Truth Criticism Quotes

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Sometimes you have to tell a a bunch of lies to get at the truth. ~ Stella Atrium

If a person is to get the meaning of life he must learn to like the facts about himself
ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanity
before he can learn the truth behind the facts. And the truth is never ugly. ~ Eugene O'Neill

People will occasionally ask me if I understand what it's like to be lonely. And the truth is I don't, because for me, solitariness is a blessing, a gift. Me, I get on fine with myself. ~ John Burnside

Maybe someone will know I didn't weave crowns to draw blood; that I faught against mockery;
that I did fill the high tide of my soul with truth.
I repaid vileness with doves. ~ Pablo Neruda

Until nothing at all existed between them.
But shared breaths.
And unspoken promises.
Lies.
And unshakable truth. ~ Renee Ahdieh

the essence of criticism is conversation - a passionate, rational argument about a shared experience ~ A.O. Scott

The truth is uncompromising. ~ Leonard Jacobson

Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse. ~ Carl Jung

I love you, and because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies. ~ Pietro Aretino

..for a man ( Roger Scruton ) whose calling and raison d'etre is that difficult business - not just telling the truth but finding out what the truth would be like if we told it - it was a huge blow to be exposed as a lickspittle of tobacco giants. If your job is enquiry, you cannot accept money for providing the answers before the question has been examined. ~ A. N. Wilson

Truly competent Literary Detectives are as rare as truthful men, Mr. Tweed
you can see her potential as clearly as I can. Frightened of someone stealing your thunder, perhaps? ~ Jasper Fforde

Anyone who fears losing can be sure that he will lose. ~ Debasish Mridha

Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited. ~ Robert Kennedy

There was a long-ago saying that was still heard from time to time in town: Waverleys know where to find the truth, they just can't stomach it. Bay ~ Sarah Addison Allen

Therefore, criticism has to direct itself against itself, and against the mysterious Substance in which it has up to now hid itself. In this way criticism must resolve things such that the development of this Substance drives itself forward to the Universality and Certainty of the Idea of its actual existence, the Eternal Self-consciousness. ~ Bruno Bauer

When a learner, in the fullness of his powers, comes to great truths unstaled by premature familiarity, he rejoices in the lateness of his lessons. ~ George Iles

My love flew over the boundary of time
with incredible beauty and notorious rhyme. ~ Debasish Mridha

I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth ~ Patti Smith

Just because they can't feel it doesn't mean that I have to forget, Everyday we get closer to a greater truth, a gift to accept, Now you may call me a liar or even call me a fake, But then life is a lesson you have to take, Everyday is a revision of how to count the price of frozen tears, Verdicts would change when we meet the truth between years. ~ Harpreet Singh Nanda

On one side of the ledger are the books man has written, containing such a hodgepodge of wisdom and nonsense, of truth and falsehood, that if one lived to be as old as Methuselah one couldn't disentangle the mess; on the other side of the ledger things like toenails, hair, teeth, blood, ovaries, if you will, all incalculable and all written in another kind of ink, in another script, an incomprehensible, undecipherable script. ~ Henry Miller

The most common criticism of the spread was that it detached policy debate from the real world, that nobody used language the way that these debaters did, save perhaps for auctioneers. But even adolescents knew this wasn't true, that corporate persons deployed a version of the spread all the time: for they heard the spoken warnings at the end of the increasingly common television commercials for prescription drugs, when risk information was disclosed at a speed designed to make it difficult to comprehend; they heard the list of rules and caveats read rapid-fire at the end of promotions on the radio; they were at least vaguely familiar with the 'fine print' one received from financial institutions and health-insurance companies; the last thing one was supposed to do with these thousands of words was comprehend them. These types of disclosure were designed to conceal; they exposed you to information that, should you challenge the institution in question, would be treated like a 'dropped argument' in a fast round of debate - you have already conceded the validity of the point by failing to address it when it was presented. It's no excuse that you didn't have the time. Even before the twenty-four hour news cycle, Twitter storms, algorithmic trading, spreadsheets, the DDoS attack, Americans were getting 'spread' in their daily lives; meanwhile, their politicians went on speaking slowly, slowly about values utterly disconnected from their policies. ~ Ben Lerner

Never compromise your values. ~ Steve Maraboli

Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

We need truth to grow in the same way that we need vitamins, affection and love. ~ Gary Zukav

I knew the truth. I was alone. And likely would always be. That normally did not trouble but lately I had begun to feel the weight of such a truth, the isolation of such a life, and it upset me more than I would have liked to admit. ~ Anna Lee Huber

He was digging in his garden--digging, too, in his own mind, laboriously turning up the substance of his thought. Death--and he drove in his spade once, and again, and yet again. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools they way to dusty death. A convincing thunder rumbled through the words. He lifted another spadeful of earth. Why had Linda died? Why had she been allowed to become gradually less than human and at last... He shuddered. A good kissing carrion. He planted his foot on his spade and stamped it fiercely into the tough ground. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kills us for their sport. Thunder again; words that proclaimed themselves true--truer somehow than truth itself. And yet that same Gloucester had called them ever-gentle gods. Besides, thy best of rest is sleep, and that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st thy death which is no more. No more than sleep. Sleep. Perchance to dream. His spade struck against a stone; he stooped to pick it up. For in that sleep of death, what dreams...? ~ Aldous Huxley

