Rollo May 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.

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.

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.

Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon, human intercourse.

I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth.

Perception is reality.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.

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

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.

It's a very complicated issue about when is a fact not a fact in the context of opinions.

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

Don't confuse facts with reality.

There may not be one Truth - there may be several truths - but saying that is not to say that reality doesn't exist.

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful.

I'm less interested in reality. I'm more interested in perception, the truth of the universe that we see.

The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth.

There are two kinds of truth. There are real truths and there are made up truths.

If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?

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.

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.

If this book has made any point clear, I hope it's that things don't have to be real to be true. Or vice versa.

As human beings, the closest we can get to truth is through story.

Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.

The truth isn't all things to all people all of the time.

There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.