pants through a smile, still out of breath."Somehow I doubt that. But I appreciate the thought.
— Addison Moore, 3:AM Kisses
Personal experience is the basis of all real literature.
— George Henry Lewis
And since today’s all there is for now, that’s everything.Who knows if I’ll be dead the day after tomorrow?If I’m dead the day after tomorrow, the thunderstorm day after tomorrowWill be another thunderstorm than if I hadn’t died.Of course I know thunderstorms don’t fall because I see them,But if I weren’t in the world,The world would be different —There would be me the less —And the thunderstorm would fall on a different world and would be another thunderstorm.No matter what happens, what’s falling is what’ll be falling when it falls.(7/10/1930)
— Alberto Caeiro, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro
some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Love consists of a commitment which limits one's freedom - it is a giving of the self, and to give oneself means just that: to limit one's freedom on behalf of another.
— John Paul II, Love and Responsibility
That's for the best. Otherwise they might realize they're in prison. It can't be helped. You women are used to harems and prisons. A person can spend his whole life between four walls. If he doesn't think or feel that he's a prisoner, then he's not a prisoner. But then there are people for whom the whole planet is a prison, who see the infinite expanse of the universe, the millions of stars and galaxies that remain forever inaccessible to them. And that awareness makes them the greatest prisoners of time and space.
— Vladimir Bartol, Alamut
For a man who walks in the light, to stay humble is not to walk in the dark; you don't need to project yourself to be thought an honest man.
— Mike  Norton
If someone is really close with you, your getting upset or them getting upset is okay, and they don’t change because of it. It’s just part of the relationship. It happens. You deal with it.
— Sarah Dessen, Just Listen
Deep within, there is something profoundly known, not consciously, but subconsciously. A quiet truth, that is not a version of something, but an original knowing. What this, absolute, truth [identity] is may be none of our business…but it is there, guiding us along the path of greater becoming; a true awareness. It is so self-sustaining that our recognition of it is not required. We are offspring’s of such a powerfully divine force – Creator of all things known and unknown.
— T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"
Look, no matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness. We don’t see what we could be. We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become. But if you’re surrounded by people who say ‘I want mine now,’ you end up with a few people with everything and a military to keep the poor ones from rising up and stealing it.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.
— Bruce Lee
Logan stopped and gazed skyward as the kite began to soar above them, and when he clapped his hands at Ben's obvious joy, she was strucked by the simple truth that sometimes the most ordinary things could be made extraordinary, simply by doing them with the right people.
— Nicholas Sparks
All stories have a curious and even dangerous power. They are manifestations of truth -- yours and mine. And truth is all at once the most wonderful yet terrifying thing in the world, which makes it nearly impossible to handle. It is such a great responsibility that it's best not to tell a story at all unless you know you can do it right. You must be very careful, or without knowing it you can change the world.
— Vera Nazarian, Dreams of the Compass Rose
I was starting to see that what looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself
—  maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.
but even the facts do not always tell the truth
— Paul Auster
This is part of what a family is about, not just love, but letting others know there’s someone who is watching out for them. It’s what I missed so much when my mother died—what I call your ‘spiritual security’—knowing that your family will be there watching out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
A novel must show how the world truly is, how characters genuinely think, how events actually occur. A novel should somehow reveal the true source of our actions.
— Kevin Hood, Becoming Jane
The truth is .. I'm okay with people not liking me. I'm not okay with them pretending that they do. Keep it real. Everybody ain't for everybody.
— Nakia R. Laushaul, The Truth as I See It: In Poetry & Prose
You won't find the truth of life in morbidity, only in hope.
— Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas
The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.
— Flannery O'Connor
Silence is the mother of truth.
— Benjamin Disraeli
Things that look impossible suddenly seem a lot better, once you get God on board.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
As a spirit having a human experience, you can choose to not merely exist but to be fully conscious and aware of living in a limited world. When you take a conscious part in life and its multitudes of choices, you won't let life happen to you - you will make life happen for you.
— James Van Praagh, Ghosts Among Us: Uncovering the Truth About the Other Side
Privacy is a protection from the unreasonable use of state and corporate power. But that is, in a sense, a secondary thing. In the first instance, privacy is the statement in words of a simple understanding, which belongs to the instinctive world rather than the formal one, that some things are the province of those who experience them and not naturally open to the scrutiny of others: courtship and love, with their emotional nakedness; the simple moments of family life; the appalling rawness of grief. That the state and other systems are precluded from snooping on these things is important - it is a strong barrier between the formal world and the hearth, extended or not - but at root privacy is a simple understanding: not everything belongs to everyone.
— Nick Harkaway, The Blind Giant
The answers are what they are. Just because you don't like them doesn't mean they aren't true.
