Famous Quotes

Goldstone has done terrible damage to the cause of truth and justice and the rule of law. He has poisoned Jewish-Palestinian relations, undermined the courageous work of Israeli dissenters and—most unforgivably—increased the risk of another merciless IDF assault.

~ Norman G. Finkelstein

He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God's providence to lead him aright

~ Blaise Pascal

Language can't describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real meaning. Each reader's interpretation is equally valid, more important than the author's intention. In fact, nothing in life has meaning. Reality is subjective. Values and truths are subjective. Life itself is a kind of illusion. Blah, blah, blah, let's have another scotch.

~ Dean Koontz

Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never be quite the same, even if they try their best to be identical, because they're never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.

~ Stephen King

The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities.... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.

~ Oscar Wilde

Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant/Success in Circuit lies...

~ Emily Dickinson

It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.

~ Jack Kerouac

The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Davy once asked me if I thought it was better to be a has-been than a never was, but maybe it doesn't make much of a difference. In the end, people are just people, and the only things that matter are whether they are good or bad, loving or unloving, loved or unloved.

~ Todd Strasser

No one, from pontiffs to professors, has a monopoly on the truth. In the end, we are all just travelers--not scientists or mystics or any one brand of thinker. By nature, we are scientists and mystics, reductionists and holists, left-brained and right-brained, mixed up creatures trying to catch an occasional glimpse of the truth. The best we can do is to be tolerant of both sides of our nature--knowing that these reflect the twin aspect of the universe--and learn from whatever wisdom is offered.

~ David Darling

There is not a single untruth, no -but after ten lines Truth shrieks, she runs distraught and disheveled through her temple's corridors; she does not know herself. 'I can endure lies,' she cries. 'I cannot survive this stifling verisimilitude

~ Thornton Wilder

One doesn't intentionally to alter the truth, just enhance it and make it more memorable.

~ John H. Alexander

It's not an easy thing to tell a true story.

~ Allen Morris Jones

There's a weird logic that explains a common truth.

~ Toba Beta

Humor is the whole truth.

~ Frigyes Karinthy

When you love someone, they deserve to know the truth

~ Lorna Seilstad

No one can attain to truth by himself. Only by laying stone on stone with the cooperation of all, by the millions of generations from our forefather Adam to our own times, is that temple reared which is to be a worthy dwelling place of the Great God.

~ Leo Tolstoy

So why did poor artists originally hang around in cafes?I don't know. Inspiration from the atmosphere.Ha! No, you've been tricked, too, just like the rest of us. Cafes didn't have inspirational atmosphere at first. That only came later, when you knew artists had been hanging around in them.

~ Arthur Phillips

It’s a truth I love you,It’s a hope you do,And may I live and die with it,Not knowing that you don’t.

~ Amit Abraham

He didn't want to play football. He wanted to be told the truth.

~ John Boyne

Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

~ Richard M. Rorty

The teachers complain that the students today are all lazy, ignorant, and stupid. But the truth is that you're smarter than they are. You're not even old enough to drive and you already know that none of this matters.

~ Charles Benoit

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

It was only vanity and discouragement that sometimes made me feel alone with my endless love, but now that I was taking one of the risks my heart had urged upon me I could also feel I was not alone. If endless love was a dream, then it was a dream we all shared, even more than we all shared the dream of never dying or of traveling through time, and if anything set me apart it was not my impulses but my stubbornness, my willingness to take the dream past what had been agreed upon as the reasonable limits, to declare that this dream was not a feverish trick of the mind but was an actuality at least as real as that other, thinner, more unhappy illusion we call normal life. After all, the intimations of endless love were the same now as they were thousands of years before, while normal life had changed a thousand times and in a thousand different ways. Which then, was more real?

~ Scott Spencer

Justice based purely on laws is about as accurate as a portrait created out of large low-resolution color pixels.If you stand back far enough it looks good.Come any closer and the glaring approximations overtake all semblance of the original.Justice should be viewable under the microscope, not from a telescope.And for that it needs to be based not on law but on truth.

~ Vera Nazarian

It would be well to realize that the talk of ‘humane methods of warfare’, of the ‘rules of civilized warfare’, and all such homage to the finer sentiments of the race are hypocritical and unreal, and only intended for the consumption of stay-at-homes. There are no humane methods of warfare, there is no such thing as civilized warfare; all warfare is inhuman, all warfare is barbaric; the first blast of the bugles of war ever sounds for the time being the funeral knell of human progress… What lover of humanity can view with anything but horror the prospect of this ruthless destruction of human life. Yet this is war: war for which all the jingoes are howling, war to which all the hopes of the world are being sacrificed, war to which a mad ruling class would plunge a mad world.

~ James Connolly

For outward show is a wonderful perverter of the reason.

~ Marcus Aurelius

Don't forget that we lawyers, we're a higher breed of intellect, and so it's our privilege to lie. It's as clear as day. Animals can't even imagine lying: if you were to find yourself among some wild islanders, they too would only speak the truth until they learned about European culture.

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

The media—stenographers to power.

~ Amy Goodman

Neatness, madam, has nothing to do with the truth. The truth is quite messy, like a wind blown room.

~ William J. Harris

An Idea is nothing but Information, It won't do us any harm until we accept it as perception of truth in our mind, which in time will potentially evolve and construct major events in history.

~ Djayawarman Alamprabu

You will remember that I remarked the other day, just before we went into the very simple problem presented by Miss Mary Sutherland, that for strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.”“A proposition which I took the liberty of doubting.”“You did, Doctor, but none the less you must come round to my view, for otherwise I shall keep on piling fact upon fact on you until your reason breaks down under them and acknowledges me to be right.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

It is not history. But I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our love of country on these paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably it is part of our glory as a creature, that we can build our best and most permanent buildings on foundations of utter dust.

~ Sebastian Barry

You govern people, you do good and bad things.If you don't have guts to do bad, then step aside.

~ Toba Beta

Whether Hindus or Greeks, Egyptians or Japanese, Chinese, Sumerians, or ancient Americans -- or even Romans, the most modern among people of antiquity -- they all placed the Golden Age, the Age of Truth, the rule of Kronos or of Ra or of any other gods on earth -- the glorious beginning of the slow, downward unfurling of history, whatever name it be given -- far behind them in the past.

~ Savitri Devi

The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened.

~ Timothy B. Tyson

The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.

~ W.h. Auden

Ellie: You could lie to me. You could tell me to be encouraged, that good will triumph over evil.Richard: Good will triumph over evil.Ellie: Liar.

~ Joan Bauer

Belief has nothing to do with facts,especially for the unbelievable facts.

~ Toba Beta

The truth is not so important as the leaving of it behind.

~ Clare Francis