Errol Morris Quotes

I don't believe that you can talk about a photograph being true or false. I don't think such a claim has any meaning.

Photography seduces us into thinking we can believe photographs, whereas we can't really believe that a picture can tell us any kind of truth at all.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

Photographs can reveal something to us, and they can also conceal things.

Everything we say is a story. But nothing we say is just a story.

A strange thing, words. Once they're said, it's hard to imagine they're untrue.

Photos have no narrative content. They only describe light on surface.

All alone - shorn of context, without captions - a photograph is neither true nor false.... For truth, properly considered, is about the relationship between language and the world, not about photographs and the world.

Any claims on the truth in my pictures are only to be answered in the sense that a particular event did in fact happen and did take place in the here and now.

I say again, if I cannot draw a horse, I will not write THIS IS A HORSE under what I foolishly meant for one.

I think that there isn't a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability... They do not tell stories - they show you what something looks like. To a camera.

Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.

Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.

The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.

The truth will always have a market.

Truth is such a precious article - let us all economize in its use.

A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.

The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.

True and False are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood.

Truthfulness is the main element of character.

Wherefore also these Kinds [elements] occupied different places even before the universe was organised and generated out of them. Before that time, in truth, all these were in a state devoid of reason or measure, but when the work of setting in order this Universe was being undertaken, fire and water and earth and air, although possessing some traces of their known nature, were yet disposed as everything is likely to be in the absence of God; and inasmuch as this was then their natural condition, God began by first marking them out into shapes by means of forms and numbers.

An instrument that sometimes expresses thought, sometimes obscures thought, but most often replaces thought.

It is as his own mind comes into contact with others that truth will begin to acquire value in the child's eyes and will consequently become a moral demand that can be made upon him. As long as the child remains egocentric, truth as such will fail to interest him and he will see no harm in transposing facts in accordance with his desires.

Truth and falsity is something that concerns language, it's a property of language.

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.