An Ultimate Truth Quotes & Sayings

Indeed, whoever imagines he has explained Zen has in fact only explained it away; it can no more be bound by a definition than the wind can be shut in a box without ceasing to be wind. Thus any attempt to write on Zen may seem an absurdity from the beginning, but that is only so if either reader or writer imagines that Zen can be contained in a set of ideas. A book about London is in no sense London itself, and no sane person would dream of thinking that it is. Yet apparently intelligent people often make the equally ridiculous mistake of identifying a philosophical system, a dogma, a creed, with Ultimate Truth, imagining that they have found that Truth embraced in a set of propositions which appeals to their reason. There — Alan W. Watts

Science is an ongoing process. It never ends. There is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire. And because this is so, the world is far more interesting, both for the scientists and for the millions of people in every nation who, while not professional scientists, are deeply interested in the methods and findings of science. — Carl Sagan

Keep in mind the roots of violence: Lust, envy, anger, avarice, and vengeance ... the taproot ... the killer's ultimate and truest motivation ... is the hatred of truth ... the hatred of truth is a vice. From it comes pride and an enthusiasm for disorder. — Dean Koontz

When I first learned of the existence of pi, I knew immediately that we had something in common. We share a parallel path. Certainly there are many times when I too have been considered irrational. Often when alone in my room, I silently ponder the equation for the area of a circle. Area (A) equals R-squared (RR) times the constant pi (C). Then I thought, by assigning the designation (K) and assuming there was an nth or final numeric digit to pi, it all might somehow become rational. The random rolling numbers that could at some point define that ultimate integer, passed through my mind. To me they were like the consecutive series of episodes that define my life. It seemed that it was more than a coincidence that when I took the variables and the constants from the equation and put them all together, A-R-R-C-K, it spells my name. That is why I need to get to the truth. — John Lack

Deceit for personal gain is one of history's most recurring crimes. Man's first step towards change would be thinking, counter-arguing, re-thinking, twisting, straightening, perfecting, then believing every original idea he intends to make public before making it public. There is always an angle from which an absolute truth may appear askew just as there is always a personal emotion, or a personal agenda, which alienates the ultimate good of mankind. — Criss Jami

In the dictionary of the seeker of truth there is no such thing as being "not successful." He is or should be an irrepressible optimist because of his immovable faith in the ultimate victory of Truth, which is God. — Mahatma Gandhi

In an honest effort to gain understanding, asking questions do not, necessarily, imply a conclusion has been determined. They can be used to avoid making the wrong judgement. If building trust is the ultimate goal - there is no need to be defensive, or feel threatened by any inquiry. — T.F. Hodge

An outdated view still prevails that a low-carbon lifestyle requires immense personal suffering and sacrifice. In my view, nothing could be further from the truth. All the evidence shows that people who do not drive, do not fly on planes, do shop locally, do grow their own food, and do get to know other members of their community have a much higher quality of life than their compatriots who still persist in making the ultimate sacrifice of wasting their lives commuting to work in cars. — Mark Lynas

The popular conception of any philosophical doctrine is necessarily imperfect, and very generally unjust. Lucretius is often alluded to as an atheistical writer, who held the silly opinion that the universe was the result of a fortuitous concourse of atoms readers are asked to consider how long letters must be shaken in a bag before a complete annotated edition of Shakespeare could result from the process; and after being reminded how much more complex the universe is than the works of Shakespeare, they are expected to hold Lucretius, with his teachers and his followers, in derision. A nickname which sticks has generally some truth in it, and so has the above view, but it would be unjust to form our judgment of a man from his nickname alone, and we may profitably consider what the real tenets of Lucretius were, especially now that men of science are beginning, after a long pause in the inquiry, once more eagerly to attempt some explanation of the ultimate constitution of matter. — Fleeming Jenkin

