If error is corrected whenever it is recognized as such, the path of error is the path of truth.
Coincidence, if traced far enough back, becomes inevitable.
The truth is more important than the facts.
To love the truth is to refuse to let oneself be saddened by it.
I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it’s hell.
Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?
Truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between the arms, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the main river.
The situation reached the height of the ludicrous when I suddenly realized one day that of everything I had written about the man I could just as well have said the opposite. I had indubitably reached that dead end which lies so artfully hidden in the phrase “the meaning of meaning.”
An ideal map would contain the map of the map, the map of the map of the map . . . endlessly.
Suppose someone claimed to have a microscopically exact replica (in marble, even) of Michelangelo’s David in his home. When you go to see this marvel, you find a twenty-foot-tall roughly rectilinear hunk of pure white marble standing in his living room. “I haven’t gotten around to unpacking it yet,” he says, “but I know it’s in there.”
I thought we were above questions of good and evil. I am not saying you are bad. That does not concern me. I am saying only that you are false with me.
You have to be true to yourself, but you have to be true to your best self, not to the self that secretly thinks you are better than other people.
The most dangerous man in the world is the contemplative who is guided by nobody. He trusts his own visions. He obeys the attractions of an interior voice, but will not listen to other men. He identifies the will of God with anything that makes him feel, within his own heart, a big, warm, sweet interior glow. The sweeter and the warmer the feeling, the more he is convinced of his own infallibility. And if the sheer force of his own self-confidence communicates itself to other people and gives them the impression that he really is a saint, such a man can wreck a whole city or a religious order or even a nation. The world is covered with scars that have been left in its flesh by visionaries like these.
In relief, in humiliation, in terror, he understood that he, too, was an appearance — that someone else was dreaming him.
The honest liar is the man who tells the truth about his old lies; who says on Wednesday, “I told a magnificent lie on Monday.”
Remember: one lie does not cost you one truth but the truth.
Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler.
