This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Sincerity makes an untruth seem like a truth, while insincerity makes a truth seem like an untruth.
Character | Insincerity | Sincerity | Truth |
When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative in to an absolute.
Half a fact is a whole falsehood. He who gives the truth a false coloring by his false manner of telling it, is the worst of liars.
Maurice Maeterlinck, fully Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck
But it is not enough to possess a truth; it is essential that the truth should possess us.
Enthusiasm begets enthusiasm, eloquence produces conviction for the moment; but it is only by truth to Nature and the everlasting institutions of mankind that those abiding influences are won that enlarge from generation to generation.
Character | Enthusiasm | Mankind | Nature | Truth |
To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.
Character | Love | Perfection | Truth | World |
We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us.
If we crave for the goal that is worthy and fitting for man, namely, happiness of life - and this is accomplished by philosophy alone and by nothing else, and philosophy, as I said, means for us desire for wisdom, and wisdom the science of truth in things, and of things some are properly so called, others merely share the name - it is reasonable and most necessary to distinguish and systematize the accidental qualities of things.
Character | Desire | Distinguish | Life | Life | Man | Means | Nothing | Philosophy | Qualities | Science | Truth | Wisdom | Happiness |
Man gains freedom only through the use of his highest faculties. Materialism makes him more and more a slave to the forces of the phenomenal world... Our present-day materialism points in this direction - that is, in the direction of the enslavement of man by mechanisation and by its direct results, by state organisations, uniformity, the sacrifice of independent intelligence, the sweeping away of individual differences, local customs, local diversity, and all the infinite branchings of humanity that enrich life... Man is made free by ‘truth’. The truth spoken here is equated with mind. This kind of truth begins with self-knowledge.
Character | Day | Diversity | Freedom | Humanity | Individual | Intelligence | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Materialism | Mind | Present | Sacrifice | Self | Self-knowledge | Truth | Uniformity | World |
They that deserve nothing should be content with anything... If we cannot bring our condition to our mind, we must bring our mind to our condition; if a man is not content in the state he is in, he will not be content in the state he would be in.
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.