If someone say he/she never lie in life, that is probably the worst lie anyone has ever told you.Everything -
Truth is that we all will die one day. That's the ultimate truth. So whatever big choices we make in life , chose death as an excuse . That will make our life as our well as death easier. — Rohit Kochar

This is not necessarily the answer people want, but ultimately, I think writing is an amoral process. Your ultimate responsibility is to the truth of the story you're trying to tell. — Lynn Coady

The greatest, like Rembrandt, paint a gallant, a hag, and a carcass with equal passion and rapture; they love the truth as it is. They do not admit that anything can be ugly or evil; its existence justifies itself. This is because they know themselves to be part of an harmonious unity; to disdain any item of it would be to blaspheme the whole. The Thelemite is able to revel in any experience soever; in each he recognizes the tokens of ultimate Truth. It is surely obvious, even intellectually, that all phenomena are interdependent, and therefore involve each other. — Aleister Crowley

Everything in the world is maya, an illusion. The ultimate truth one has to realise is that we actually need nothing. Because to possess an illusion is as good as possessing nothing. — Amish Tripathi

When life is an existential suffering, death is our ultimate blessings. — Debasish Mridha

Love is a madness produced by an unsatisfiable rational desire to understand the ultimate truth about the world. — Plato

But as the word satyagraha implies, Gandhi's passivity was not weakness at all. It meant focusing on an ultimate goal and refusing to divert energy to unnecessary skirmishes along the way. Restraint, Gandhi believed, was one of his greatest assets. And it was born of his shyness: I have naturally formed the habit of restraining my thoughts. A thoughtless word hardly ever escaped my tongue or pen. Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. We find so many people impatient to talk. All this talking can hardly be said to be of any benefit to the world. It is so much waste of time. My shyness has been in reality my shield and buckler. It has allowed me to grow. It has helped me in my discernment of truth. — Susan Cain

There is a circularity here I do not doubt. I am defending the Bible by the Bible. Circularity of a kind is unavoidable when one seeks to defend an ultimate standard of truth, for one's defense must itself be accountable to that standard. — John M. Frame

Man's quest for knowledge is an expanding series whose limit is infinity, but philosophy seeks to attain that limit at one blow, by a short circuit providing the certainty of complete and inalterable truth. Science meanwhile advances at its gradual pace, often slowing to a crawl, and for periods it even walks in place, but eventually it reaches the various ultimate trenches dug by philosophical thought, and, quite heedless of the fact that it is not supposed to be able to cross those final barriers to the intellect, goes right on. — Stanislaw Lem

The ultimate horror movie for a really un-illuminated being is an enlightened person. They are scared of others seeing what they are all about and what they really do. They are scared of truth. — Frederick Lenz

An open society calls itself open to improvement. It is based on the recognition that people have divergent views and interests, and that nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth. — George Soros

I cannot tell you that the sacrifice will be light: it is a serious thing to stand against the whole current of an age; it is a serious thing to be despised and hated by the generality of one's fellow men. Yet that is increasingly the lot of the truth Christian today. He will not, indeed, be inclined to complain; for he has something with which all that he has lost is not worthy to be compared; and he knows that despite temporary opposition the ultimate future belongs to him and to His Lord. But for the present he is called upon to endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. It can hardly be said that unworthy motives of self-interest can lead a man to enter into a calling in which he will win nothing but reproach. — J. Gresham Machen

The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution in which all good things coexist, seems to me not merely unobtainable
that is a truism
but conceptually incoherent ... Some among the great goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss. — Isaiah Berlin

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others. — Cormac McCarthy

Beauty is an ultimate value - something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations. — Roger Scruton

Truth telling, therefore, has to be an ultimate value, until it clashes with another ultimate value, pleasure, at which point, to state the obvious, there is conflict. — Hanif Kureishi

