“I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.”
Truth is simple in theory and messy in practice. These quotes tackle honesty, deception, self-awareness, and the uncomfortable reality that the truths most worth hearing are usually the ones you least want to hear.
“It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.”
“I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.”
“It is precisely our job as Catholics to speak the truth as plainly and precisely as we can.”
“In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.”
“Any truth is better than indefinite doubt.”
“Nothing is more noble, nothing more venerable than fidelity. Faithfulness and truth are the most sacred excellences and endowments of the human mind.”
“The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.”
“God help us from those who believe that they are the sole possessors of truth. How we manage at times to agree willingly to become prisoners within our own minds and souls of beliefs and ideas on which we can never be flexible.”
“I told my wife the truth. I told her I was seeing a psychiatrist. Then she told me the truth: that she was seeing a psychiatrist, two plumbers, and a bartender.”
“The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.”
“We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.”
“It is difficult to discriminate the voice of truth from amid the clamor raised by heated partisans.”
“Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.”
“Be calm in arguing for fierceness makes error a fault, and truth discourtesy.”
“Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction.”
“It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else's meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.”