Quotes about Truth

Doubt is the heart of the matter. Abolish all doubt, and what's left is not faith, but absolute, heartless conviction. You're certain that you possess the Truth -- inevitably offered with an implied uppercase T -- and this certainty quickly devolves into dogmatism and righteousness, by which I mean a demonstrative, overweening pride in being so very right, in short, the arrogance of fundamentalism.

I'm afraid of the dark.' And his mother: 'Don't be silly. You know there's nothing to be afraid in the dark.' But he knew hte falsity of the reasoning; he knew how they taught also that there was nothing to fear in death, and how fearfully they avoided the idea of it.

There's only things, Blackie.

I don't believe anyone who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self.

Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood - for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.

In one great case a man [Winston Churchill] who had been considered too brilliant and too reckless ever to be trusted with major office was the leader of the country [1941]. One of Rowe's last memories was of hearing him hissed by ex-servicemen from the public gallery of a law court because he had told an abrupt unpalatable truth about an old campaign. Now he had taught the country to love his unpalatable truths.

Perhaps truth and humility go together; so many lies come from our pride

Henry added with apparent anxiety, 'You're wet through, Sarah. One day you'll catch your death of cold.' A cliché with its popular wisdom can sometimes fall through a conversation like a note of doom, yet even if we had known he spoke the truth, I wonder if either of us would have felt any genuine anxiety for her break through our nerves, distrust, and hate.

Jesus asked, "But what about you? … Who do you say I am?" (Matt. 16:15 NIV).

To a large degree we have preached our own version of the knowledge of good and evil as though it were the message of salvation. We need to confess that we have sinned in the gravest fashion by frequently loving our version of truth and ethics more than people, and even God himself. For one cannot genuinely love God while refusing to love one's neighbor (1 John 4:20).

For we are only as healthy as our picture of God is accurate.

Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. I think it applies to faith as well. The unexamined faith is not worth believing.