. . . [T]o live in an inspired condition, to know truth, to be free, to love another, to consummate existence, to abide with death in clarity of consciousness - without which, racing and conniving to evade death, the spirit holds its breath and hopes to be immortal because it does not live - is no longer a rarefied project. Just as machinery has embodied ideas of good, so the technology of destruction has also acquired a metaphysical character. The practical questions have thus become the ultimate questions as well. Annihilation is no longer a metaphor. Good and Evil are real. The inspired condition is therefore no visionary matter. It is not reserved for gods, kings, poets, priests, shrines, but belongs to mankind and to all of existence. — Saul Bellow

Here is something for you to write down and remember: facing reality is never pessimistic. Believing the truth, no matter how difficult that may be, is the ultimate act of optimism because it opens up the panorama of options that will free us from further deception. Taking off a blindfold is never an act of pessimism. Getting angry at the truth (or at the messenger who delivers the truth) is a self-deceptive act of narcissistic theater, and it is a colossal waste of time. — Michael Bunker

And that's what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love. Fear is an illusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined. That is not to say they don't exist for us as human beings. They do. But our fear is not our ultimate reality, and it does not replace the truth of who we really are. Our love, which is our real self, doesn't die, but merely goes underground. — Marianne Williamson

Life is eternal; death only punctuates it for a short while. After a little break life starts again. Death is ultimate truth; life is truth beyond ultimate. Life is never destroyed; it just keeps on changing shapes. Endless processes are attached with this life; many stages are there in this grand journey of life. From an insect to an enlightened soul it keeps on changing. Creation is always beautiful in the beginning. It can be beautiful all the time also. What is purpose of life? It's evolution to higher levels — Mahesh Babu

The ultimate truth is like the flavour of an apple which you can't see with the eye or hear with the ear. The only way to experience it is to put the teachings into practice. Once you taste it, you are no longer in any doubt about its flavour and you do not have to ask anyone else. The problem is solved. — Ajahn Chah

In fact, it is the account of an interior voyage, the kind of excursion that's hard to talk about without sounding foolish or annoyingly serene, or like someone who thinks the Great Spirit has singled him out to be the mouthpiece of ultimate truth. If you knew me you'd know that I am none of the above. — Roland Merullo

The scientist knows very well that he is approaching ultimate truth only in an asymptotic curve and is barred from ever reaching it; but at the same time he is proudly aware of being indeed able to determine whether a statement is a nearer or a less near approach to the truth. — Konrad Lorenz

Ah, Marilyn, Hollywood's Joan of Arc, our Ultimate Sacrificial Lamb. Well, let me tell you, she was mean, terribly mean. The meanest woman I have ever known in this town. I am appalled by this Marilyn Monroe cult. Perhaps it's getting to be an act of courage to say the truth about her. Well, let me be courageous. I have never met anyone as utterly mean as Marilyn Monroe. Nor as utterly fabulous on the screen, and that includes Garbo. — Billy Wilder

When you are on the spiritual path, and you are looking for the answers outside, there is an ample of reasons, for you to deviate from the path. The path of the ultimate truth is straight way inside — Roshan Sharma

Pursuit of truth, not success, is the ultimate purpose of an illuminated life. — Debasish Mridha

To commit herself to becoming "an apostle of Joy" when humanly speaking she might have felt at the brink of despair, was heroic indeed. She could do so because her joy was rooted in the certitude of the ultimate goodness of God's loving plan for her. And though her faith in this truth did not touch her soul with consolation, she ventured to meet the challenges of life with a smile. Her one lever was her blind trust in God. — Brian Kolodiejchuk

Reality is subjective, and there's an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as 'important' only if 'tis sober and severe. Sure and still you're right about your Cheerful Dum, only they're not so much happy as lobotomized. But your Gloomy Smart are just as ridiculous. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form o' self-indulgence. — Tom Robbins

