Os Guinness Quotes

There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

Learn to see things as they really are, not as we imagine they are.

Show me a man who claims he is objective and I'll show you a man with illusions.

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

People want to see the world the way they want to see it, not the way it is.

I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth, so help me God. And I thought I was. I found I couldn't. Nobody can write the absolute truth.

When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.

The fact is one thing and the idea about the fact is another.

Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.

Truth is the ricochet of a prejudice bouncing off a fact.

Facts do not constitute truth.

If truth is not acceptable, it becomes the imagination of others.

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can't see how it is.

Those who tell you that man is unable to perceive a reality undistorted by his senses, mean that they are unwilling to perceive a reality undistorted by their feelings. "Things as they are" are things as perceived by your mind; divorce them from reason and they become "things as perceived by your wishes.

Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know.

Reality has actually very little to do with truth; there is no necessary connection between the two.

Of course a picture can lie, but only if you are not honest with yourself.

I never said the camera was truth. It is, however, a more accurate and more objective way of seeing.

The percept is the reality. It is not in propositional form. But the most immediate judgment concerning it is abstract. It is therefore essentially unlike the reality, although it must be accepted as true to that reality. Its truth consists in the fact that it is impossible to correct it, and in the fact that it only professes to consider one aspect of the percept.

Perception of a state is not the state.

In academic life you seek to state absolute truths; in politics you seek to accommodate truth to the facts around you.

Truth and dreams are always getting muddled.

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

Anybody who pretends to be objective isn't realistic.