Quotes about Truth

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all. (The autocrat of the breakfast-table)

The life of the law has not been logic but experience.

Truth is the breath of life to human society. It is the food of the immortal spirit. Yet a single word of it may kill a man as suddenly as a drop of prussic acid.

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

The thing you fear most has no power. Your fear of it is what has the power. Facing the truth really will set you free.

For whatever be the knowledge which we are able to obtain of God, either by perception or reflection, we must of necessity believe that He is by many degrees far better than what we perceive Him to be.

Conscience is the chamber of justice.

All good thinking is a matter of asking and answering three elementary questions. What is being said? Is it true? What of it?

In the biblical view the issue is not modern versus postmodern. Both these views are partly right, and both are finally wrong. Nor is it rational argument versus story, or reason versus imagination. In fact it is not either-or at all. The deep logic of God's truth can be expressed in both stories and arguments, by questions as well as statements, through reason and the imagination, through the four Gospels as well as through the book of Romans.

This challenge means that each of us as apologists must examine our own hearts. Have we loved enough to listen, or is it that we love to hear the sound of our own answers? Are we really arguing for Christ, or are we expressing our need always to be right?

If the Christian faith is true, it is true even if no one believes it, and if it is not true, it is false even if everyone believes it. The truth of the faith does not stand and fall with our defense of it.

There still remains only God to protect man against man. Either we will serve him in spirit and in truth or we shall enslave ourselves ceaselessly, more and more, to the monstrous idol that we have made with our own hands to our own image and likeness. Etienne Gilson, 20th century