#truths

Ceremony leads her bigots forth, prepared to fight for shadows of no worth. While truths, on which eternal things depend, can hardly find a single friend. ↗

— William Cowper

#ceremony #depend #eternal #fight #find

A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths. ↗

— Marina Tsvetaeva

#deception #elevates #host #low #than

I hope that I am generous and tolerant, but certainly on the intellectual side I think that there are discoverable truths, and some things that are closer approximations to the truth than others. ↗

— Edward Tufte

#approximations #certainly #closer #discoverable #generous

Justifying faith is not a naked assent to the truths of the gospel. ↗

— William Gurnall

#faith #gospel #justifying #naked #truths

In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful. [...] There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful. And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them. It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood. ↗

— Sherwood Anderson

#grotesque #truth #truths #beauty

The Four Noble Truths are pragmatic rather than dogmatic. They suggest a course of action to be followed rather than a set of dogmas to be believed. The four truths are prescriptions for behavior rather than descriptions of reality. The Buddha compares himself to a doctor who offers a course of therapeutic treatment to heal one’s ills. To embark on such a therapy is not designed to bring one any closer to ‘the Truth’ but to enable one’s life to flourish here and now, hopefully leaving a legacy that will continue to have beneficial repercussions after one’s death. (154) ↗

— Stephen Batchelor

#buddhism #four-noble-truths #here-and-now #truth #death

So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#gandalf #steadfastness #truths #decisions

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. ↗

— William Nicholson

#after #among #another #because #business

No secular state ever existed and none would exist until the end of the French Revolution, and so we understand that America was built on the Judeo-Christian ethic and we believe that this nominee is going to see to it that those truths are upheld. ↗

— Rod Parsley

#believe #built #christian ethic #end #ethic

The greatest truths are the simplest, and so are the greatest men. ↗

— Julius Charles Hare

#greatest men #men #simplest #truths