How hard have those intolerant of John Adams’s perspective worked to strip from young people any hope of knowing the concepts and truths that help deal with life?
A good business book teaches simple truths.
With Facebook and Twitter, everyone wants to publicize their innermost truths.
When truth is no longer free, freedom is no longer real: the truths of the police are the truths of today.
The supposed revelations of God to humanity through Christ, or the word of God to Mohammed through the angel Gabriel, had the power they did because they indicated new truths, new directions for followers.
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
Christianity is a religion of continuity and discontinuity as well. It’s about what stays the same and what changes in the twinkling of an eye. Both are necessary truths, but sometimes it’s important to accentuate the discontinuity, the sudden leap, the way you go up a tree, Zacchaeus, and come down a saint.
The greatest truths are the simplest, and so are the greatest men.
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
There’s something about approaching universal truths with the simplicity of the acoustic guitar. You can take it anywhere, and it helps me reach listeners of all ages and walks of life.
Tahir Pasha assigned me a room when I was staying in his residence, and every night before sleeping, I would spend around three hours going over the books I had memorized. It would take me three months to go through the lot. Thanks be to God, all those works became steps ascending to the truths of the Qur’an.
Every now and again, it doesn’t hurt to utter some home truths as long as it is not personal, just purely professional.
Comedy’s the ultimate pill that helps the really hard truths and hard facts go down, right?
Two truths are all too often overshadowed in today’s political discourse: Public service is a most honorable pursuit, and so is bipartisanship.
What I hear every day on talk radio is America’s lack of education – and I don’t mean lack of college degrees. I mean lack of the basic art of democracy, the ability to seek the great truths that can come only by synthesizing the small truths possessed by each of us.
One of life’s terrible truths is that women like guys who seem to know what they’re doing.
I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.
Despite all the gains for democracy in the world, in many countries anyone who wants to publish truths unwelcome to the government risks suppression and criminal punishment.
Frankly, I think that the news industry is critically important because it points out things and surfaces truths that can often be uncomfortable. I think that that’s working, and the spotlight has been pointed on things that we have a responsibility to do better, and I accept that.
I think that successful writers somehow capture truths that resonate with readers.
Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.
The make-believe world of ‘The Black Tower’ succeeds by broadcasting larger truths that might otherwise elude us.
We receive the truths of science by compulsion. Nothing but ignorance is able to resist them.
Better to illuminate than merely to shine, to deliver to others contemplated truths than merely to contemplate.
What’s the function of poetry? It’s to express general truths, to connect with the reader and make him think: ‘Wow, I’ve experienced that, but you’ve expressed it so much better.’
Rock n’ roll is the music where you can get away with pretty much saying everything, and it’s OK. You can say truths in really interesting and good ways and really express yourself through it.
But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.
I am attracted to the complexities and deeper truths of characters, and I can’t name a favourite role any more than I can name a favourite food!
History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
Right and wrong are not relative terms. There are fundamental truths. Evil flourishes, but good men continue to battle it – and win.
By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths.
Americans have perfected the art of reducing complicated truths into formulas and products. We’re desperate for instant, visible, measurable ways of knowing God, instead of trusting that it’s complicated and a mystery.
The British were white, English, and Protestant, just as we were. They had to have some other basis on which to justify independence, and happily they were able to formulate the inalienable truths set forth in the Declaration.
Madly, futilely, I wrote novel after novel, eight in all, that failed to find a publisher. I persisted because for me the novel was the supreme literary form – not just one among many, not a relic of the past, but the way we communicate to one another the subtlest truths about this business of living.
One of the eternal truths is that happiness is created and developed in peace, and one of the eternal rights is the individual’s right to live.
I’ve always taken the view that works of art are not just things that we enjoy. They can convey truths about the world more vividly and to greater effect than ordinary philosophical prose can because they don’t just deal in ideas but show the emotional reality of them.
There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.
‘Chernobyl’ is a human story. It’s not a disaster movie. It’s not about explosions. It’s about people and truths and lies.
But he is unworthy the name of a minister of the gospel of peace, who is unwilling, not only to have his name cast out as evil, but also to die for the truths of the Lord Jesus.
Garry Shandling’s stand-up specials were masterpieces of tightly crafted stories that delivered both hard jokes and hard truths. He was neurotic and self-deprecating, and his observations on life cut deep.
Athletics carries its own set of truths, and those truths are diminished when manipulated by people with agendas.
I think that a lot of times Mr. Peanutbutter is absolutely speaking directly to the audience and saying basic, human truths that we need to hear.
When you have a conflict, that means that there are truths that have to be addressed on each side of the conflict. And when you have a conflict, then it’s an educational process to try to resolve the conflict. And to resolve that, you have to get people on both sides of the conflict involved so that they can dialogue.
Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.
Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
One of the main reasons I write fiction is to try to understand what life is like for people other than myself, to try to see the world through my characters’ eyes. I often find that I’m able to understand certain emotional truths about my own life by exploring things from different vantages.
There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.
Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.
There exists, if I am not mistaken, an entire world which is the totality of mathematical truths, to which we have access only with our mind, just as a world of physical reality exists, the one like the other independent of ourselves, both of divine creation.
When a truth is necessary, the reason for it can be found by analysis, that is, by resolving it into simpler ideas and truths until the primary ones are reached.
You can be non-judgmental, but you don’t want to be non-discerning because, remember, the force of evolution is the conversation, you know: two truths standing up to each other in conversation, and the best truth emerges, and the best truth prevails.
The truth of good economic doctoring is to know the general principles, and to really know the specifics. To understand the context, and also, to understand that an economy may need some tender loving care, not just the so-called hard truths, if it’s going to get by.
Our obsessive focus on college schooling has blinded us to basic truths. College is a place, not a magic formula. It matters what subjects students study, and subsidies should focus on the subjects that matter the most – not to the students, but to everyone else.
My nature is to try and look past apparent truths, to pull back layers and understand the psychological motives behind phenomena.
There is never one defined right or wrong brother. We each have our individual truths. But together we’re the better truth.