The potential for loss of soul
to one degree or another
is the affliction of a society that as a collective has lost its sense of the holy, of a culture that values everything else above the spiritual. We live in such a spiritually impoverished culture
and in such a time. Loss of soul, to one degree or another, is a constant teasing possibility. We are invited at every corner to hedge on the truth, indulge outselves, act as if our words and actions have no ultimate consequence, make an absolute of the material world, and treat the spiritual world as if it were some kind of frothy, angelic fantasy. In such a world the soul struggles for survival; in such a world a man can lose his own soul and have the whole culture support him, and in such a world, conversely, the light of a single, great soul that lives in integrity can truly illumine the world. — Daphne Rose Kingma

An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man's mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut. He can say nothing to the purpose. Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing either the Tao or anything else. — C.S. Lewis

In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas. — Alfred North Whitehead

The one great thing about football is that whatever happens it will manifest itself on the pitch. If it's right, you'll see it on the pitch, if it's wrong, it will be on the pitch. In business you can get fellas who are doing crooked deals and nobody knows anything about it. There is an ultimate honesty about football. Politics is part of the lying game, I wouldn't trust any of them. In football you can hide for a while, but ultimately the truth comes out. I always loved that. — Johnny Giles

Achieve the success they truly desire because they get impatient. They want easy success or none at all. They see the path to success as a frustration, an impediment. Each day spent short of the ultimate goal is viewed as a time of failure and as an annoyance. As such, they get distracted by hundreds of little things that each day try to get us off our course. Yet the successful among us know the truth: — Earl Nightingale

Pondering the legitimate modern day problem of intellectual bullies. Self-proclaimed smarties attacking the innocent.

They revel in being politically correct, all-loving and open-minded while not applying these principles to themselves.

The ultimate double standard in the name of truth and acceptance. It's sad.

This is not a post about anyone in particular. This is an observation over years.

Have you seen it? Call it out when you do.

The offender won't know what to do because they know that you know their game. — Richie Norton

The two things I understand best are stand-up comedy and martial arts. And those things require an ultimate grasp of the truth. You have to be objective about your skills and abilities to compete in both. — Joe Rogan

The ultimate Mystery of being, the ultimate Truth, is Love. This is the essential structure of reality. When Dante spoke of the 'love which moves the sun and the other stars', he was not using a metaphor, but was describing the nature of reality. There is in Being an infinite desire to give itself in love and this gift of Self in love is for ever answered by a return of love ... and so the rhythm of the universe is created. — Venerable Bede

I condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian Church the most terrible of all accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worse possible corruption. The Christian Church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul. — Friedrich Nietzsche

That's the truth with any idol - it will rock you to your core when it leaves. When a good thing leaves you, it might make you sad. But when an ultimate thing leaves you, you feel like you can't live anymore. — Jefferson Bethke

Around 1980, I'd been writing short stories, all to no success; so I wrote a fan letter to Stephen King and asked "How long should it take an aspiring writer to either get published or know when to give up?" Lo and behold, King wrote back to me in long hand with blue flair pen on 14-inch paper, purveying a very nice, helpful note; in it he said my letter proved a "command of the language," that I should never give up, and that it would take years to succeed, not months. "That's cold comfort but it's the truth." This was the ultimate encouragement for a young writer to be who didn't know shit about the market. I took Mr. King's advice and actually sold my first novel little more than a year later. I'll always be copiously grateful for this advice, and it's the same advice I give aspiring writers now (along with the story of King's reply!). — Edward Lee

His name is...
Will it ever come to me? There is a grand lapse of memory that may be the only thing to save us from ultimate horror. Perhaps they know the truth who preach the passing of one life into another, vowing that between a certain death and certain birth there is an interval in which an old name is forgotten before a new one is learned. And to remember the name of a former life is to begin the backward slide into that great blackness in which all names have their source, becoming incarnate in a succession of bodies like numberless verses of an infinite scripture.
To find that you have had so many names is to lose claim to any one of them. To gain the memory of so many lives is to lose them all. — Thomas Ligotti

At a certain point, I felt the need to submit to a higher level of religiosity ... to move away from my intuition and to accept an ultimate truth. I felt that in order to become a good person, I needed rules - lots of them - or else I would somehow fall apart. I am reclaiming myself. Trusting my goodness and my divine mission. — Matisyahu

