James Baldwin Quotes

I think Pirandello had something to say to people about what truth really is.

Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.

Who does understand life?

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

The questions of philosophy proper are human desires and fears and aspirations - human emotions - taking an intellectual form.

O man, of whatever country you are, and whatever your opinions may be, behold your history, such as I have thought to read it, not in books written by your fellow creatures, who are liars, but in nature, which never lies

The two basic topics which fascinate me are 'What is reality?' and 'What constitutes the authentic human being?'

Reality, by itself, becomes a story by Philip K. Dick.

I like illusion when it is so convincing that we might as well see reality this way - I like to present to our belief system something that is convincing, that 'we know not to be.'

Truth I have no trouble with, it's the facts I get all screwed up.

The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.

I am who I am, you are who you are, and everything else is a perception based on acceptance, deception, smoke, mirrors, and so on. It's what's between us that seems to justify our accidental identities.

The dead see what they believe they will see. So do the living. That is the secret.

There is only what is and that's it. What should be is a dirty lie.

When you have examined all the illusions of life and know that there isn't any reality, but you nevertheless go on, then you are a mature human being. You accept the idea that it is all mask and illusion and that people are in disguise. You see the crumbl

Belief is nearly the whole of the universe whether based on truth or not.

There are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.

Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.

The Gay Science, section 108

The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.

No," said the priest, "you don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary." "Depressing view," said K. "The lie made into the rule of the world.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

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

Never trust a mirror,' his mother had told him. 'They never tell the truth unless you make them.

You say they create their own reality," said Veronika, "but what is reality?