Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
- Truth
- "A
faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets."
-
Arthur C. Clarke
- Winston Churchill: "You see these dictators on
their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons
of their police.Yet in their hearts there is unspoken - unspeakable! - fear.They
are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home,
all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse -- a
little tiny mouse! -- of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates
are thrown into panic."
- John Milton, Areopagitica: "For books are not
absolutely dead things, but... do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction
of that living intellect that bred them... who kills a man kills a reasonable creature,
God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills Reason itself, kills the Image
of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good
Book is the precious life-blood of a master- spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose
to a life beyond life."
- George Orwell, 1984: "Only the disciplined mind
can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external,
existing in its own right ... self-evident... But ... reality is not external. Reality
exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make
mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is
collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth.
It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. This is
the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston... You must humble yourself before you can
become sane."
- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: "A little
sunlight is the best disinfectant.
- John 1:5: The Life-Light
blazed out of the darkness; the darkness could not put it out (The
Message translation). Commentators point out that the flame of a single candle begins
to defeat darkness, and increasingly so with each incremental addition of candlepower. But
darkness has no such corresponding power over light. Someone has said that it’s not
strictly true that light and darkness are opposites, implying that they are co-equals in
power. Light is something substantive; darkness is merely the absence of light. Darkness
must begin to flee before the smallest encroachment of light, but darkness has not the
least such power over light.
- Thomas Jefferson: "It
is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."
- President
Ronald Reagan, Jan. 11, 1989, final address to the nation from the Oval Office: "[During
the last eight years] I won a nickname, 'the Great Communicator.' But I never thought it
was my style or the words I used that made a difference. It was the content. I wasn't a
great communicator. But I communicated great things -- and they didn't spring full bloom
from my brow; they came from ... our wisdom and our belief in the principles that have
guided us for two centuries."
- the poet Rilke, a
letter to a friend, Dresden University: "Be patient with all that is
unresolved in your heart. And try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek for
the answers that cannot be given. For you wouldn't be able to live with them. And the
point is to live everything, live the questions now, and perhaps without
knowing it, you will live along, some day, into the answers."
- Antoine
de Saint-Exupery:
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible
to the eye."
- Giordano
Bruno (1548-1600); burned alive by the Church at the stake:
"It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or
majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it
is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people."
- Tolstoy:
"I know that most men...can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if
it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have
delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which
they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabrics of their lives."
- Helen
Keller: "Many people know so little about what is beyond their short
range of experience. They look within themselves--and find nothing! Therefore they
conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either."
"A paradox is not a conflict with
reality. It is a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality should be
like."
Richard Feynman, physicist
- Tsao Hsueh-chin: "When
the unreal is taken for the real, the real becomes unreal."
- Ronald
Reagan:
“Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority of government
has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that
every one of us put on this world has been put there for a reason and has something to
offer.”
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: "When you have eliminated the impossible,
whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
- Voltaire:
"No
culture has a monopoly on beauty, just as no religion has a monopoly on truth."
- Harry
S Truman (1884-1972): "I
never give them hell; I just tell them the truth and they think it is hell."
- H. L. Mencken: "The world always makes the assumption that the
exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth -- that the error and truth
are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is
cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first
one."
- John Milton: "Truth ... never comes into the world but like a
Bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her forth."
- Ludwig von Mises: "The criterion of truth is that it works
even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it."
- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne: "If falsehood, like truth, had but
one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the
liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an
infinite field."
- Charles Peguy: "The honest man must be a
perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who
wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself perpetually unfaithful to all the
continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors."
- Max Planck: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by
convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents
eventually die out, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
- Henry David Thoreau: "Rather than love, than money, than fame,
give me truth... Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the
mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that
alluvion which covers the globe...till we come to the hard bottom of rocks in place, which
we can call reality."
- Voltaire: "What is not in nature can never be true."
- Frank Lloyd Wright: "Truth against the world."
- Alfred Adler: "A lie would have no sense unless the truth were
felt dangerous."