Jesus beckons me to follow him to that place of weakness where I risk the vulnerability of a child so that I might know how strong my Father is and how much he loves me. But truth be told, I would rather be an adult. I'd rather be in a place where I can still pull things together if God doesn't show up, where I risk no ultimate humiliation, where I don't have to take the shallow breaths of desperation. And as a result, my experience of my heavenly Father is simply impoverished. — Gary Haugen

Could the search for ultimate truth really have revealed so hideous and visceral looking an object? — Max Perutz

The search for some ultimate significance in the universe, and in our little transient role in it, the compulsion to learn, to know, to find the truth, to answer questions and solve problems - these constitute the essence of an aware existence, the central core of intelligent life. — Dale Rex Coman

How, in the contemporary period, can we evoke the imagery that communicates the most profound and most richly developed sense of experiencing life? These images must point past themselves to that ultimate truth which must be told: that life does not have one absolutely fixed meaning. These images must point past all meanings given, beyond all definitions and relationships, to that really ineffable mystery that is just the existence, the being of ourselves and of our world. If we give that mystery an exact meaning we diminish the experience of its real depth. But when a poet carries the mind into a context of meanings and then pitches it past those, one knows that marvelous rapture that comes from going past all categories of definition. Here we sense the function of metaphor that allows us to make a journey we could not otherwise make ... — Joseph Campbell

Cleverness is egocentric, dramatic, gives you an illusion of success. We are always running behind it and ultimately suffer. Whereas simplicity is spiritual, blissful, not dramatic, simple but joyful and gives inner peace. Which is our ultimate goal. — Debasish Mridha

I grew up then, into this life of jazz, and fell immediately into the state of almost audible confusion. Life stood over me like an immoral schoolmistress, editing my thoughts. It seemed to me that there was no ultimate goal for man. Man was beginning a grotesque and bewildered fight with nature, that by the divine and magnificent accident has brought us to where we could fly in her face. We produce a Christ who can raise up the leper and presently, it's the salt of the Earth. If any one can find lesson in that, let him stand forth. Am I crazy trying to pierce the darkness of political idealism with some wild, despairing urge towards truth? Trying to separate the knowable from the unknowable? — F Scott Fitzgerald

The liturgy of the Eucharist is best understood as a journey or procession. It is the journey of the Church into the dimension of the Kingdom. We use the word 'dimension' because it seems the best way to indicate the manner of our sacramental entrance into the risen life of Christ. Color transparencies 'come alive' when viewed in three dimensions instead of two. The presence of the added dimension allows us to see much better the actual reality of what has been photographed. In very much the same way, though of course any analogy is condemned to fail, our entrance into the presence of Christ is an entrance into a fourth dimension which allows us to see the ultimate reality of life. It is not an escape from the world, rather it is the arrival at a vantage point from which we can see more deeply into the reality of the world. — Alexander Schmemann

His readiness to undergo persecutions for his beliefs, the high moral character of the men who believed in him and looked up to him as leader, and the greatness of his ultimate achievement - all argue his fundamental integrity. To suppose Muhammad an impostor raises more problems than it solves. Moreover, none of the great figures of history is so poorly appreciated in the West as Muhammad — William Montgomery Watt

Truth is one, but error proliferates. Man tracks it down and cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth. But the ultimate atom will always essentially be an error, a miscalculation. — Rene Daumal

Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth? - photography, once it begins to reproduce colors, and that won't be long in coming. And yet you want an intelligent man to sweat for months so as to give the illusion he can do something as well as an ingenious little machine can! — Paul Gauguin

Deny that the Bible is, without any qualifications, the very Word of God, and you are left without any ultimate standard of measurement and without any supreme authority. Grant that the Bible is a Divine revelation and communication of God's own mind and will to men, and you have a fixed starting point from which an advance can be made into the domain of truth. — Arthur W. Pink