Quotes & Sayings About Seeking Truth

Nor does linguistics need the nominal blessing of science. It is some sort of systematic, truth-seeking, knowledge-making enterprise, and as long as it brings home the epistemic bacon by turning up results about language, the label isn't terribly important. Etymology is helpful in this regard: science is a descendant of a Latin word for knowledge, and it is only the knowledge that matters. — Randy Allen Harris

People as a whole see a limited scope of the world, chained to their notions, often misguided notions, of what truth is. Seeking something more, I would argue, is the very act of unchaining oneself from the cave wall. — Elizabeth Finn

A man of science rises ever, in seeking truth; and if he never finds it in its wholeness, he discovers nevertheless very significant fragments; and these fragments of universal truth are precisely what constitutes science. — Claude Bernard

If you are not actively seeking the truth, you are destined to only know what people tell you, and people will only tell you what they want you to know. — Jack Mierop

Open the book and read it to renew your mind. — Lailah Gifty Akita

You adulterate the truth as you write. There isn't any pretense that you try to arrive at the literal truth. And the only consolation when you confess to this flaw is that you are seeking to arrive at poetic truth, which can be reached only through fabrication, imagination, stylization. What I'm striving for is authenticity; none of it is real. — W.G. Sebald

Greed is a strange, strange sin.
All you want to do is acquire. Acquire money, acquire material, acquire time, acquire energy, acquire attention. The running mantra is "I want, I want, I want" but that quickly turns to "I need, I need, I need."
Suddenly there just isn't enough time for friends, for family, for anyone. Your goal is to acquire and to make sure what you acquire stays acquired. Your life depends on it. You don't see truth because the truth is shadowed by enormous homes, incredibly fast cars, in lavish spending. Your life no longer belongs to you, but you are blind to it all because those around you are seeking the same.
So you shuffle along at an impossible rate, and you pass the real world around you.
But what you'll come to realize, altogether too late, is that it's never enough.
It's simply never enough — Amelie Fisher

He was partly a young man of our time - that is, honest by nature, demanding the truth, seeking it and believing in it, and in that belief demanding immediate participation in it with all the strength of his soul; demanding an immediate deed, with an unfailing desire to sacrifice everything for this deed, even life. Although, unfortunately, these young men do not understand that the sacrifice of life is, perhaps, the easiest of all sacrifices in many cases, while to sacrifice, for example, five or six years of their ebulliently youthful life to hard, difficult studies, to learning, in order to increase tenfold their strength to serve the very truth and the very deed that they loved and set out to accomplish - such sacrifice is often almost beyond the strength of many of them. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There is a difference between seeking to know things for the sake of knowledge itself and being willing to undergo renunciation to be possessed by the truth. — James M. Houston

Whenever we make the choice to bring fear into the light with truth-seeking questions, we shall find soul-growing answers. — Molly Friedenfeld

Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear. — Emil M. Cioran

It takes extraordinary mental discipline to transmit human experience without perversion. Truth telling is unnatural. Lying is an important aspect of humanity. We lie to other people to prevent hurt feelings and we deceive ourselves in order to protect our noble sense of being a good person. Dishonesty and inaccuracy preserves our quest seeking uninterrupted personal pleasure. I shall eschew pleasure seeking and cultivate precision of mind and moral character that precious truth telling necessitates. Reading and writing, along with observing nature and studious reflection on vivid personal experiences is the process methodology that will bring me closest to discovering inviolate verity of existence and becoming a doyen for all the immaculate truth, beauty, and goodness in this world. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Science is a principle and a process of seeking truth. Truth cannot be purchased, and thus, truth cannot be altered by money. — Tyrone Hayes

We are always hearing of people who are around seeking after the Truth. I have never seen a (permanent) specimen. I think he has never lived. But I have seen several entirely sincere people who thought they were (permanent) Seekers after the Truth. They sought diligently, persistently, carefully, cautiously, profoundly, with perfect honesty and nicely adjusted judgment- until they believed that without doubt or question they had found the Truth. That was the end of the search. The man spent the rest of his hunting up shingles wherewith to protect his Truth from the weather. — Mark Twain

Theres a process of self doubt when things go wrong. Whether or not its personal or a friend in trouble, looking at ones self isn't always the answer neither is seeking god. Just acception and the will to decide is a human condition, but the circle of choices flux with time. So fight my friend or choose your demise, because after all we are only human. — Adam Mickley Wood

Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth. — Michael Crichton

I was an answer-seeking machine, in love with what I called "the truth," whether it came in the form of little truth particles stuck to the pages of books or vast patterns screaming out from the obvious and mundane. — Barbara Ehrenreich

As soon as the theoretician attempts to take account of so-called 'utility' and 'reality' instead of absolute truth, his work will cease to be a polar star of seeking humanity and instead will become a prescription for everyday life. — Adolf Hitler

Some of the worst enemies of the man who is seeking for the truth will appeal to him as old friends in whom he has had great confidence. — Joseph French Johnson

You're after perfection,'Matt said.
'Is that so awful?'
'No, it's not, but if you aim for perfection, you've got to be ready to take the consequences of not getting it and one of those is ending up with no one. — Tim Relf

Truth searches for no one. It waits to be found. — Suzy Kassem

The first duty of man is the seeking after and the investigation of truth. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Since in the age of the internet we are all publishers, each of us bears some private responsibility for the public's sense of truth. If we are serious about seeking the facts, we can each make a small revolution in the way the internet works. If you are verifying information for yourself, you will not send on fake news to others. If you choose to follow reporters whom you have reason to trust, you can also transmit what they have learned to others. If you retweet only the work of humans who have followed journalistic protocols, you are less likely to debase your brain interacting with bots and trolls. We — Timothy Snyder

The man who is seeking truth is free of all societies and cultures. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

You can ask many questions but you cannot question everything. — Lailah Gifty Akita

May I tell you a wonderful truth about your dog? ... In our religion, we believe in reincarnation. We live many times, you see, always seeking to be wiser and more virtuous. If we eventually lead a blameless life, a perfect life, we leave this world and need not endure it again. Between our human lives, we may be reincarnated as other creatures. Sometimes, when someone has led a nearly perfect life but is not yet worthy of nirvana, that person is reincarnated as a very beautiful dog. When the life as the dog comes to an end, the person is reincarnated one last time as a human being, and lives a perfect life. Your dog is a person who has almost arrived at complete enlightenment and will in the next life be perfect and blameless, a very great person. You have been given stewardship of what you in your faith might call a holy soul. — Dean Koontz

Tragically misinformed, some Christian believers at first looked upon hippies as promising prospects through whom the Church could present the claims of Jesus Christ. Clergymen mistakenly proclaimed that hippies were searching for truth and meaning and needed only to be guided. Wasn't their talk about love? Weren't they seeking an opportunity to share the love of God with others?

On the contrary, the hippies claimed to have found meaning for existence through conscious expanding drugs. And although they sang of love in chants and groans, they knew nothing of love's commitment and concern and duty towards one's neighbor. They ignored the responsibility of love and dwelt upon their quest for uninhibited physical gratification. — Bob Larson

We must become reacquainted with our true human selves. — Bryant McGill

it was like trying to see a shadow in the dark. — Melissa Andrea

Naturalism is a picture of the whole of reality that cannot, according to its own intrinsic premises, address the being of the whole; it is a metaphysics of the rejection of metaphysics, a transcendental certainty of the impossibility of transcendental truth, and so requires an act of pure credence logically immune to any verification (after all, if there is a God he can presumably reveal himself to seeking minds, but if there is not then there can be no "natural" confirmation of the fact). Thus naturalism must forever remain a pure assertion, a pure conviction, a confession of blind assurance in an inaccessible beyond; and that beyond, more paradoxically still, is the beyond of no beyond. — David Bentley Hart

Fill your heart with truth so that the wisdom of Christ will flow fluently from you like a living river moving into the seeking hearts of the thirsty. — Calvin W. Allison

Justice is like an invisible creature that flees before us. As long as we keep chasing it, we have it. It's the constant seeking for law and justice that constitutes law and justice. . . . All confusion and disorder and disintegration is just semblance and illusion. Law and order endure in secret. Truth and justice are not a conjuring trick. — Torgny Lindgren

The more power they have over your emotions, the less likely you'll trust your own reality and the truth about the abuse you're enduring. Knowing the manipulative tactics and how they work to erode your sense of self can arm you with the knowledge of what you're facing and at the very least, develop a plan to retain control over your own life and away from toxic people. . . . Taking back our control and power . . . means seeking validating professional help for the abuse we've suffered, detaching from these people in our lives, learning more about the techniques of abusers, finding support networks, sharing our story to raise awareness, and finding appropriate healing modalities that can enable us to transcend and thrive after their abuse. — Shahida Arabi

Doing justice, loving mercy, seeking truth ... these are the issues [the Bible] is clear on. — Mel White