— Megan Chance, The Spiritualist
It's strange, isn't it, how you never know you're living the best time of your life at the moment you're living it? If you could appreciate, at that instant, that this is it, maybe you'd make certain your mind imprinted every detail of the sights, smells, sounds and sensations.  Then again, maybe knowing that life will only get duller, sadder, less hopeful afterward would inject melancholy into that moment. You'd miss life's peak experience by mourning it before it passes.  So perhaps it's best not to know.
— Anita Bartholomew, The Midget's House
But to live in ignorance on such a point was impossible.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
The only other person I have fallen in love with that way is Jesus, and I hope that goes more smoothly. I hope I remember, when I'm bored with Him, and antsy, and sick of brushing my teeth next to the same god every morning, I hope I remember not to leave Him. I am not so worried that He will leave me. The Bible, after all, is full of stories about God sticking with His Bride, no matter how stiff-necked and prideful and unfaithful she may be.
— Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God
Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction
—  for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.
Truth on our level is a different thing from truth for the jellyfish.
— T.S. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley
The truth, as much as people acted like they wanted to hear it, was sometimes too cruel and harsh.
— Laura Kreitzer, Fallen Legion
There is fact in every fiction and truth in every lie.
— Krisi Keley, On the Soul of a Vampire
There is a law of the natural worlds (the spiritual and the physical) and this is something I have understood: that for every genuine existence, for every real manifestation and occurrence, there are are ten thousand falsities. Before you meet what or who is genuine, you will first have met, or known of, what is fake; and ten thousand times so! There is no need to feel disappointments, any number below ten thousand deceptions renders you a lucky person! And you ask why is there a need for this to happen? Well, if you have not known what is false first, there is no way to understand what then comes which is truth. What is lesser is so afraid of what is genuine, that it finds it necessary to imitate and duplicate that imitation ten thousand times over, for fear that you will finally meet what is real. The more important that one existence is, the more imitations there are in the world.
— C. JoyBell C.
The cruelest thing you can do to an artist is tell them their work is flawless when it isn't
— Yahtzee Croshaw
Public truth telling is a form of recovery, especially when combined with social action. Sharing traumatic experiences with others enables victims to reconstruct repressed memory, mourn loss, and master helplessness, which is trauma's essential insult. And, by facilitating reconnection to ordinary life, the public testimony helps survivors restore basic trust in a just world and overcome feelings of isolation. But the talking cure is predicated on the existence of a community willing to bear witness. 'Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships,' write Judith Herman. 'It cannot occur in isolation.
— Lawrence N. Powell, Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
I know you have it in you, Guy," Anne said suddenly at the end of a silence, "the capacity to be terribly happy.
— Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train
Life is difficult.
— M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
You don't deserve to understand truth if all that you want is just the normal life.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.
— Christopher Hitchens
Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true.
— Jonah Lehrer
My Emma, does not every thing serve to prove more and more the beauty of truth and sincerity in all our dealings with each other?
— Jane Austen, Emma
Science is only a Latin word for knowledge
— Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God
I tried to manipulate and control people and I harbored resentment. I wanted to be forgiven but I wouldn't forgive others.
— Lauryn Hill
When all of this music sounds like you know what you want to say, then it will have been of all worth, ever. You will be something complete unto yourself, present and unique.
— Jeff Buckley
Words are not just wind. Words have something to say. But if what they have to say is not fixed, then do they really say something? Or do they say nothing? People suppose that words are different from the peeps of baby birds, but is there any difference, or isn't there? What does the Way rely upon, that we have true and false? What do words rely upon, that we have right and wrong? How can the Way go away and not exist? How can words exist and not be acceptable? When the Way relies on little accomplishments and words reply on vain show, then we have rights and wrongs of the Confucians and the Mo-ists. What one calls right the other calls wrong; what one calls wrong the other calls right. But if we want to right their wrongs and wrong their rights, then the best to use is clarity.
— Zhuangzi, Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings
The mind is satisfied with phrased, but not the body, the body is more fastidious, it wants muscles. A body always tells the truth, that's why it's usually depressing and disgusting to look at.
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night
The world is to be carried forward by truth, which at first offends, which wins its way by degrees, which the many hate and would rejoice to crush.
— William Ellery Channing
I have no greater joy than to know that my children walk in truth.
— Anonymous, Holy Bible: King James Version
Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: First and Second Series
The truth is in the heart
— out there is true darkness.
I don't impressed if you're a religious person.I just wanna know about soul behind that mask.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Blessed is he who believes in the illusion because thus he can find his great truth!
— Sorin Cerin, Wisdom Collection: The Book of Wisdom
What's the truth? The truth is what people WANT. Liars are basically idealists, liars are saints and prophets. Jesus was a liar.
