Shelby Foote Quotes

Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous.

The truth isn't just the facts. You can have all the facts imaginable and miss the truth, just as you can have facts missing or some wrong, and reach the larger truth.

Sometimes the truth is more than the sum of the facts.

The truth is more important than the facts

I think what happens is when we start to look at the facts, everybody has their impression of what truth is.

Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place - and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all - so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.

What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.

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

Facts do not constitute truth.

'What is' is more important than 'what should be.' Too many people are looking at 'what is' from a position of thinking 'what should be'.

What is nonsense, and what is not, then, may be merely a matter of perspective.

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.

Count Hermann Keyserling once said truly that the greatest American superstition was the belief in facts.

There is a world of difference between facts and the truth. You can have so many facts that you don't deal with the truth. You never get to the truth. You have the places where, the people who, the times when, the reasons why, the methods how - blah blah. And never get to the human truth. The human truth is as elusive as the air. And as important as the air.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

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

Facts are many, but the truth is one.

Never question the relevance of truth, but always question the truth of relevance.

The facts are always less than what really happened.

Don't confuse facts with reality.

Once we thought, journalists and readers alike, that if we put together enough 'facts' and gave them a fast stir, we would come up with something that, at least by the standards of short-order cooks, could be called the truth.

I often wish... that I could rid the world of the tyranny of facts. What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease.

Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty.

Facts are not the truth. They only indicate where the truth may lie.