James Russell Lowell Quotes

When someone starts talking to me about the truth, what I hear is what they're telling me about themselves.

I don't think I could tell the whole truth about anything. That's a pretty heavy burden, because we all just view the world through this little piece of coke bottle.

All faith is false, all faith is true. Truth is the shattered mirror strown in myriad bits, while each believes his little bit the whole to own.

One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient.

Your whole life is nothing but a dream. You live in a fantasy where everything you know about yourself is only true for you. Your truth is not the truth for anyone else.

People make their own reality. That was what Praxis had taught him years ago. A hundred people can witness the exact same event, and give two hundred and three different accountings of it.

The biggest lie is the lie we tell ourselves in the distorted visions we have of ourselves, blocking out some sections, enhancing others. What remains are not the cold facts of life, but how we perceive them. That's really who we are.

Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.

There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at.

The dream of life is really an illusion, and everybody lives in the reality he or she creates - a virtual reality that is only true for the one who creates it.

All ego really is, is our opinions, which we take to be solid, real, and the absolute truth about how things are.

My intent is to tell the truth as I know it, realizing that what is true for me may be blasphemy for others.

All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because we're liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed.

Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.

Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.

People say they love truth, but in reality they want to believe that which they love is true.

You and I do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.

… what is true for me may be blasphemy for others.

Truth is, in fact, an elusive concept. It depends almost entirely on where you are standing at the time. It is a human instinct to confuse belief with truth.

The unreliable narrator is an odd concept. The way I see it, we're all unreliable narrators of our lives who usually have absolute trust in our self-told stories. Any truth is, after all, just a matter of perspective.

My view is my view. Your view is your view.

You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer . . . Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

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.

Doesn't everyone see Reality as it is?