- W. H. Auden: "The most important truths are likely to be those
which...society at that time least wants to hear."
- Winston Churchill: "Men occasionally stumble over the truth,
but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened."
- Erich Fromm: "Historically...those who told the truth about a
particular regime have been exiled, jailed, or killed by those in power whose fury has
been aroused. To be sure, the obvious explanation is that they were dangerous to their
respective establishments, and that killing them seemed the best way to protect the status
quo. This is true enough, but it does not explain the fact that the truth-sayers are
so deeply hated even when they do not constitute a real threat to the established order.
The reason lies, I believe, in that by speaking the truth they mobilize the
[psychological] resistance of those who repress it. To the latter, the truth is dangerous
not only because it can threaten their power but because it shakes their whole conscious
system of orientation, deprives them of their rationalizations, and might even force them
to act differently. Only those who have experienced the process of becoming aware of
important impulses that were repressed know the earthquakelike sense of bewilderment and
confusion that occurs as a result. Not all people are willing to risk this adventure,
least of all those people who profit, at least for the moment, from being blind."
- Andre Gide: "Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt
those who find it."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "The first and last thing required
of genius is the love of truth."
- Adolph Hitler: "There is no such thing as truth."
- Eric Hoffer: "To most of us nothing is so invisible as an
unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down
our throats- we know it not."
- Albert Einstein: "The pursuit of truth and beauty is a
sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our
lives... The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It
is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can
no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are
closed... When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the
gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive
thinking."
- Dr. Mortimer Adler, Syntopicon essay,
"Truth": "But the ancient controversy in which Socrates
engages with the sophists of his day, who were willing to regard as true whatever anyone
wished to think, seems to differ not at all from Freud's quarrel with those whom he calls intellectual
nihilists. They are the persons who say there is no such thing as truth or that it is
only the product of our own needs and desires. They make it 'absolutely immaterial,' Freud
writes, 'what views we accept. All of them are equally true and false. And no one has a
right to accuse anyone else of error.' ... If all opinions are equally true or false, then
why, Aristotle asks, does not the denier of truth walk 'into a well or over a precipice'
instead of avoiding such things. 'If it were really a matter of indifference what we
believed,' Freud similarly argues, 'then we might just as well build our bridges of
cardboard as of stone, or inject a tenth of a gramme of morphia into a patient instead of
a hundredth, or take tear-gas as a narcotic instead of ether. But,' he adds, 'the
intellectual anarchists themselves would strongly repudiate such practical applications of
their theory.'"
- Josh Billings, Affurisms from Josh Billings: His Sayings, 1865:
"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand."
- Thomas
Mann, Essay
on Freud:
"A
great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth."
- Albert Einstein: "The ideals which have lighted my way, and
time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness,
Beauty, and Truth."
- Ancient Buddhist Proverb: "When the student is ready, the
teacher will appear."
- The Apostle John: "This then is the message which we have
heard of him ... God is light and in him is no darkness at all." [Editor's
note: John asserts this within the context of combating the Gnostic heresy, one which
proclaimed that certain gurus had special knowledge of God, obtainable only through them,
of course. When John says that God is light, he likely means to say that God, by
nature, is self-revealing; that it is his whole desire to reveal himself and all truth to
us. In fact, the universe has been so constructed as to reveal all answers. So why are we
still so much in the dark if this is so? God, ever gracious, always respectful of our
freedom to choose, force-feeds no one. The above Buddhist proverb says it all.]
- Oscar Wilde: "A thing is not necessarily true because a man
died for it."
- Emile Zola: "When truth is buried underground, it grows, it
chokes, it gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up
everything with it."
- Charles Van Doren, speaking at a memorial service for Mortimer Adler, 2001:
"... I remember the first seminar we led together, nearly forty years ago. The text
was Plato's dialogue, The Sophist. I had read it twice or three times and
struggled to get the point. It could not be what it seemed to be. But Mortimer helped us
all to understand it was: The true sophist, Plato is saying,
cannot be trapped -- if he is willing to say anything whatsoever to win the
argument. If he wants to win at all costs and does not care what is true, and if he
is adept at fending off the truth when it is presented, the sophist will triumph, and you
will fail ..."
