Swallow The Truth Quotes & Sayings

the more I see of the 'honoured, famed, and great,' the more I see of the littleness, the unsatisfactoriness of all created good; and that no earthly pleasure can fill up the wants of the immortal principle within."20 Now the truth of this was even more apparent. — Karen Swallow Prior

Books have formed the soul of me. I know that spiritual formation is of God, but I also know - mainly because I learned it from books - that there are other kinds of formation, too, everyday gifts, and that God uses the things of this earth to teach us and shape us, and to help us find truth — Karen Swallow Prior

The question is, In what manner do we accept this world, which is a perfect gift of joy? Have we been able to receive it in our heart where we keep enshrined things that are of deathless value to us? We are frantically busy making use of the forces of the universe to gain more and more power; we feed and we clothe ourselves from its stores, we scramble for its riches, and it becomes for us a field of fierce competition. But were we born for this, to extend our proprietary rights over this world and make of it a marketable commodity? When our whole mind is bent only upon making use of this world it loses for us its true value. We make it cheap by our sordid desires; and thus to the end of our days we only try to feed upon it and miss its truth, just like the greedy child who tears leaves from a precious book and tries to swallow them. — Rabindranath Tagore

Listen to what I'm tellin' you, boy! This is why we couldn't tell you the truth - 'cause you wasn't lookin' for the truth. You was lookin' for confirmation of what you already believed. The truth was starin' you in the face and you didn't want it. How the hell could I get away wit' killin' somebody and authorities never come? Huh? I know we in the country, but we ain't on Mars! That don't make no sense! But you couldn't swallow the truth that I had done changed, so you held on to the ignorance you always believed - that I was a mean, nasty, evil woman. That's what's wrong wit' the world. We don't let people change." She paused, frowning. "Sometimes, when people change, we change 'em right back into what they was 'cause the change don't fit how we know 'em. So people get tired of fightin' to make other folks see 'em differently. Most stop tryin'." TL — Daniel Black

Am I too blunt? If the truth is too hard to swallow, should I feed you soft lies? — Edward W. Robertson

Truth is the most bitter to accept, swallow and digest it. The moment you speak truth, you lose your popularity. But I don't care. — Bikram Choudhury

Milton puts it most profoundly when he says, Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion. Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy. In other words, the power of truth lies not in abstract propositions but in the understanding and willful application of truth by living, breathing persons which can occur only in the context of liberty. — Karen Swallow Prior

Sometimes people would rather accept a lie than know the truth. Life is a whole lot easier to swallow that way. — K.K. Allen

And this is the sense of the word "grammar" which our inaccurate student detests, and this is the sense of the word which every sensible tutor will maintain. His maxim is "a little, but well"; that is, really know what you say you know: know what you know and what you do not know; get one thing well before you go on to a second; try to ascertain what your words mean; when you read a sentence, picture it before your mind as a whole, take in the truth or information contained in it, express it in your own words, and, if it be important, commit it to the faithful memory. Again, compare one idea with another; adjust truths and facts; form them into one whole, or notice the obstacles which occur in doing so. This is the way to make progress; this is the way to arrive at results; not to swallow knowledge, but (according to the figure sometimes used) to masticate and digest it. — John Henry Newman

Lies are terrible things. One could say that the greatest sins afflicting modern society are the proliferation of lies and silence. We lie through our teeth, then swallow our tongues. All the same, were we to speak only the truth all year round, then the truth might lose its value. — Haruki Murakami

You recognize the truth because sometimes it's hard to swallow, but if you hold it in your mouth, refusing to eat it, you are going to choke. — Monica Johnson

It is a general rule that when the grain of truth cannot be found, men will swallow great helpings of falsehood. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

When I saw corruption, I was forced to find truth on my own. I couldn't swallow the hypocrisy. — Barry White

The Christian should never have to put others down in order to feel good about himself. Instead, he can simply check out the media's insistent portrayal of Christianity and feel grateful that he isn't as deceived as the masses who really swallow the garbage. Ignorance is ultimately how people put themselves down, and the mere Christian who knows what entails the mere Christian is ultimately free from such. — Criss Jami

The truth is scary. We all think we want it, but once it's given, it's harder to swallow than we originally thought. But sometimes, when the pain is too much, we have to be honest with ourselves. Why are we unhappy? Why are we scared? Is it internal, or external? Then when we find the answer, we need to accept it (see chapter 1), and make the necessary changes to fix it. — S.R. Crawford

