Claude Adrien Helvetius Quotes

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.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

Truth is the torch that gleams through the fog without dispelling it.

The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.

Plato described ordinary life as unthinking, lived in a dim cave of shadowy reflections, but said that it is possible to leave the cave and see things in sunlit clarity as they actually are.

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

Which country is real, mine or the teacher's? My wish is that we might progressively lose our confidence in what we think we believe and the things we consider stable and secure, in order to remind ourselves of the infinite number of things still waiting to be discovered.

Who would ever give up the reality of dreams for relative knowledge?

The truth is a fog, in which one man sees the heavenly host and the other one sees a flying elephant.

In order to survive, we cling to all we know and understand. And label it reality. But knowledge and understanding are ambiguous. That reality could be an illusion. All humans live with the wrong assumptions. Isn't that another way of looking at it? That sharingan how much can you really se?

Democritus says, "But we know nothing really; for truth lies deep down".

Even if a man should chance to speak the most complete truth, yet he himself does not know it; all things are wrapped in appearances

The truths that seem most truthful, if you look at them from all sides, if you look at them close up, turn out to be either half truths or lies.

Truth wasn't something you went out and found. It was wide and vast and deep and unending, and all you could hope to see was a tiny part of it. And to see that part and to mistake it for the whole was to make of Truth a lie.

XXVIII "Truth," said a traveller, "Is a rock, a mighty fortress; "Often have I been to it, "Even to its highest tower, "From whence the world looks black." "Truth," said a traveller, "Is a breath, a wind, "A shadow, a phantom; "Long have I pursued it, "But never have I touched "The hem of its garment." And I believed the second traveller; For truth was to me A breath, a wind, A shadow, a phantom, And never had I touched The hem of its garment.

In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.

All you know is what you think you know, but that isn't always what's real.

The very essence of truth is plainness and brightness; the darkness and crookedness is our own. The wisdom of God created understanding, fit and proportionable to truth, the object and end of it, as the eye to the thing visible. If our understanding have a film of ignorance over it, or be blear with gazing on other false glitterings, what is that to truth?

Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.

Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake.

The recognition of the false is already the arising of the real.

Till the false is seen as the false, truth is not.