- Melvin Morse, M.D., Transformed By The Light:
"[Regarding paranormal research] I also think that the level of proof we are required
to present is irrationally high. Most of our modern medical and
scientific advances are based on scientific data far less documented than the eyewitness
and independently verified stories we hear in our research. For example, most of
our infant feeding practices are based on statistically suspect or anecdotal studies. Most
people believe in the existence of infant colic, yet it is difficult to find any consensus
in the medical literature on what it is and how to treat it. Even the value of having a
low serum cholesterol, something almost completely accepted by the public, is the subject
of debate in scientific circles. Despite the controversy, we build guidelines to live by
from these accepted 'facts.' Why? Simply because the principles we follow work most of the
time and don't really change our world view. We feed babies a certain way, treat them for
something we can only loosely define as colic, and keep our cholesterol levels low even if
the why is not scientifically nailed down. We do this because, frankly, these rules do not
interfere too much with our lives. Since there is so much documentation to back up these
shared experiences, why are they and other spiritual experiences not
generally accepted as being true? I think the answer is quite simple. Believing in them
would radically change our world view, challenging everything from natural laws to
spiritual beliefs."
- Brian Josephson, Times Higher Education Supplement, 12 Aug. 1994:
"For the last six weeks, BBC2 TV has been running a series called Heretic,
detailing the responses of the scientific community to ideas generally considered
unacceptable by scientists, and the treatment given to those advocating such ideas... In every case a similar story unfolded: dismissal of the claims as being
nonsense or impossible, generally without any serious attempt
to look at the evidence or the arguments; the
non-materialisation of the honours, promotions, invitations to give public lectures and so
on that such individuals might have been expected to receive given their past
achievements; violent attacks by other scientists; and, for some, demotion or withdrawal
of research facilities."
- Goethe: "Few men have imagination enough for reality."
- Herbert Puryear, The Edgar Cayce Primer: "Nothing
hinders us more than saying one thing and doing another. Yet all of us know more of what
constitutes a 'better way' in many aspects of our life than we are willing to apply. There
is a quality within us which deters us from doing our best. If we could identify, and
confront that quality, accept responsibility for it and not project it upon others, we
would take a great step toward our own better well-being. All that
is asked of any of us as souls is that we do what we presently know to do. When we do what
we know to do, the next step is already given. There is a saying from the East that
when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. This often is taken to mean
that a person will appear as a master; however, another way of understanding this truth is
that when we bring ourselves to the point of being truly ready to learn, the learning
experience needed will be forthcoming. We may think of ourselves as
being ready to learn only insofar as we are applying what we already know."
- Herbert Puryear, The Edgar Cayce Primer: "Edgar
Cayce encouraged comparative study. He frequently stated that we learn by comparing
different points of view, for 'No finite mind can hold all the truth.'
As he suggests, our fellowmen are always going to have experiences, awarenesses, and
therefore viewpoints different from our own. If we can listen to each other and share our
experiences, we have a chance to broaden our insights."
- Arthur Findlay, The Rock of Truth: "What is the truth? ... Truth is eternal and unchangeable. We who
are finite and subject to change can only appreciate it little by little. Truth is always
the same, but as we change and advance mentally we can grasp it better. Until we
are mentally developed, truth will not be fully comprehended, but, as
we evolve, it slowly becomes clearer. Often in ignorance we mistake for truth what
is error, and the history of man is the history of error gradually giving place to
truth."
- Arthur Findlay, The Rock of Truth: "Next best to finding the truth is to search for it, and to do so
all should question and reason, as these are the guide posts scattered on the winding road
that leads to truth. Truth loves discussion, and the doubting
questioning mind of the investigator which creates intelligence, candour, honesty,
sympathy and charity for all. Truth is the enemy of ignorance, prejudice, egotism, bigotry
and hypocrisy. The one lives by day, the others by night. Let us
each, therefore, be a torch-bearer of the truth and always strive for light, more light.
