James McBride Quotes

Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I'm up and down and round about, Yet all the world can't find me out; Though hundreds have employed their leisure, They never yet could find my measure.

I can be expected to look for truth but not to find it.

One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days.

We do not dwell in the Palace of Truth. But, as was mentioned to me not long since, "There is a time coming when all things shall be found out." I am not so sanguine myself, believing that the well in which Truth is said to reside is really a bottomless pit.

For every moment of truth, there's confusion in life

Unless you have the courage to doubt you will never come to know the truth.

It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there.

sometimes to find truth one must move mountains -Kohler

Do not believe the truth. The truth is tiny compared to what you have to do.

What a world is this, and how does fortune banter us!

We have a saying that a stranger's soul is like a black box. Which is why I would not want to analyze [Vladimir] Putin's psychological motivations.

Nothing in this world is real

It is open to every man to choose the direction of his striving; and also every man may draw comfort from Lessing's fine saying, that the search for truth is more precious than its possession.

Maybe it was wrong, or maybe impossible, but I wanted the truth to be one thing. One solid thing.

This is a puzzling world, and Old Harry's got a finger in it.

A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice.

The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making. But who says the world has to make sense?

In a world like this one, only the random makes sense.

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.

If we can get to the truth, we can change anything.

The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.

Oh happy he who still can hope in our day to breathe the truth while plunged in seas of error! What we don't know is really what we need, and what we know is of no use to us whatever!