Truth Is Relative Quotes & Sayings

What makes us most human is not whether we are or are not biologically driven and determined beings; but, rather, how we respond to this relative truth. The conscious choices we make in related to the dynamic, psychobiological forces of the daimonic define our humanity. — Stephen A. Diamond

Philosophy has been described as thinking about thinking, and all Christians should do that. The term comes from two Greek words, philia ("love") and sophia ("wisdom"), thus "loving wisdom." Nothing anti-Christian appears in that definition. Problems arise if we seek wisdom apart from God, or elevate human reason above Him, but according to Proverbs 4:5-7, God's people should love and seek wisdom.
Formal philosophy is divided into three major areas-incidentally, all core Christian issues: (1) Metaphysics,
which asks questions about the nature of reality: "What is real?" "Is the basic essence of the world matter, or spirit, or something else?" (2) Epistemology, which addresses issues concerning truth and knowledge: "What do we know?" "How do we know it?" "Why do we think it's true?" (3) Ethics, which considers moral problems: "What is right and wrong?" "Are moral values absolute or relative?" "What is the good life, and how do we achieve it? — Rick Cornish

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. — Allan Bloom

God had said to listen to what five people tell you and don't hold on to your own opinion. The person who holds on to his opinion is isolated. If you insist upon it, it will harm you as well as others. This true-false is a relative truth; it is a mundane [worldly] truth. One should not insist upon it. — Dada Bhagwan

Kids are told there are no differences between boys and girls. They are told there is no such thing ultimately as right and wrong. Values are relative. Truth is relative. Morality is defined by individual choice. If that isn't a recipe for sexual harassment and other forms of sexual and physical abuse, I don't know what it is. — Rush Limbaugh

Lies erase. Lies are power. Power to be had by you. Truth is relative, no? Power defeats truth, paper, scissors. Are you faux real? — David David Katzman

Truth is relative. Truth is what you can make the voter believe is the truth. If you're smart enough, truth is what you make the voter think it is. That's why I'm a Democrat. I can make the Democratic voters think whatever I want them to. — James Carville

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don't. — Roger Scruton

The fascination of any search after truth lies not in the attainment, which at best is found to be very relative, but in the pursuit, where all the powers of the mind and character are brought into play and are absorbed by the task. One feels oneself in contact with something that is infinite and one finds joy that is beyond expression in sounding the abyss of science and the secrets of the infinite mind. — Florence Bascom

Truth is only relative to those that ignore hard evidence. — A.E. Samaan

Truth is relative, and there is always something missing in truth that prevents it from being perfect. — Nawal El Saadawi

The point is that (little-t) truth is a matter of definition relative to the grid one is using at the moment, and that (capital-T) Truth, metaphysical reality, is irrelevant to grids entirely. Pick a grid, and through it some chaos appears ordered and some appears disordered. Pick another grid, and the same chaos will appear differently ordered and disordered. Reality is the original Rorschach. Verily! So much for all that. — Malaclypse The Younger

The fate of the physiology of the brain is independent of the truth and falsity of my assertions relative to the laws of the organization of the nervous system, in general, and of the brain in particular, just as the knowledge of the functions of a sense is independent of the knowledge of the structure of its apparatus. — Franz Joseph Gall

The death of a lesser man is the death of all those who believe themselves to be greater. — Shaun Hick

I cannot often enough say, that a man is only a relative and representative nature. Each is a hint of the truth, but far enough from being that truth, which yet he quite newly and inevitably suggests to us. If I seek it in him, I shall not find it. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The truth is relative in this world; it's changing all the time because we live in a world of illusions. What is true right now is not true later. Then it could be true again. The truth in hell could also be just another concept, another lie that can be used against you. Our own denial system is so powerful and strong that it becomes very complicated. There are truths covering lies, and lies covering truth. Like peeling an onion, you uncover the truth little by little until in the end, you open your eyes to find out that everyone around you, including yourself, is lying all the time. Almost — Miguel Ruiz

The seeker of God is the real lover of vidya, unchangeable truth; all else is avidya, relative knowledge. — Paramahansa Yogananda

Truth has always been relative in China, but political power has not, they say, and the same is still true today. — Rob Gifford

How treacherous history is! Half-truths, ignorance, deceptions, false trails, errors and lies, and buried somewhere in between all of that, the truth, in which it is easy to lose faith, of which it is consequently easy to say, it's a chimera, there's no such thing, everything is relative, one man's absolute belief is another man's fairy tale; but about which we insist, we insist most emphatically, that it is too important an idea to give up to the relativity merchants. — Salman Rushdie