We now realise that all past mistakes just taught mankind to reach the road of truth. We
pity the follies of the past but understand them. We admire the achievements of the past
and should try to emulate them. All the past errors and mistakes of man, with their
consequent sufferings and cruelties, were caused by the stones of ignorance, over which he
stumbled, on the road that leads to perfection. As a result his next steps were taken with
greater thought."
- Confucious:
"Three things cannot long be hidden the sun, the moon, and the truth."
- Albert Schweitzer: "Truth
has not special time of its own. Its hour is now -- always and, indeed, then most truly
when it seems unsuitable to actual circumstances."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.:
"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in
reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."
- Boris Pasternak:
"What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life
always spills over the rim of every cup."
- Malcolm X:
"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or
against."
- Spinoza: "Be not astonished
at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true
because it is not accepted by many."
- Winston Churchill: "Truth is incontrovertible, ignorance
can deride it, panic may resent it, malice may destroy it, but there it is."
- Will Rogers: "Nothing makes a man, or a body of men, as mad
as the truth. If there is no truth in it, they laugh it off."
- Dr. Gary E. Schwartz, U. of Arizona, The AfterLife
Experiments: "Data can be stranger than
fiction. Are you ready for the data? As Carl Sagan wrote in 'Contact,' Do you wanna
take a ride? ... I was trained to look at the world as an intellectual, a
scientist. In science we hypothesize; we do not believe.
And science does not establish 'proof' so much as provide evidence for or against a
hypothesis."
- Thomas Jefferson: "I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge,
never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led."
- Benjamin Disraeli: "Something unpleasant is coming when men
are anxious to tell the truth."
- Leslie Weatherhead: [The poet] "is not sure
of a truth because he has proved it [by logical argument], but because he has seen
it. Indeed, in some moments of rapture he has experienced it... Aristotle, in the Poetics,
believed poetry to be inspired, and to imply either a strain of madness or a happy
gift of nature; and he divides poetry into the ecstatic [a "standing
out" of oneself] and the euplastic [easily or commonly formed]. It is the
ecstatic poet [who] requires explanation. The poet, inspired by some vivid experience,
goes into a kind of trance -- we think the phrase is not too strong -- and thereupon sees
a vision which he expresses in poetical ideas, that those who read may have that
experience re-created in them... It is because of this different way
of arriving at truth, we think, that the poet has so often led the way in expressing ideas
which are among the most profound [and] cherished by mankind. On the wings of vision the
poet soars to a pinnacle of truth... It may be that the poet's creation ... may
point to some as yet unrealized desire of humanity, for which the poet, as a prophet of
the race, yearns. So, Shelley says ... They are the dreams of what ought to be, or may
be."
- Thomas Jefferson: "No experiment can be more interesting
than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that men can be governed by reason and truth."
- Albert Einstein: "Nature conceals her secrets because she is sublime,
not because she is a trickster."
- Kenneth Wapnick: "The shared content of all inspired works
is the desire to express what is true for their authors,
regardless of the form of artistic expression in which it comes."
- Eugene L’Hote: "Honesty
isn’t a policy at all; it’s a state of mind or it
isn’t honesty."
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden:
"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table
where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and
truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board."
- Albert Einstein: "Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of
truth."
- John
Adams: "Facts are stubborn things;
and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they
cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
- J. Scott Turner: "Academe is full of
wrongheaded ideas, and has always been -- not because academe itself is wrongheaded, but
because to discuss such ideas is its very function. Even bad ideas
can contain kernels of truth, and it is academe's role to find them. That can be
done only in the sunlight and fresh air of normal academic discourse. Expelling an idea [from the discourse] is the surest way to allow
falsehood to survive."
- "I have sworn upon the altar of Almighty God eternal
hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
Thomas Jefferson
|