Truth is one forever absolute, but opinion is truth filtered through the moods, the blood, the disposition of the spectator.
--
Idols (October 4, 1859)Wendell Phillips
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...an Autobiography is the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell...—the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.
Samuel Langhorne (Mark Twain) Clemens
...an Autobiography is the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell...—the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.
Mark Twain
As in reply to the skeptic or agnostic, who asserts in despair that there is no absolute truth. The dialectician retorts: Then at least your own assertion must be absolutely true. There must be some absolute truth, for you cannot assert that there is none without self-contradiction. As in Descartes' case, the doubter is reminded of himself. There, in his own assertion, is a certainty from which he cannot escape.
This turn of thought which reminds the enquirer of himself, we shall call the reflexive turn. It reappears in all discoveries of the Absolute. It is clinching--but is likely to disappoint, even as Descartes' result disappoints. For the skeptic finds that he also was in search of objective truth: and that the absolute truth of his statement is irrelevant to his quest. Whence his skepticism toward objective truth remains unanswered.William Ernest Hocking
Since there is no such thing as absolute rightness and truth, we always pursue the artificial, leading, human truth. We judge and make a truth that excludes other truths. Art plays a formative part in this manufacture of truth.
Gerhard Richter
The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth. It is not possession of the Truth, but rather the pursuit of Truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing perfectibility is to be found. Possession makes one passive, indolent, and proud. If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand, and say: Father, I will take this one—the pure Truth is for You alone.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Phillips, Wendell
Philo
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