That person in the mirror is just the outside, your earth suit; the real you resides on the inside ~ Sunday Adelaja

For hundreds of years the world was wrapped in a veil of spiritual darkness, until there was not one fundamental truth belonging to the place of salvation ... Joseph Smith declared that in the year 1820 the Lord revealed to him that all the 'Christian' churches were in error, teaching for commandments the doctrines of men. ~ Joseph Fielding Smith

Clark liked to think he knew London but the truth was he'd spent most of his adult life in New York, secure within the confines of Manhattan's idiot-proof grid, and on this particular evening London's tangle of streets was inscrutable. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

There are dozens of references to God in the Scriptures for every one to the figure of Satan. This reflects a sometimes forgotten theological truth that the devil is by no means God's counterpart. He is a creature, not the Creator. ~ John Ortberg

But, finally, I had to open my eyes. I had to stop keeping secrets. The truth, thankfully, is insistent. What I saw then made action necessary. I had to see people for who they were. I had to understand why I made the choices I did. Why I had given them my loyalty. I had to make changed. I had to stop allowing love to be dangerous. I had to learn how to protect myself. But first ... I had to look ~ Deb Caletti

Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion. ~ Willa Cather

What! Would you make no distinction between hypocrisy and devotion? Would you give them the same names, and respect the mask as you do the face? Would you equate artifice and sincerity? Confound appearance with truth? Regard the phantom as the very person? Value counterfeit as cash? ~ Moliere

Everyone knows that a quick-fix usually doesn't work, yet we have all been sold on the idea time and time again. Most of us would like to believe in miracle drugs and fast relief. The truth is that most of the quick fixes for stress focus on temporary relief from tension or pain. Temporary, as in, the problem will return with a vengeance. This doesn't mean we should never take drugs to alleviate tension or pain, it just means that taking drugs is not a viable permanent solution; it's just a temporary relief. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

Is it really true... that our aim as historians is in some sense to recapture past reality, "to retrieve the truth about the past?" If so, what do "past reality" and "the truth about the past" mean? How does the historian's understanding of "reality" and "truth" differ - as most surely it does - from that of the direct participant? And what implications does this difference have for what we do as historians? It is not likely that questions of this sort will ever be finally answered. Yet clearly we must keep asking such questions if we are to maintain the highest levels of honesty and self-awareness concerning our work as historians. ~ Paul A. Cohen

Man is, so to speak, an endless and infinitely varied repetition: and if we know what one man feels, we so far know what a thousand feel in the sanctuary of their being. Our feeling of general humanity is at once an aggregate of a thousand different truths, and it is also the same truth a thousand times told. ~ William Hazlitt

Amazing how meaningless life is. A succubus literally fucks because she's not far removed from a monkey who needs to get stuffed with monkey dick and as a result a new life is created capable of experiencing all the suffering in the world. And they don't even feel guilty, they probably think their children should be glad that they are alive. ~ Ben Caesar

I must say a few words about memory. It is full of holes. If you were to lay it out upon a table, it would resemble a scrap of lace. I am a lover of history . . . [but] history has one flaw. It is a subjective art, no less so than poetry or music. . . . The historian writes a truth. The memoirist writes a truth. The novelist writes a truth. And so on. My mother, we both know, wrote a truth in The 19th Wife– a truth that corresponded to her memory and desires. It is not the truth, certainly not. But a truth, yes . . . Her book is a fact. It remains so, even if it is snowflaked with holes. ~ David Ebershoff

Rama, the ancient idol of the heroic ages, the embodiment of truth, of morality, the ideal son, the ideal husband, and above all, the ideal king, this Rama has been presented before us by the great sage Valmiki. No language can be purer, none chaster, none more beautiful, and at the same time simpler, than the language in which the great poet has depicted the life of Rama. ~ Swami Vivekananda

The painful truth is that while we might have the illusion, none of us are free. ~ Laura Anne Gilman

Faith in the possibilities of continued and rigorous inquiry does not limit access to truth to any channel or scheme of things. It does not first say that truth is universal and then add there is but one road to it. ~ John Dewey

People fear that being trapped inside a box, they will miss out on all the wonders of the world. As long as Neo is stuck inside the matrix, and Truman is stuck inside the TV studio, they will never visit Fiji, or Paris, or Machu Picchu. But in truth, everything you will ever experience in life is within your own body and your own mind. Breaking out of the matrix or travelling to Fiji won't make any difference. It's not that somewhere in your mind there is an iron chest with a big red warning sign 'Open only in Fiji!' and when you finally travel to the South Pacific you get to open the chest, and out come all kinds of special emotions and feelings that you can have only in Fiji. And if you never visit Fiji in your life, then you missed these special feelings for ever. No. Whatever you can feel in Fiji, you can feel anywhere in the world; even inside the matrix. ~ Yuval Noah Harari