To all those whom seek the iron words of the community: if your book is good, it will stand on its own. Be it a short story, a novel, a novella, a chapter book, a poetry book, a chapbook, a manga or a graphic novel ... it will seek reviews by itself. You need to do nothing with it. Do nothing but write. Give up review seeking and focus on writing, for that is what becomes you in the end. — L'Poni Baldwin

While men believe themselves to be seeking truth for its own sake, they are in fact seeking life in truth. — Miguel De Unamuno

It is not the truth which has to be sought, it is you who have to be brought home. — Osho

Seek for truth,
you'll find me;
Peek for lies,
you'll blind me — Munia Khan

The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavor. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles. — Noam Chomsky

If Christ is missing from your life, it isn't because He is lost. — Toni Sorenson

Who is God? Who are we? What is our purpose? All these questions remain unanswered. I want to reach the genuine seeker of spiritual well-being. My goal is to satisfy the hunger and longing for those who are seeking the truth. — Ravi Zacharias

Arguing, after all, is less about seeking truth than about overcoming opposing views. — Sharon Begley

In modern warfare, journalists are among the first responders, seeking out truth in the turmoil and wreckage, wherever it takes them. — Nancy Gibbs

Do not wear yourself out fighting facts;
do not be weary of seeking truth.
Truth is more than information.
It is the gatekeeper of knowledge. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world. — Patricia Hampl

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth. — Guillermo Del Toro

When we move beyond information toward transformation, we savor the truth of seeking to do life "under the Word" as the ancients have taught. — William Anthony Donohue

Read and search for the answers you seek. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The passion for seeking the truth for truth's sake ... can be kept alive only if we continue to seek the truth for truth's sake. — Franz Boas

The search for the soul is sacred adventure. — Lailah Gifty Akita

In spite of the fact that religion looks backward to revealed truth while science looks forward to new vistas and discoveries, both activities produce a sense of awe and a curious mixture of humility and arrogance in their practitioners. All great scientists are inspired by the subtlety and beauty of the natural world that they are seeking to understand. Each new subatomic particle, every unexpected object, produces delight and wonderment. In constructing their theories, physicists are frequently guided by arcane concepts of elegance in the belief that the universe is intrinsically beautiful. — Paul Davies

Be-careful for what you wish for it may be seeking you as well ... — Master Golden Wizard "Luxas Aureaum"

Your presence fills every space of a heart that seeks to find; Your love is here to save us and Your name is love defined. — Lisa Mischelle Wood

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. — Graham Greene

Only when the seeker is lost, the truth is there. Seek, and you will miss. Seek not, and you will find. The very seeking becomes a barrier to truth, to the ultimate experience. — Swami Dhyan Giten

Utopia is a collective shift of perception away. Abundance is all around us. Only our efforts at tower-building blind us to it, our gaze forever skyward, forever seeking to escape this Earth, this feeling, this moment. — Charles Eisenstein

If moral reflection consists in seeking a fit between the judgments we make and the principles we affirm, how can such reflection lead us to justice, or moral truth? — Michael J. Sandel

Many of us Christians have become extremely skillful in arranging our lives so as to admit the truth of Christianity without being embarrassed by its implications. We arrange things so that we can get on well enough without divine aid, while at the same time ostensibly seeking it. We boast in the Lord but watch carefully that we never get caught depending on Him. — Aiden Wilson Tozer

Does religious conviction provide a powerful reason for killing? Undeniably it often does. It also often provides the sole compelling reason for refusing to kill, or for being merciful, or for seeking peace; only the profoundest ignorance of history could prevent one from recognizing this. For the truth is that religion and irreligion are cultural variables, but killing is a human constant. — David Bentley Hart

I spent a month in India and where I learnt an important word for me, for everything that had come before and after, and the was the word 'seva' - the work you do without wanting reward, simply for the work itself, for the spiritual, for the practice and the experience it gives you by doing that work. I began to realise it was something I was searching for all my life, that I was doing theatre not for myself but for something for a search, for a seeking for something that is behind that, to find a truth somewhere about us. — George Ogilvie

Socrates is a shining example of a man who bravely lived up to his ideals, and, in the end, bravely died for them. Throughout his life, he never lost faith in the mind's ability to discern and decide, and so to apprehend and master reality. Nor did he ever betray truth and integrity for a pitiable life of self-deception and semi-consciousness. In seeking relentlessly to align mind with matter and thought with fact, he remained faithful both to himself and to the world, with the result that he is still alive in this sentence and millions of others that have been written about him. More than a great philosopher, Socrates was the living embodiment of the dream that philosophy might one day set us free. — Neel Burton

