Quotes about Truth

The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.

Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe.

We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.

If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that; it becomes stale, soon learned only by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.

We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling. HENRI POINCARÉ (1854—1912)

Science is an ongoing process. It never ends. There is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire. And because this is so, the world is far more interesting, both for the scientists and for the millions of people in every nation who, while not professional scientists, are deeply interested in the methods and findings of science.

Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is.

Edmund Way Teale in his 1950 book Circle of the Seasons understood the dilemma better: It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.

Those who make uncritical observations or fraudulent claims lead us into error and deflect us from the major human goal of understanding how the world works. It is for this reason that playing fast and loose with the truth is a very serious matter.

Nietzsche mourns the loss of "man's belief in his dignity, his uniqueness, his irreplace-ability in the scheme of existence." For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable.

His argument was not with God but with those who believed that our understanding of the sacred had been completed. Science's permanently revolutionary conviction that the search for truth never ends seemed to him the only approach with sufficient humility to be worthy of the universe that it revealed.