Publilius Syrus Quotes

Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

An error becomes an error when born as truth.

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

Lying and art are very allied. But after you lie, you get to the truth.

No doubt about it: error is the rule, truth is the accident of error.

Art is as heavy as sorrow, as light as a breeze, as bright as an idea, as pretty as a picture, as funny as money, and as fugitive as fraud!

Truth is in all things, even partly, in error.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

Science is but an image of the truth.

After all, the ultimate goal of all research is not objectivity, but truth.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

Science provides an understanding of a universal experience. Arts provide a universal understanding of a personal experience.

Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.

The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments.

That which is cannot be true.

In all science, error precedes the truth, and it is better it should go first than last.

Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

As a son of a man who pretended to be one thing for 33 years of my life and then was another thing, the questions of 'what is real' and 'what is not real' are very blurrily vivid to me.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

What is called a sincere work is one that is endowed with enough strength to give reality to an illusion.

Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.