But as I got older and worked more rigorously (age will, or ought to, do this) toward knowing and living what was true, I came to believe that one of two things would happen:
The truth would out, or, if it didn't, the outcome was not worth managing.
You can't make bad/stupid/cruel/naive/thoughtless/selfish [whatever] people over into good/smart/kind/perceptive/thoughtful/giving people, just as you can't make good people bad.
You cannot convince people who do not want to know the truth what is true. And you ought not to. Everyone comes to his own realizations, or doesn't, as he wishes and chooses.
Each of us hides behind whatever simplistic and complex faslehoods we need to hide behind, until we are able to come out from behind the clouds and bravely -- because courage is sometimes required -- seek out what is true.
I learned all of this the hard way.
The hard way was the only way any of this was worth knowing.
~
There is no god higher than truth. Mahatma Gandhi
The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple. Rebecca West
When I tell any truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do. William Blake
Truth only reveals itself when one gives up all preconceived ideas. Shoseki
We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable. Alexander Solzhenitsyn
It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Oscar Wilde
If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it? Dogen
Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch, nay, you may kick it all about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast Table
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold. Leo Tolstoy
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. Oliver Wendell Holmes
We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter. Denis Diderot
...Science and mathematics
Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it,
They never touch it: consider what an explosion
Would rock the bones of men into little white fragments and unsky the world
If any mind for a moment touch truth.
Robinson Jeffers, "The Silent Shepherds," The Beginning & the End
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me. Simone de Beauvoir
Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives...by make-believe. W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, 1938
Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first, it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self-evident. Arthur Schopenhauer
And while it is also true that I have written this all out in Biblical-column style, I am neither a Christian nor a proselytizer. I have far too much to learn (and I am way too chubby) to be wearing white robes and sandals. But when it comes to knowing what is true, I think I am doing just fine.
