Truth

"I am an inconsistent creature. Perhaps it is the pressure of my past, and not my own perverse mind, that has made me into this contradictory being. I am all too well aware of this fault in myself. You must forgive me."

"Eyes blinded by the fog of thingscannot see truth. Ears deafened by the din of thingscannot hear truth. Brains bewildered by the whirl of thingscannot think truth. Hearts deadened by the weight of thingscannot feel truth. Throats choked by the dust of thingscannot speak truth."

"This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Deuteronomy 30:19-20 (NIV)"

"In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won't get mixed up. It was the best advice Francie every got."

"Everything is true,' he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought.''Will you be all right''I'll be all right,' he said, and thought, And I'm going to die. Both those are true, too."

"And where love ends, hate begins"

"For those who like that sort of thing," said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, "That is the sort of thing they like."

"While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus."

"It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth."

"The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history... It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science."

"I don't know what sort of world she will live in and I have no fixed opinions concerning how she should live in it. I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful, it will make little difference whether she lives at all."

"Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what every man wishes,that he also believes to be true."

"I tried. Can't do it. Brain's empty."

"Everything he had ever done that had been better left undone. Every lie he had told — told to himself, or told to others. Every little hurt, and all the great hurts. Each one was pulled out of him, detail by detail, inch by inch. The demon stripped away the cover of forgetfulness, stripped everything down to truth, and it hurt more than anything."

"Sometimes when I see a bad performance and people still clap... I wonder if they're clapping because they liked what they saw or because they're happy it's over?"

"It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry."

"Do you want this to be a love story?"

"Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people."

"The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?"

"I suppose that we women are such cowards that we think a man will save us from fears, and we marry him."