"The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie."

Sontag, Susan on truth   

"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."

Twain, Mark on truth   

"Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth."

Socrates on deception   

"The wise man sees in the misfortune of others what he should avoid."

Aurelius, Marcus on wisdom
10 fans of this quote   

"Like warmed-up cabbage served at each repast, The repetition kills the wretch at last."

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) on repetition   

"I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand."

Appleton, Sir Edward on language   

"Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence."

Baudrillard, Jean on language
5 fans of this quote   

"I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations."

Johnson, Samuel on language   

"To have another language is to possess a second soul."

Charlemagne on language
12 fans of this quote   

"Might, could, would --they are contemptible auxiliaries."

Eliot, George on language   

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"The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words."

Eliot, George on language   

"Language is the archives of history."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on language
3 fans of this quote   

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"Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow."

Holmes, Oliver Wendell on language
3 fans of this quote   

"The language of truth is unadorned and always simple."

Ammianus, Marcellinus on language
5 fans of this quote   

"What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life."

Buscaglia, Leo on choice
11 fans of this quote   

"The secret of language is the secret of sympathy and its full charm is possible only to the gentle."

Ruskin, John on language   

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"Grace is always natural, though that does not prevent its being often used to hide a lie. The rude shocks and uncomfortably constraining influences of life disappear among graceful women and poetical men; they are the most deceptive beings in creation; distrust and doubt cannot stand before them; they create what they imagine; if they do not lie to others, they do to their own hearts; for illusion is their element, fiction their vocation, and pleasures in appearance their happiness. Beware of grace in woman, and poetry in man -- weapons the more dangerous because the least dreaded!"

Custine, Marquis De on grace   

"We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road -- the one less traveled by -- offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth."

Carson, Rachel on choice
4 fans of this quote   

"Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things."

Raban, Jonathan on travel   

"A just war is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience."

Cockburn, Alexander on war   

"Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't --it's human."

Erasmus, Desiderius on nature
4 fans of this quote   

"All deception in the course of life is indeed nothing else but a lie reduced to practice, and falsehood passing from words into things."

Southey, Robert on deception
6 fans of this quote   

"The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret."

Dali, Salvador on influence
6 fans of this quote   

"A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know."

Arbus, Diane on photography   

"Language is the dress of thought."

Johnson, Samuel on language
7 fans of this quote   

"Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden."

Kraus, Karl on language
4 fans of this quote   

"Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing."

Levi-Strauss, Claude on language   

"If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgment now."

Aurelius, Marcus on judgment and judges
10 fans of this quote   

"The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing; the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unseen attack."

Aurelius, Marcus on life
11 fans of this quote   

"Your life is what your thoughts make it."

Aurelius, Marcus on life
33 fans of this quote   

"How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it."

Aurelius, Marcus on anger
12 fans of this quote   

"How much time he saves who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks."

Aurelius, Marcus on opinions
6 fans of this quote   

"Remember that what pulls the strings is the force hidden within; there lies the power to persuade, there the life -- there, if one must speak out, the real man."

Aurelius, Marcus on persuasion   

"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment."

Aurelius, Marcus on power
12 fans of this quote   

"Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life."

Aurelius, Marcus on power
5 fans of this quote   

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"Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears."

Aurelius, Marcus on injury
10 fans of this quote   

"Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil."

Aurelius, Marcus on evil
7 fans of this quote   

"Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be."

Aurelius, Marcus on fate
3 fans of this quote   

"Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents."

Mathews, Harry on language   

"The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world."

Nietzsche, Friedrich on language
3 fans of this quote