You won't be able to find the truth by merely seeking it.
You also have to change your perspective and yourself. — Toba Beta

We spend our lives failing to realise this obvious truth, and thus anxiously seeking to fortify our boundaries, to build our egos and assert our superiority over others, as if we could separate ourselves from them, without realising that interdependence makes us what we are. — Oliver Burkeman

Social media, like blogs, are truth-seeking technologies. In fact, the Internet itself is the greatest truth-generating device ever created. — Jason Calacanis

The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don't know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them - if the storytelling is good enough - we imagine them as being, essentially, like us. If the story is poor, or has an agenda, if it comes out of a paucity of imagination or is rushed, we imagine those other people as essentially unlike us: unknowable, inscrutable, incontrovertible. — George Saunders

The gods did not reveal, from the beginning,
All things to us, but in the course of time
Through seeking we may learn and know things better.
But as for certain truth, no man has known it,
Nor shall he know it,neither of the gods
Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.
For even if by chance he were to utter
The final truth, he would himself not know it:
For all is but a woven web of guesses — Xenophanes

People wasted so much time seeking out the love of their lives in the shape of a partner, when the truth was that for most the real loves of their lives were their children - and everyone else was dispensable. — Anna McPartlin

Reaching inside the heart, at the core of the soul, is a deep hunger. That hunger is a passion which seeks truth. — Pat Patrick

The peculiar vanity of man, who wants to believe and who wants other people to believe that he is seeking after truth, when in fact it is love that he is asking the world to give him. — Albert Camus

Walk with those seeking truth ... — Deepak Chopra

He knew the truth. Yes, my dear child, he would undoubtedly tell a terrified toddler tremulously seeking succor, monsters are real. I happen to have one hanging in my basement. — Rick Yancey

Perfection is not to be attained, but to be pursued infinitely. — Abhijit Naskar

I was one of those kids who was always seeking the truth, and I first looked for truth by reading novels. It took quite a long time for me to realize there are better ways. — Cynthia Kenyon

If you do not seek the truth by yourself, you will be misled. — Lailah Gifty Akita

They say that life is an accident, driven by sexual desire, that the universe has no moral order, no truth, no God.

Driven by insatiable lusts, drunk on the arrogance of power, hypocritical, deluded, their actions foul with self-seeking, tormented by a vast anxiety that continues until their death, convinced that the gratification of desire is life's sole aim, bound by a hundred shackles of hope, enslaved by their greed, they squander their time dishonestly piling up mountains of wealth.

"Today I got this desire, and tomorrow I will get that one; all these riches are mine, and soon I will have even more. Already I have killed these enemies, and soon I will kill the rest. I am the lord, the enjoyer, successful, happy, and strong, noble, and rich, and famous. Who on earth is my equal? — Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

A person desires to leave a mark of goodness on earth before death arrives. All artists are creators in the face of death. All of life a person seeks to salvage something worthwhile and enduring from living a tragic life. We must eventually dance with death. A person begins on a road leading to personal enlightenment by giving up false beliefs, quelling destructive desires, overcoming fearfulness, and by seeking truth. In order to lead an evocative life full of truth, I must stop living a false life, conquer my fearfulness, and begin expressing love, wonder, and gratitude for all the beauty and splendor of the world. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Socrates: So even our walks are dangerous here. But you seem to have avoided the most dangerous thing of all.
Bertha: What's that?
Socrates: Philosophy.
Bertha: Oh, we have philosophers here.
Socrates: Where are they?
Bertha: In the philosophy department.
Socrates: Philosophy is not department.
Bertha: Well, we have philosophers.
Socrates: Are they dangerous?
Bertha: Of course not.
Socrates: Then they are not true philosophers. — Peter Kreeft

Seeking of the truth should be not only part of the Justice Department and part of our judicial system, but also should be ... a goal of reporters today. — John Ensign

For the carpenter's and the geometer's inquiries about the right angle are different also; the carpenter restricts himself to what helps his work, but the geometer inquires into what, or what sort of things, the right angle is, since he studies the truth. We must do the same, then in other areas too, [seeking the proper degree of exactness], so that digressions do not overwhelm our main task. — Aristotle.

