Truth

"Words were insufficient for the elevation of his [Mr Collins'] feelings; and he was obliged to walk about the room, while Elizabeth tried to unite civility and truth in a few short sentences."

"Faith can be interested in results only, for a truth once recognized as such puts an end to the believer's thinking."

"We must experience the Truth in a direct, practical and real way; this is only possible in the stillness and silence of the mind, and this is achieved by means of meditation."

"Today we have to learn all over again that love for the sinner and love for the person who has been harmed are correctly balanced if I punish the sinner in the form that is possible and appropriate. In this respect there was in the past a change of mentality, in which the law and the need for punishment were obscured. Ultimately this also narrowed the concept of law, which in fact is not only just being nice or courteous, but is found in the truth. And another component of the truth is that I must punish the one who has sinned against real love"

"Saya akan lebih mendulukan kebenaran-kebenaran universal, bukan hutang budi, bukan kewajiban moral dan bukan juga pengabdian buta."

"We have to speak the truth always, at any cost, and no matter what."

"We didn't try to force God's hand or do the "I just heard a sermon about David and Goliath so I need to quit my job right this second" leap of faith that's so popular in Christian circles. We took our time with the decision, like another guy in the Bible, named Jesus. He spent thirty years in obscurity before he started his adventure. Often, we're not willing to spend thirty minutes in preparation, never mind thirty years, especially when we come home from a conference and find our day jobs waiting for us on Monday morning. I'm not sure why Christians sometimes think the maturation of our own missions will be radically shorter than that of Jesus. But it happens and in the past I've certainly wanted to take wild, unplanned, possibly-not-inspired-by-God leaps of faith."

"Indeed our survival and liberation depend upon our recognition of the truth when it is spoken and lived by the people. If we cannot recognize the truth, then it cannot liberate us from untruth. To know the truth is to appropriate it, for it is not mainly reflection and theory. Truth is divine action entering our lives and creating the human action of liberation."

"...inability to lie is still far from being love to truth. Be on your guard! ... He who cannot lie, doth not know what truth is."

"Stories are masks of God. That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother's Grimm. Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth. Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God. So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them."

"It is obvious that the concept of truth has become suspect. Of course it is correct that is has been much abused. Intolerance and cruelty have occurred in the name of truth. To that extent people are afraid when someone says, "This is the truth", or even "I have the truth". We never have it, at best is has us. No one will dispute that one must be careful and cautious in claiming the truth. But simply to dismiss it as unattainable is really destructive.(...) We must have the courage to dare to say: Yes, man must seek the truth; he is capable of truth. It goes without saying that truth requires criteria for verification and falsification. It must always be accompanied by tolerance, also. But then truth also points out to us those constant values which have made mankind great. That is why the humility to recognize the truth and to accept it as a standard has to be relearned and practiced again. The truth comes to rule, not through violence, but rather through its own power; this is the central theme of John's Gospel: When brought before Pilate, Jesus professes that he himself is The Truth and the witness to the truth. He does not defend the truth with legions but rather makes it visible through his Passion and thereby also implements it."

"It's frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what is going on."

"I wish i could tell you that through the tragedy i mined some undiscovered, life-altering absolute that i could pass on to you. I didn't. The cliches apply-people are what count,life is precious,materialism is over rated, and the little things matter,live in the moment-and i can repeat them to you ad nauseam.you might listen, but you won't internalize. Tragedy hammers it hm. Tragedy etches into your soul. You might not be happier. But you will be better."

"We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it."

"Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?"

"When a man has a gift in speaking the truth, brute aggression is no longer his security blanket for approval. He, on the contrary, spends most of his energy trying to tone it down because his very nature is already offensive enough."

"I came only to report the news, to gather information. I didn't come to find out the truth."

"That was one of the inherent flaws of faith. Belief without knowing. But worse yet: belief without action. It could be good in its own right. Beautiful, even, when embraced, but that had to be measured. Checked. Too many surrendered themselves to it. What they did not see was simple fact. Religion did not bring peace. It merely offered a means. It was up to man to create peace."

"She thought it funny how the poor environment had been raped just fine until there was a sufficient excess of the people who had effected the raping to produce sufficient numbers of themselves who were sufficiently idle that they might begin to protest the raping of the environment, which was irretrievably lost to the raping by that point. And this would be the great soothing cathedral music, the stopping of the chainsaws amid the patter of acid rain, that all good citizens would listen to for the quarter-century it took them all to wire up to cyberspace and forget about the lost hopeless run-over gang-ridden land, reproducing madly still all the while, inside their bunkers listening to NPR."

"If only, we could stop taking our job as an OPPORTUNITY and work honestly as a DUTY, this world would be a much better, peaceful and loving place to live in."