The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of inexorable opposites — day and night, wellbeing and suffering, birth and death, good and evil. We are not even sure that the one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life and the world are a battleground.
truthquotes
The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life.
But it seems to me to be an imperfection in things of beauty, and a weakness in man, if an explanation from the shallow-side has a destructive effect. The horror which we feel for Freudian interpretations is entirely due to our own barbaric or childish naivete, which believes that there can be heights without corresponding depths, and which blinds us to the really “final” truth that, when carried to extremes, opposites meet.
freudian / imperfection / naïveté / truth / weakness
Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.
Not the criticism of individual contemporaries will decide the truth or falsity of these discoveries, but future generations. There are things that are not yet true today, perhaps we dare not find them true, but tomorrow they may be. So every man whose fate it is to go his individual way must proceed with hopefulness and watchfulness, ever conscious of his loneliness and its dangers.
conscious / criticism / discoveries / fate / truth
It only too often yields to the temptation to become sycophantic, opportunist and lying, like a politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favour.
opportunist / politician / sycophantic / temptation / truth
If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything dies for internal reasons – becomes inorganic once again – then we shall be compelled to say that “the aim of all life is death” and, looking backwards, that “inanimate things existed before living ones”.
The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.
aggressiveness / creatures / endowments / loved / truth
That’s what I must avoid: I mustn’t put strangeness where there’s nothing. I think that is the danger of keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything, you are on the look-out, and you continually stretch the truth.
diary / strangeness / truth
And, finally, groups have never thirsted after truth. They demand illusions, and cannot do without them. They constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real; they are almost as strongly influenced by what is untrue as by what is true. They have an evident tendency not to distinguish between the two.