Truth

"Smartass Disciple: I've been searching for so long. I still can't find the truth. Master of Stupidity: Until you've lost and felt desperate, you won't be found."

"It took me years to realize that I could do all kinds of drastic acts like quitting jobs, relationships, towns (or all of the above), but what showed up at the next job, relationship, & town was still ME."

"Although the pure truth has never been stated, nevertheless it has never been lost. Its existence does not depend upon human statement but upon human sensitivity. In this it is unlike all other knowledge."

"Truth does not surround itself with lies."

"You can't get decent Mexican food in DC."

"The blame of course belonged to Clyde, who just was not much given to talk. Also, he seemed very little curious himself: Grady, alarmed sometimes by the meagerness of his inquiries and the indifference this might suggest, supplied him liberally with personal information; which isn't to say she always told the truth, how many people in love do? or can? but at least she permitted him enough truth to account more or less accurately for all the life she had lived away from him. It was her feeling, however, that he would as soon not hear her confessions: he seemed to want her to be as elusive, as secretive as he was himself."

"Smartass Disciple: Master, why should people love each other ?Master of Stupidity: Well, orgasm is felt better than kill each other."

"Klar sieht, wer von ferne sieht, nebelhaft, wer Anteil nimmt."

"There are times when I think that the ideal library is composed solely of reference books. They are like understanding friends—always ready to meet your mood, always ready to change the subject when you have had enough of this or that."

"Truth has to be credible or it makes as much trouble as any lie!"

"This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and unique...something truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard."

"There are a lot of people like me, people who need books the way they need air."

"Smartass Disciple: Master, you keep preaching the truth. They don't listen. Master of Stupidity: Oh that's not bad. That attitude keeps us in the business."

"Truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. . . A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure"

"There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind."

"It's written, 'seek and ye shall find'. But first, 'imagine what you seek'. Otherwise, you will end up searching everything everywhere forever."

"Think of something useless, and that's probably what I'll be doing. Listen, Virginia, we need to love the useless. We need to raise pigeons without a thought of eating them, plant rose bushes without expecting to pick roses, write without aiming at publication. We need to do things without expecting benefits in return. The shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but it's in the curving paths that the best things are found. . . . We must love the useless, because there is beauty in uselessness."

"Intellectual freedom begins when one says with Socrates that he knows that he knows nothing, and then goes on to add: Do you know what you don’t know and therefore what you should know? If your answer is affirmative and humble, then you are your own teacher, you are making your own assignment, and you will be your own best critic. You will not need externally imposed courses, nor marks, nor diplomas, nor a nod from your boss . . . in business or in politics. (from the essay The Last Don Rag)"

"A bitter reality of truth can be wisely told in a sweet tale of lullaby."

"Knowing is not simply a material act, since the object that is known always conceals something beyond the empirical datum. All our knowledge, even the most simple, is always a minor miracle, since it can never be fully explained by the material instruments that we apply to it. In every truth there is something more than we would have expected, in the love that we receive there is always an element that surprises us."