My letters seeking a job, though truthful, diminished the full truth. Face would blanch if the facts had been complete: "Dear Sir," I thought. "Do you have a position for a journeyman burglar, con man, forger and car thief; also with experience as armed robber, pimp, card cheat and several other things. I smoked marijuana at twelve (in the 40's) and shot heroin at sixteen. I have no experience with LSD and methedrine. They came to popularity since my imprisonment. I've buggered pretty young boys and feminine homosexuals (but only when locked up away from women). In the idiom of jails, prisons and gutters (some plush gutters) I'm a motherfucker! Not literally, for I don't remember my mother. In my world the term, used as I used it, is a boast of being hell on wheels, outrageously unpredictable, a virtuoso of crime. Of course by being a motherfucker in that world I'm a piece of garbage in yours. Do you have a job? — Edward Bunker

After much seeking for truth and knowledge the profoundness of reality came to me with a clarity never before known. — Gautama Buddha

True education is enlightenment. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Set your soul in search of th he truth. — Lailah Gifty Akita

A Speechmaker's Prayer:
"Let each word of mine be tender and sweet,
Just in case someone might make me eat it. — Ana Claudia Antunes

Add to that that he was to some extent a youth of our last epoch - that is, honest in nature, desiring the truth, seeking for it and believing in it, and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength of his soul, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, life itself, for it. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. — Andre Gide

Don't sail through life, without an anchor, a captain and a compass — Sonya Withrow

God is Truth. There is no incompatibility between science and religion. Both are seeking the same truth. Science shows that God exists. — Derek Barton

As time heads towards the cliff of the unknown, there are those who will be hated and pushed to the fringes. Those who look inward will have the advantage; seeking fulfillment anywhere else will only lead to a dead end and disillusionment. Those who are marginalized, are also uniquely gifted- focus on those gifts that will speak to the truth of the matter and stand your ground. Your intuition and consciousness bears light to the truth. — Dara Reidyr

In truth everything and everyone Is a shadow of the Beloved,
And our seeking is His seeking
And our words are His words ...
We search for Him here and there, while looking right at Him.
Sitting by His side, we ask:
'O Beloved, where is the Beloved?' — Rumi

There are many ways to live, to love, to aspire. The mountain only has one peak but there are limitless paths that you can take to reach it. The secret, they say, is to find your own path and stick to it. What they don't tell you is that the path is invisible. If you find it, or imagine you've found it, you follow the path in the dark with nothing to guide you but self-belief. — Chloe Thurlow

NOBREZA SILENCIOSA. SILENT NOBILITY. It is a mistake to believe that the crucial moments of a life when its habitual direction changes forever must be loud and shrill dramatics, washed away by fierce internal surges. This is a kitschy fairy tale started by boozing journalists, flashbulb-seeking filmmakers and authors whose minds look like tabloids. In truth, the dramatics of a life-determining experience are often unbelievably soft. It has so little akin to the bang, the flash, of the volcanic eruption that, at the moment it is made, the experience is often not even noticed. When it deploys its revolutionary effect and plunges a life into a brand-new light giving it a brand-new melody, it does that silently and in this wonderful silence resides its special nobility. — Pascal Mercier

Such "godlessness" he finds particularly present in the American church, which begins by seeking to faithfully build the world with Christian principles and ends with the total capitulation of the church to the world. Such societies and the churches have no confidence in truth with the result that the place of truth is usurped by sophistic propaganda.[76] — Stanley Hauerwas

The truth that I am seeking is in your missing file. — Bob Dylan

All of the answers you seek can be found in the macrocosmic view of the microcosmic You. — Ka Chinery

When we go all in, we find the answers. They're in us. — Kamal Ravikant

Faith is the opposite of seeking control. It is surrendering control. It embraces the truth that control is an illusion - we never had it and we never will. Rather than trying to overcome our fears by seeking more control, the solution offered by LIFE WITH GOD is precisely the opposite - we overcome fear by surrendering control. — Skye Jethani

The way is not clear, and it is when you do not have clarity, when this is allowed, that you will finally have clarity. — T. Scott McLeod

If you're brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting, which can be anything from your house to bitter, old resentments, and set out on a truth-seeking journey, either externally or internally, and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher and if you are prepared, most of all, to face and forgive some very difficult realities about yourself, then the truth will not be withheld from you. — Elizabeth Gilbert

I may not read tea leaves or palms, my lady, but it is easy enough to read faces. Yours is a questioning face, always looking for answers, always seeking the truth, for yourself and for others." I smiled at her. "I think that is a very polite way of saying I am curious as a cat. And we all know what happened to the cat - curiosity killed her." Rosalie took the last slice of cake onto her plate. "Yes, but you forget the most important thing about the little cat," she said, giving me a wise nod. "She had eight lives left to live. — Deanna Raybourn