God who spoke the world into existence with words is, in fact, the source of meaning of all words. My journey toward that discovery is the story of this book. I thought my love of books was taking me away from God, but as it turns out, book were the backwoods path back to God, bramble-filled and broken, yes, but full of truth and wonder. — Karen Swallow Prior

Discovering truth is a process that occurs over time, more fully with each idea or book that gets added to the equation. Sure, many of the books I read in my youth filled my head with silly notions and downright lies that I mistook for truth, but only until I read something else that exposed the lie for what it was. — Karen Swallow Prior

Whenever you get an appetite, you feed yourself. Therefore, fill your belly on wisdom of things old and new. Only swallow the truth, less you choke on the lies. — Amaka Imani Nkosazana

The fact that your lifespan is an infinitesimally tiny fragment in the life of the universe, and that there is, at the very least, a strong possibility that when you die, you disappear completely and forever, and that in five hundred years nobody will remember you and in five billion years the Earth will be boiled into the sun: this can be a profound and defining truth about your existence that you reflexively repulse, that you flinch away from and refuse to accept or even think about, consistently pushing to the back of your mind whenever it sneaks up, for fear that if you allow it to sit in your mind even for a minute, it will swallow everything else. It can make everything you do, and everything anyone else does, seem meaningless, trivial to the point of absurdity. — Greta Christina

How do you swallow the truth after a diet of lies? — Gennifer Albin

Honor, More charged, 'is the religion of tragedy.' Emotions such as love, hate, ambition, pride, and jealousy, 'form a dazzling system of worldly morality,' which contradicts 'the spirit of that religion whose characteristics are charity, meekness, peaceableness, longsuffering, gentleness, forgiveness. — Karen Swallow Prior

Creativity's too big a pill; the truth's too hard to swallow. Sprinkle sugar in a straight line and we'll all inhale and follow. — Kelby Losack

The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow. — Edward Abbey

Of course, there is some truth in advertising. There's yeast in bread, but you can't make bread with yeast alone. Truth in advertising," announced Lord Peter sententiously, "is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal. It provides a suitable quantity of gas, with which to blow out a mass of crude misrepresentation into a form that the public can swallow. — Dorothy L. Sayers

That truth which you swallow from others will not be yours ... you have to realize truth and work it our for yourself according to your own nature ... All must struggle to be individuals-strong, standing on your own feet, thinking your own thoughts, realizing you own Self. No use swallowing doctrines others pass on-standing up together like soldiers in jail, sitting down together, all eating the same food, all nodding their heads at the same time. Variation is the sign of life. Sameness is the sign of death. — Swami Vivekananda

I'd swallow some whiskey and listen to the waves while I thought about Naoko. It was too strange to think that she was dead and no longer part of this world. I couldn't absorb the truth of it. I couldn't believe it. I had heard the nails being driven into the lid of her coffin, but I still couldn't adjust to the fact that she had returned to nothingness. — Haruki Murakami

He sat before a note book of blank pages, saying: I swallow my own words. I chew and chew everything until it deteriorates. Every thought or impulse I have is chewed into nothingness. I want to capture all my thoughts at once, but they run in all directions. If I could do this I would be capturing the nimblest of minds, like a shoal of minnows. I would reveal innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and cowardice and courage. I want to tell the whole truth, but I cannot tell the whole truth because I would have to write four pages at once, like four columns simultaneously, four pages to the present one, and so I do not write at all. I would have to write backwards, retrace my steps constantly to catch the echoes and overtones. — Anais Nin

Find the grain of truth in criticism-chew it and swallow it. — Don Sutton

Schools train you to be ignorant with style [ ... ] they prepare you to be a usable victim for a military industrial complex that needs manpower. As long as you're just smart enough to do a job and just dumb enough to swallow what they feed you, you're going to be alright [ ... ] So I believe that schools mechanically and very specifically try and breed out any hint of creative thought in the kids that are coming up. — Frank Zappa

Some truths are hard to swallow, so we share it within tales that most people will accept without being frightened by the truth hidden within. — Larry Itejere

Our brain is a circuit board with neurons and terminals ready to be wired. We are born free, then programmed to obey our parents, to tell the truth, pass exams, pursue and achieve, love and propagate, age and fade unfulfilled and uncertain what it has all been for. We swallow the operating system with our mother's milk and sleepwalk into the forest of consumer illusion craving shoes, houses, cars, magazines, experiences that endorse our preconceived dreams and opinions. We grow into our parents. We becomes clones, robots, matchstick men thinking and saying the same, feeling the same, behaving the same, appreciating in books and films and art shows those things we already recognize and understand. — Chloe Thurlow

Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit. — Martha Gellhorn