Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

Without knowing the Knower, all the knowledge that one gathers cannot be valid.

From the perspective of mere representation, the external world always remains only a phenomenon.

Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception.

Science is nothing but perception.

The existence of inherent limits of experience in no way settles the question about the subordination of facts of the human world to our knowledge of matter.

What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?

What, then is truth?... Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.

But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know.

You can never be sure whether you are discovering the truth or inventing it.

Sense-perceptions can only be indirect knowledge, and not direct knowledge. Only one's own awareness is direct knowledge.

Metaphysical world.- It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off.

We know nothing in reality; for truth lies in an abyss.

Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.

Subjectivity is objective.

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.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

I am beginning to believe that nothing is quite so uncertain as facts. (Edward Curtis)

Maybe I don't believe things myself, as well. Truth is such a transient thing.

I never know how much of what I say is true.

Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts.

On the other hand, for the whole human being who wills, feels, and represents, external reality is given simultaneously and with as much certitude as his own self.