Truth

I will use this post to list some of my favourite remarks concerning the idea of truth and may add to this from time to time.

If we have the possibility of knowing the truth, why would we choose to be deceived? (Isiah Berlin)

When you want to know the truth, you do not care who is right. (Richard Feynman)

A man may imagine things that are false but he can only understand things that are true. (Isaac Newton)

If "truth" were whatever I could understand - it would end up being just a small truth, one my size. (Clarice Lispector)

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence (Christopher Hitchins)

Real things are precisely those whose properties will never be exhausted by any description we can make of them. We can have comprehensive knowledge only of things that we have made up. (Roy Bhaskar)

"We do not anticipate the world dogmatically, but rather wish to find the new world through the criticism of the old." Marx. Letter to Ruge.

"When my love swears she is made of truth / I do believe her though I know she lies." W. Shakespeare. Sonnet 138.

[This is not strictly on topic but it is a useful remark to insert into internet debates periodically - it bears repetition!] "Is there anything more inconsistent with civil conversation, and the end of all debate, than not to take an answer, though ever so full and satisfactory, but still to go on with the dispute as long as equivocal sounds can furnish a 'medius terminus', a term to wrangle with on the one side or a distinction on the other?......for this in short is the way and perfection of logical disputes, that the opponent never takes any answer, nor the respondent ever yield to any argument." John Locke, Thoughts Concerning Education, 1690

Perhaps also on this theme of debate, this from Kahlil Gibran is provocative and permits more than one interpretation: "I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet I am ungrateful to those teachers." 

“The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it.” — Terry Pratchett in Monstrous Regiment

Hegel wrote this in the introduction to his Phenomenology of Spirit: "True and false are among the determinate thoughts which are considered immobile separate essences, as if one stood here and the other there, without community, fixed and isolated.  Against this view one must insist that truth is not a minted coin which can be given and pocketed ready-made."