— Jane Rogers, Island
You should be spreading the good word. You should be etching the good word onto the glass scanning beds of library photocopiers. You should be scraping the truth onto old auto parts and throwing them off bridges so that people digging in the mud in a million years will question the world, too. You should be carving eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe soles so that your every trail speaks of thinking and faith and belief. You should be designing molecules that crystallize into poems of devotion. You should be making bar codes that print out truth, not lies. You shouldn't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has the truth stamped on it--a demand for people to reach a finer place! ...Your new life will be tinged with urgency, as though you're digging out the victims of an avalanche. If you're not spending every waking moment of your life living the truth, if you're not plotting every moment to boil the carcass of the old order, then you're wasting your day.
— Douglas Coupland, Player One: What Is to Become of Us
... the mind was designed not to defend what we want, but to discover what is ultimately true, which should shape our wants and satisfy them more deeply with God. The purpose of the mind is not to rationalize subjective preferences, but to recognize objective reality and to help the heart revel in God.
— John Piper, The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God's Delight in Being God
Sometimes when you get older—and I'm not talking about you, I'm talking generally, because everyone ages differently—things you think on and wish on start to seem real. And then you believe them, and before you know it they're a part of your history, and if someone challenges you on them and says they're not true—why, then you get offended.
— Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants
I prefer the keen edge of truth to the dull comfort of lies.
— Sondra Allan Carr, A Bed of Thorns and Roses
Cunning grows in deceit at seeing itself discovered, and tries to deceive with truth itself.
— Baltasar Gracián, The Art of Worldly Wisdom
The Four Noble Truths are pragmatic rather than dogmatic. They suggest a course of action to be followed rather than a set of dogmas to be believed. The four truths are prescriptions for behavior rather than descriptions of reality. The Buddha compares himself to a doctor who offers a course of therapeutic treatment to heal one’s ills. To embark on such a therapy is not designed to bring one any closer to ‘the Truth’ but to enable one’s life to flourish here and now, hopefully leaving a legacy that will continue to have beneficial repercussions after one’s death. (154)
— Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist
If there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth.
— Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
God is willing to walk the earth again incarnate in us.
— Eugenia Price, Early Will I Seek Thee
If you learn from many wise men who disagree one another,you will find that there are many wisdoms came out of truth.In the end, you must find truth and define your own wisdom.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Bullshit takes no genius,even fool senses its' foul.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Only the winner and coward may survive.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
(Ivan) Hold your tongue, or I'll kill you!(The devil) You'll kill me? No, excuse me, I will speak. I came to treat myself to that pleasure. Oh, I love the dreams of my ardent young friends, quivering with eagerness for life! 'There are new men,' you decided last spring, when you were meaning to come here, 'they propose to destroy everything and begin with cannibalism. Stupid fellows! they didn't ask my advice! I maintain that nothing need be destroyed, that we only need to destroy the idea of God in man, that's how we have to set to work. It's that, that we must begin with. Oh, blind race of men who have no understanding! As soon as men have all of them denied God -- and I believe that period, analogous with geological periods, will come to pass -- the old conception of the universe will fall of itself without cannibalism, and, what's more, the old morality, and everything will begin anew. Men will unite to take from life all it can give, but only for joy and happiness in the present world. Man will be lifted up with a spirit of divine Titanic pride and the man-god will appear. From hour to hour extending his conquest of nature infinitely by his will and his science, man will feel such lofty joy from hour to hour in doing it that it will make up for all his old dreams of the joys of heaven. Everyone will know that he is mortal and will accept death proudly and serenely like a god. His pride will teach him that it's useless for him to repine at life's being a moment, and he will love his brother without need of reward. Love will be sufficient only for a moment of life, but the very consciousness of its momentariness will intensify its fire, which now is dissipated in dreams of eternal love beyond the grave'... and so on and so on in the same style. Charming!Ivan sat with his eyes on the floor, and his hands pressed to his ears, but he began trembling all over. The voice continued.(The devil) The question now is, my young thinker reflected, is it possible that such a period will ever come? If it does, everything is determined and humanity is settled for ever. But as, owing to man's inveterate stupidity, this cannot come about for at least a thousand years, everyone who recognises the truth even now may legitimately order his life as he pleases, on the new principles. In that sense, 'all things are lawful' for him. What's more, even if this period never comes to pass, since there is anyway no God and no immortality, the new man may well become the man-god, even if he is the only one in the whole world, and promoted to his new position, he may lightheartedly overstep all the barriers of the old morality of the old slaveman, if necessary. There is no law for God. Where God stands, the place is holy. Where I stand will be at once the foremost place... 'all things are lawful' and that's the end of it! That's all very charming; but if you want to swindle why do you want a moral sanction for doing it? But that's our modern Russian all over. He can't bring himself to swindle without a moral sanction. He is so in love with truth-.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
— Hannah Arendt, On Revolution
Toutes les opinions ne se valent pas, et il ne faut pas confondre l'éloquence d'une parole avec la justesse d'une pensée.