The truth is that relative income is not directly related to happiness. Nonpartisan social-survey data clearly show that the big driver of happiness is earned success: a person's belief that he has created value in his life or the life of others. — Arthur C. Brooks

Truth is relative, then. It is about timing. It is about what is safe. Truth is the luxury of the privileged, of people who have plenty of food and are not forced to hide because they are Jews. Truth can destroy, and therefore it is not always wise or even healthy to be truthful. — Patricia Cornwell

Truth is relative! — Manaswini

Even when the truth is in fact simple, simplicity is still relative. — Criss Jami

I encounter one example after another of how relative truth is. — Raoul Wallenberg

There is synthesis when, in combining therein judgments that are made known to us from simpler relations, one deduces judgments from them relative to more complicated relations.
There is analysis when from a complicated truth one deduces more simple truths. — Andre-Marie Ampere

If truth is relative, then it's cousin is anarchy. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

We are the Western World. We read, see, think. Left. To. Right. We can't help it.
..The problem with Top to Bottom is that it's unAmerican. We want to begin in the depths and climb our way upward. But our typographic system argues against this and wins, and images follow suit.
..What you have to be careful to remember about Big and Small, is that they can extend to infinity in either direction. Consider: Big can always be bigger and Small smaller. The atom is the Universe and vice versa. And they're both identical.
..Left to Right, Top to Bottom, Big and Small; on a two-dimensional plane, all of these tools rely on a relative truth. Now we come to In Front Of and In Back of, which for us are big, fat lies. Very useful though, and the first of many at your disposal. — Chip Kidd

Those wretches tainted with the error of Indifferentism and Modernism hold that dogmatic truth is not absolute, but relative: that is, that it must adapt itself to the varying necessities of the times and the varying dispositions of souls, since it is not contained in an unchangeable revelation, but is, by its very nature, meant to accommodate itself to the life of man. — Pope Pius XI

The bookis a distant relative of the truth, and the film is a distant relative of the book, — Danny Porush

Truth is not something that is relative to one situation and then changes to fit another situation. Truth is constant, never changing. — Gwen Burton

When you put relative and absolute truth together and they become one unit, it becomes possible to make things workable. You are not too much on the side of absolute truth, or you would become too theoretical. You are not too much on the side of relative truth, or you would become too precise. When you put them together, you realize that there is no problem. — Chogyam Trungpa

The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple indeterminate, relative ones. — Robert M. Pirsig

On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand, postmodernism tells it like it really is.
On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.
Values are subjective
but sexism and racism are really evil.
Technology is bad and destructive
and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others.
Tolerance is good and dominance is bad
but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows. — Stephen Hicks

The Bible's been attacked. What is truth? It's relative. — Todd Burpo

Of course, there are different truths on different levels. Things are true relative to other things; "long" and "short" relate to each other, "high" and "low," and so on. But is there any absolute truth? Something self-sufficient, independently true in itself? I don't think so. — Dalai Lama

My recommendation instead, however, is that we do not surrender questions of value, whether absolute matters of truth, goodness, and beauty or relative judgment of more or less truth, goodness, and beauty. With those questions to the fore, in fact, we can interrogate various other traditions and truly learn something that can improve our own. Perhaps the Presbyterians really do know more than we do about due process in church government. Perhaps the Orthodox really do know some things we do not about iconography. Perhaps the Mennonites really can teach us the meaning of 'enough.' Perhaps the Pentecostals can help liberate us from dull and disembodied worship. Baptists who have learned to improve their procedures from Presbyterians, their art from the Orthodox, their finances from the Mennonites, and their worship from the Pentecostals do not therefore become worse Baptists but better ones. And so around the ecumenical circle, no? — John G. Stackhouse Jr.

All statistics consist of our attempts to represent statistically what is in motion; and in the process things assume a weight in our mind which they have not in reality. For this reason a man, who by his profession is concerned with any particular aspect of life, is apt to magnify its proportions; in laying undue stress upon facts he loses his hold upon truth. A detective may have the opportunity of studying crimes in detail, but he loses his sense of their relative places in the whole social economy. When science collects facts to illustrate the struggle for existence that is going on in the kingdom of life, it raises a picture in our minds of "nature red in tooth and claw." But in these mental pictures we give a fixity to colours and forms which are really evanescent. — Rabindranath Tagore

Truth is, of course, relative. But then, so is relative. — James Sallis

Most people do surprisingly poorly when dealing with a relative who is hurting, depressed, or anxious - we get defensive and try to solve the problem rather than finding the truth in what the person is saying. — David D. Burns

We're doomed to be do-gooders for the rest of our lives and doomed to fail. But, happily, truth is a relative business. — Jo Nesbo

Honesty is not the same as truth. That is the obstacle of the notion of relative truths. I would like to put my trust in the lunatic. He is the one least concerned of what I think of him, the mark of an honest man. I can always depend on him to be completely honest in what he thinks and feels, about anything, no matter the consequences laid before him, however with no course of rationale, I cannot necessarily take his word for even the well-being of him in his own reality. — Criss Jami

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin. — Barbara Kingsolver

It seems that truth is progressive approximation in which the relative fraction of our spontaneously tolerated residual error constantly diminishes. — R. Buckminster Fuller

To B-major or B-minor: that is the question. Consider that the major and minor chords are separated by the smallest tonal step which is one half-step carrying in its pitch the gravity of all humanity which needs the major to recognize its relative, inherent tragedy which once given expression seeks the resurrection that only the major can procreate which self-expression gives beauty to the harmony of the major which then confirms the whole truth of the tragic minor saga which overcomes the hidden hand of destiny in the great ellipse of being and the greater cosmic void of nothingness which passage of time has sadly destined to be replayed in the same octave of the ineluctable modality of the audible which ellipse with such a simple twist resonates as infinity which is both meaningless beyond all human capacity for understanding but which holds within it the ubiquitous mystic beauty and truth of the pulsing human heart. — David B. Lentz

If you were far out in space, you would see that the sun neither rises nor sets, but that it shines continuously. And yet, even after realizing that, we can continue to speak of the sunrise or sunset, still see its beauty, paint it, write poems about it, even though we now know that it is a relative rather than an absolute truth. — Eckhart Tolle

It is not given to man to know the whole Truth. His duty lies in living up to the truth as he sees it, and in doing so, to resort to the purest means, i.e., to non-violence. God alone knows absolute truth. Therefore, I have often said, Truth is God. It follows that man, a finite being, cannot know absolute truth. Nobody in this world possesses absolute truth. This is God's attribute alone. Relative truth is all we know. Therefore, we can only follow the truth as we see it. Such pursuit of truth cannot lead anyone astray. — Mahatma Gandhi

An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth
truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing ... To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations ... — Saul Alinsky

Do we say that one must never willingly do wrong, or does it depend upon the circumstances? Is it true, as we have often agreed before, that there is no sense in which wrongdoing is good or honourable? Or have we jettisoned all our former convictions in these last few days? Can you and I at our age, Crito, have spent all these years in serious discussions without realizing that we were no better than a pair of children? Surely the truth is just what we have always said. Whatever the popular view is, and whether the alternative in pleasanter than the present one or even harder to bear, the fact remains that to do wrong is in every sense bad and dishonourable for the person who does it. — Socrates

One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention. — Flannery O'Connor

If beauty is relative, then any and everything when compared to the beauty of God is absolutely hideous. — Criss Jami

Relativism reduces every element of absoluteness to relativity while making a completely illogical exception in favor of this reduction itself. Fundamentally it consists in propounding the claim that there is no truth as if this were truth or in declaring it to be absolutely true that there is nothing but the relatively true; one might just as well say that there is no language or write that there is no writing. In short, every idea is reduced to a relativity of some sort, whether psychological, historical, or social; but the assertion nullifies itself by the fact that it too presents itself as a psychological, historical, or social relativity. The assertion nullifies itself if it is true and by nullifying itself logically proves thereby that it is false; its initial absurdity lies in the implicit claim to be unique in escaping, as if by enchantment, from a relativity that is declared to be the only possibility. — Frithjof Schuon

The world in which we now live is a world whose outlook is so distorted that we absolutize what is relative (money-making, power, success) and relativize what is absolute (truth, moral values, and God). — Alice Von Hildebrand

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute. — Walter Lippmann

Beauty, like truth, is relative to the time when one lives and to the individual who can grasp it. — Gustave Courbet

In the absence of either a widely accepted theory of language learning or a solid empirical base for classroom practice, teachers and learners have always been, and will always be, vulnerable to drastic pendulum swings of fashion, the coming and going of various unconventional and unlamented "Wonder Methods" being an obvious recent example. The sad truth is that after at least 2,000 years, most language teaching takes place on a wing and a prayer - sometimes successfully, but often a relative failure. — Michael H. Long

... but every activity we pursue comes with an opportunity cost, as the economists remind us. Time spent commuting to work is time not spent with your kids. Time spent debating the relative merits of kale versus arugula is time not spent discussing the nature of beauty and truth. I look down at my plate of bland grub with newfound respect. — Eric Weiner

Truths are not relative. What is relative are opinions about truth. — Nicolas Gomez Davila

Recognition that most of what is generally considered the truth is entirely relative. Subject and object are not as distinct as most people think. If the boundary separating the two isn't clear-cut to begin with, it is not such a difficult task to intentionally shift back and forth from one to the other. — Haruki Murakami

Truth is relative," the man replied. "Our minds have a tendency to remember things only the way in which they happened to us, the way they made us feel. It results in us inadvertently lying about what we experienced — Dylan Saccoccio

Standards are different for all things, so the standard set by man is by no means the only 'certain' standard. If you mistake what is relative for something certain, you have strayed far from the ultimate truth. — Zhuangzi

It's like there is a huge balance scale in the sky, weighing the relative strength of two opposing fields of Influence. One side represents those opening to a higher personal spirituality, and thus acting to lift others into that consciousness. The other side of the scale represents those who are still stuck in fear and anger, who are acting to pull people down into a simmering, untruthful fear and rage. The statement hit me hard. That meant there was a contagion from both sides, and the balance shifted daily depending on how consistently those in Alignment could hold their truth with others. — James Redfield

Human thought by its nature is capable of giving, and does give, absolute truth, which is compounded of a sum-total of relative truths. — Vladimir Lenin

If all meaning were relative, then the meanings of the terms in the proposition "All meaning is relative" would be relative. Therefore the proposition "All meaning is relative" destroys itself. It is nothing but an evasion of reality. That seems a high price to pay, even for the privilege of killing people. — J. Budziszewski

Learn to look not just with your eyes but with your heart. The truth is that style and taste are all relative. It is not a question whether or not someone has good taste. It is how something feels to the individual ... Open your heart and mind to the world, and find the things that connect with you. How else will you know how to design your home? — Kelly Hoppen

Our violent, narcissistic, noncommittal, "me first" culture is simply the logical and predictable expression of "truth" as a relative, subjective, unverifiable concept. — Chip Ingram

It is hard to witness to truth to people who believe truth is relative. It is hard to proclaim the forgiveness of sins to people who believe that, since morality is relative, they have no sins to forgive. — Gene Veith

Live, you say, in the present;
Live only in the present.

But I don't want the present, I want reality;
I want things that exist, not time that measures them.

What is the present?
It's something relative to the past and the future.
It's a thing that exists in virtue of other things existing.
I only want reality, things without the present.

I don't want to include time in my scheme.
I don't want to think about things as present; I want to think of them as things.
I don't want to separate them from themselves, treating them as present.

I shouldn't even treat them as real.
I should treat them as nothing.

I should see them, only see them;
See them till I can't think about them.

See them without time, without space,
To see, dispensing with everything but what you see.
And this is the science of seeing, which isn't a science. — Alberto Caeiro

A modern theory of knowledge which takes account of the relational as distinct from the merely relative character of all historical knowledge must start with the assumption that there are spheres of thought in which it is impossible to conceive of absolute truth existing independently of the values and position of the subject and unrelated to the social context. — Karl Mannheim

Beyond happiness and unhappiness is truth. Truth is not affected by anything in the relative world. Truth is the unifying aspect of existence. — Frederick Lenz

Most people, including ourselves, live in a world of relative ignorance. We are even comfortable with that ignorance, because it is all we know. When we first start facing truth, the process may be frightening, and many people run back to their old lives. But if you continue to seek truth, you will eventually be able to handle it better. In fact, you want more! It's true that many people around you now may think you are weird or even a danger to society, but you don't care. Once you've tasted the truth, you won't ever want to go back to being ignorant — Socrates

To fail to exhibit that we take truth seriously at those points where there is a cost in our doing so, is to push the next generation in the relative, dialectical millstream that surrounds us. — Francis A. Schaeffer

Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has. — Robert M. Pirsig

The absolute truth is one for an infinity of possible relative truths which lie. — Sorin Cerin

We take a word, such as freedom, and dress it up to mean the ability to bear firearms, display flags, collect rainwater or grow clean food, but absolute freedom is not a relative construct. It is not there one minute or outlawed the next. It can never be seized or given. It is ever-lasting and omnipresent. — Anita B. Sulser PhD

Only very odd people don't realize that truth-telling is always a relative value. — John Gardner

How can you say one thing when your data shows something else. One doesn't know what was on the authors' minds and maybe they interpreted things differently but the sense is that the literature maintains an attitude somewhat like the approach of lawyers. If the jury buys it, it doesn't matter whether or not it's true. In scientific publishing, the jury are the reviewers and the editors. If they are already convinced of the conclusion, if there is no voir dire, you will surely win the case. — Richard David Feinman

The truth is an arbitrary, shifting, culturally relative, and historically molded phenomenon. — Ken Wilber