— Tzvetan Todorov, In Defence of the Enlightenment
We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.
— Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
Until modern times, we focused a great deal of the best of our thought upon rituals of return to the human condition. Seeking enlightenment or the Promised Land or the way home, a man would go or be forced to go into the wilderness, measure himself against the Creation, recognize finally his true place within it, and thus be saved both from pride and from despair. Seeing himself as a tiny member of a world he cannot comprehend or master or in any final sense possess, he cannot possibly think of himself as a god. And by the same token, since he shares in, depends upon, and is graced by all of which he is a part, neither can he become a fiend; he cannot descend into the final despair of destructiveness. Returning from the wilderness, he becomes a restorer of order, a preserver. He sees the truth, recognizes his true heir, honors his forebears and his heritage, and gives his blessing to his successors. He embodies the passing of human time, living and dying within the human limits of grief and joy.(pg.95, "The Body and the Earth")
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
Like all of us sinners, General Betrishchev was endowed with many virtues and many defects. Both the one and the other were scattered through him in a sort of picturesque disorder. Self-sacrifice, magnanimity in decisive moments, courage, intelligence--and with all that, a generous mixture of self-love, ambition, vanity, petty personal ticklishness, and a good many of those things which a man simply cannot do without.
— Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
A very single fact could emerge into many versions of truth,depends on the number of eyewitnesses and interpretations.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
At beyond continent of reality, there are oceans of ideas.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
The life of truth is cold.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson
I don’t trust the answers or the people who give me the answers. I believe in dirt and bone and flowers and fresh pasta and salsa cruda and red wine. I don’t believe in white wine
—  I insist on color.
An ant can't define shape of an elephant solely from its' point of view.They have to unify all views. It's a way for ant to understand elephant.In order to understand true realities, men need to do mental blending.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
So obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity.
— Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome
Knowing the Techniques of Survival........Our fears and anxieties will often drive us to build impenetrable walls that act like blinders deflecting others and preventing us from seeing who surrounds us. Getting focused to the things that matter are the Key to what has to be to COMPLETE our MISSION. "I Had Every Excuse to Fail but I Chose None" Speak Life!!!(sky)
— Sebastian K. Young, I Had Every Excuse to Fail, but I Chose None
Smartass Disciple: Master, I feel really really confused about the truth.Master of Stupidity: Only confused? Walk in my shoes then you tell me.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
Today wouldn't have happened if histories weren't falsified.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
The best fiction is true.
— Kinky Friedman
I see the Christian world like this: we've inherited a divided map of the truth, and each of us has a piece. Our traditions teach us that no one else has a valid map and that our own church's piece shows us all the terrain and roads that exist. In fact, there is much more terrain, more roads, and more truth for us to see if we can accept and read one another's maps, fitting them together to give us a clearer picture of the larger Christian tradition.
— Michael Spencer, Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality
Evil presupposes a moral decision, intention, and some forethought. A moran or a lout, howeverm doesn't stop to think or reason.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
In any government, interests precede truth.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
If only [people] understood that every thought is both false and true! False by one-sidenedness resulting from man's inability to embrace the whole truth, and true as an expression of one fact of human endeavor.
— Leo Tolstoy
Natürlich muss die Wahrheit im Kampf mit der Unwahrheit geschrieben werden und sie darf nicht etwas Allgemeines, Hohes, Vieldeutiges sein. Von dieser allgemeinen, hohen, vieldeutigen Art ist ja gerade die Unwahrheit. Wenn von einem gesagt wird, er hat die Wahrheit gesagt, so haben zunächst einige oder viele oder einer etwas anderes gesagt, eine Lüge oder etwas Allgemeines, aber er hat die Wahrheit gesagt, etwas Praktisches, Tatsächliches, Unleugbares, das, um was es sich handelte.
— Bertolt Brecht
Sometimes before your luck can be good,someone else's has to be bad
— Maisie Mosco, Almonds and Raisins
I know certain truths about life.
— Dana Reinhardt, How to Build a House
...at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.
— Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
Sometimes, the things They say, the laws They make, the way the world spins doesn't make any sense at all...Which is exactly why you have to ask "Why?" and keep on asking until you get the TRUTH...
— Joe Kelly, Douglas Fredericks and the House of They
Stand up for what is right against the wrong.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem