Quotes & Sayings About Universal Truths

Imperfection is true perfection. — T.A. Uner

He would not question Barretto's love, since to know Jenny is to love Jenny; it's a universal truth — Erich Segal

A common human error is a tendency to recognize personal truths as universal truths. — Kilroy J. Oldster

One aim of my field is to relativize the images possessed by individuals, discover in these images the factors universal to all human beings, and feed these universal truths back to those same individuals. As a result of this process, people might be able to belong to something even as they maintain their autonomy. — Haruki Murakami

When I was a teenager, her habit of cramming a bunch of words into one line, plus the way her lyrics tend to start with small particularities and ripple outward into universal truths, lodged itself into my ears and wound up directly on my pages. — Meghan Daum

Working with people from all walks of life, from full-time moms to CEOs at large companies, I've distilled many universal truths about success. There's a secret I've learned that works quite well at helping you to achieve what you want: Decide what you want. — Jack Canfield

Universal truths have become an embarrassment, but they won't quite go away. — Mason Cooley

We are the universe seeking truth. — Jay Woodman

In wars, it is always the children who suffer the most. — T.A. Uner

I am not interested in coming to a conclusion or finding the "right" answer, I'm interested in going on a lifelong journey with this God who decided he wanted to walk this same journey with me. — Ricky Maye

He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in their significances. — Jack London

The most useful truths are always universal, and unconnected with accidents and customs. — Samuel Johnson

It's more like can I build a group of characters and can I tell some universal truths that feel real and aren't formulaic in the spirit of filmmakers gone by who've told American stories that were personal and universal as well. — Cameron Crowe

Life is a bunch of 'universal truths', not mine, not anyone else's ...but which exist as a fact..until we 'crack' them for ourselves as 'truths'! — Abha Maryada Banerjee

Behavior is mutable. It changes from place to place. It's like accents, dialect - it varies from one area to another. But there are universal truths about what it means to be a human being. All the other stuff is like applique. Learning that was interesting to me and probably useful for becoming an actor. — Julianne Moore

Of course he was required to wear a seat belt, just as he was required to give directions to a torture camp, because stupidity was the single abiding law of the universe. — Anthony Marra

It dosn't metter how meny type of products. Sale of product is always SAME. — Sushil Singh

It is beyond logic that we see the light. — Julieanne O'Connor

The equal and sustainable right of access to the Earth's bounty seems one of the most transcendent truths a human being can contemplate. Yet, this right is missing from the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The fact that this single principle is violated on an ongoing basis is quite possibly the root cause of many, if not most, other human rights violations. — Martin Adams

I don't even understand it myself. Almost every myth references love, betrayal. Heartbreak. Universal truths that I've read a thousand times but still can't comprehend. No story can explain this pain that feels too big for my body. — Skye Warren

Anybody who has done high school physics knows Newton's Third Law. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. You push against a wall; it pushes back against you. I love the poetry hidden in these truths, in the many laws we've discovered that underpin the universal fabric. We search for meaning ever hungrier, perhaps even with desperation: the symmetry in the equations freaks us out; for all we know, there is just us on this lonely little marble in the inky void. — Sean J Halford

The wonders of life ... you and I are the light! Seek within ... there is no one to fight ... love is all ... we are one ... concentrate on bringing forth your sight ... breathe deep ... the universe is waiting for you divine ones. — Sereda Aleta Dailey

The piano is able to communicate the subtlest universal truths by means of wood, metal and vibrating air. — Kenneth R. Miller

Art is universal. It unites mankind in common brotherhood. As a missionary of civilization, its message is both to heart and mind. Distinctions of tongue or boundary lines disappear before the power of truths, which, like the rainbow, charm by the beauty of variegated hues, or, combined with light, illuminate the universe. Moreover, art is the connecting link in the chain of great minds. Through its language, thought appeals to thought, and sympathy echoes feeling. — James Jackson Jarves

I don't care how old you are, or what background you come from, there are two universal truths. We will always laugh at ... gas if it happens at the wrong time, and we are always curious about what goes on in other people's bedrooms. — Alice Clayton

There's something about approaching universal truths with the simplicity of the acoustic guitar. You can take it anywhere, and it helps me reach listeners of all ages and walks of life. — Jim Croce

Well, there's just some universal truths in a way that I've just observed to be true. You read Voltaire. You read modern literature. Anywhere you go, there's these observations about romantic love and what it does people, and these rotten feelings that rarely are people meaning to do that to each other. — Feist

Historically whoever advocates truth always suffers. I am just a fighter for the truth. Our truths are universal — Merve Kavakci

Ammu watched over them fiercely. Her watchfulness stretched her, made her taut and tense. She was quick to reprimand her children, but even quicker to take offense on their behalf. — Arundhati Roy

Cort taught them to navigate by the sun and stars; Vannay showed them compass and quadrant and sextant and taught them the mathematics necessary to use them. Cort taught them to fight. With history, logic problems, and tutorials on what he called "the universal truths," Vannay taught them how they could sometimes avoid having to do so. Cort taught them to kill if they had to. Vannay, with his limp and his sweet but distracted smile, taught them that violence worsened problems far more often than it solved them. He called it the hollow chamber, where all true sounds became distorted by echoes. — Stephen King

What was boring was somehow more elegant, more perfect, for it was incontrovertible. The boring was everything that certainly was. The boring was everything that had stood the test of time. The boring was that set of truths that were so long fixed that erosion had begun to sand them down. The boring was geological; the boring was universal. The boring, therefore, was preferable. — Rick Moody

Truth is female, since truth is beauty rather than handsomeness; this, Ridcully reflected as the council grumbled in, would certainly explain the saying that a lie could run around the world before Truth has got its, correction, her boots on, since she would have to choose which pair - the idea that any woman in a position to choose would have just one pair of boots being beyond rational belief.
Indeed, as a goddess she would have lots of shoes, and thus many choices: comfy shoes for home truths, hobnail boots for unpleasant truths, simple clogs for universal truths and possibly some kind of slipper for self-evident truth.
More important right now was what kind of truth he was going to have to impart to his colleagues, and he decided not on the whole truth, but instead on nothing but the truth, which dispensed with the need for honesty. — Terry Pratchett

So there you have it: you must believe in something...and that is universal! Believing in nothing is a belief system in itself. — Kazeem Olalekan

[T]he young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. — William Faulkner

From what I can tell, the chief distinguishing factor between children and adults is that children hear everything while appearing not to and adults hear nothing while pretending to listen. — Stephen McCauley

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time. — George Bernard Shaw

How a man handles himself in defeat is more important than how he handles himself in victory. — T.A. Uner

By means of personal experimentation and observation, we can discover certain simple and universal truths. The mind moves the body, and the body follows the mind. Logically then, negative thought patterns harm not only the mind but also the body. What we actually do builds up to affect the subconscious mind and in turn affects the conscious mind and all reactions. — H.E. Davey

I like authors who experiment with narrative and delve into very specific conditions within their characters in order to expose universal truths about humanity. After reading, I like to feel that I've experienced, learned, identified, been challenged and been provided with insight. — Amanda Knox

When you recklessly mine the depths of your imagination, universal truths are freed to surface. — Joshua Emmet

For this reason poetry is more philosophical and more serious than history; poetry utters universal truths, history particular statements. The universal truths concern what befits a person of a certain kind to say or do in accordance with probability and necessity - and that is the aim of poetry, even if it makes use of proper names.* A particular statement tells us what (for example) Alcibiades* did or what happened to him. In the case of comedy this is already manifest: the poets make up the story on the basis of probability and then attach names to the characters at random; — Aristotle.

My theory is that the purpose of art is to transmit universal truths of a sort, but of a particular sort, that in art, whether it's poetry, fiction or painting, you are telling the reader or listener or viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition. And so, what the artist does, or tries to do, is simply to validate the human experience and to tell people the deep human truths which they already unconsciously know. — Walker Percy

There is great worth in holding universal truths and timelessly beautiful words in your heart, which will stay there forever, infusing your thoughts and speech ... — Dan Stevens

It's such a relief to know these are universal truths for so many of us in the adoption triad. Gosh, how much easier things could have been for you, for me, and your folks, if literature like this had been around, say, five, ten years ago, when we could've all really used it. — Paula Gruben

You should know both the universal and the personal, the realm of forms and the freedom to not cling to them. The forms of the world have their place, but in another way, there is nothing there. To be free, we need to respect both of these truths. — Ajahn Chah

The poet lives and writes at the frontier between deep internal experience and the revelations of the outer world. There is no going back for the poet once this frontier has been reached; a new territory is visible and what has been said cannot be unsaid. The discipline of poetry is in overhearing yourself say difficult truths from which it is impossible to retreat. Poetry is a break for freedom. In a sense all poems are good; all poems are an emblem of courage and the attempt to say the unsayable; but only a few are able to speak to something universal yet personal and distinct at the same time; to create a door through which others can walk into what previously seemed unobtainable realms, in the passage of a few short lines. — David Whyte

Our attitudes, opinions, beliefs and judgments are, simply put, our attitudes, opinions, beliefs and judgments. They are not universal truths. — Robert J. White

Laws of nature have no physical properties of mass /energy. They are platonic truths in transcendent realm that create & govern the Universe. — Deepak Chopra

The only way my life makes sense is if, regardless of culture, race, religion, tribe, there is this commonality, these essential human truths and passions and hopes and moral precepts that are universal. And that we can reach out beyond our differences. If that is not the case, then it is pretty hard for me to make sense of my life. — Barack Obama

I write so others might contemplate things that are out of the ordinary. I write to make people feel - to cause laughter and tears and anger at injustice. I write so the world will imagine and wonder at crazy, incredible truths. I write to have a tiny bit of influence on a universal conscience. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Yes, of course, believing in universal moral truths can be used to oppress others. But what if that absolute truth is a man who died for his enemies, who did not respond in violence with violence but forgave them? How could that story, if it is the center of your life, lead you to take up power and dominate others? — Timothy J. Keller

Instead of telling our valuable stories, we seek safety in abstractions, speaking to each other about our opinions, ideas, and beliefs rather than about our lives. Academic culture blesses this practice by insisting that the more abstract our speech, the more likely we are to touch the universal truths that unite us. But what happens is exactly the reverse: as our discourse becomes more abstract, the less connected we feel. There is less sense of community among intellectuals than in the most 'primitive' society of storytellers. Parker Palmer, AHW, 123 — Parker J. Palmer

...once you express your will, the Universe will conspire with each and every atom to help you reach your destiny. — Katy Tackes

Jesus became a God and reached His great state of under-standing through consistent effort and continuous obedience to all the Gospel truths and universal laws. — Milton R. Hunter

A child is a reinvigorating experience. It almost does feel like immortality, but not in the way people think. It reminds us there are universal truths that are most simply seen through the mind of a young person. — Kelsey Grammer

Not only does every Hebrew word have its own definition, but every Hebrew letter, within the word, has its own meaning. God placed before you a great banquet of universal truths. All this in 22 Hebrew letters. Every letter contains a progressive curriculum designed to teach you about this marvelous world that God gave us. These letters will flavor each word's definition claiming its place in God's well organized universe. — Michael Ben Zehabe

Heroes are important not only because they symbolize what we believe to be important, but because they also convey universal truths about personal self-discovery and self-transcendence, one's role in society, and the relation between the two. — Alan Hirsch

Memoir is actually the most egoless genre, even though it might seem ostensibly so much ego-driven. In order for it to succeed, you have to dissolve the self into these larger universal truths, and explore these deeper mysteries. If it's purely autobiographical and ego-driven, it's going to fail. — Nick Flynn

He [the writer] must, teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and compassion and sacrifice. See Poets & Writers — William Faulkner

Truth is universal. Perception of truth varies. — Bohdi Sanders

The benefits of science are not only material ones. The truths that science teaches are of common interest the world over. The language of science is universal, and is a powerful force in bringing the peoples of the world closer together. — Arthur Compton

It was truly an abomination of nature that one always found the most comfortable spot in the bed five minutes before one had to leave it. — Mia Ryan

A 'caring' judgment is still a judgment. And any form of judgment creates blocks and stagnation. — Alaric Hutchinson

He thought one of the universal truths of life was that, sooner or later, someone always paid. — Stephen King

As long as we don't cut off our hearts, the inner workings of the universe illuminate before us. — Rivera Sun

Conservatism aims to maintain in working order the loyalties of the community to perceived truths and also to those truths which in their judgment have earned universal recognition. — William F. Buckley Jr.

In poems, equally as in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The secrets of the universe aren't really secrets. It's just that humanity is too subjugated by their blissful ignorance to ask the right questions. When you have all of the answers, but are unable to ask any questions to them, then all you have are secrets. — Lionel Suggs

Yes, I decided, a man can truly change. The events of the past year have taught me much about myself, and a few universal truths. I learned, for instance, that while wounds can be inflicted easily upon those we love, it's often much more difficult to heal them. Yet the process of healing those wounds provided the richest experience of my life, leading me to believe that while I've often overestimated what I could accomplish in a day, I had underestimated what I could do in a year. But most of all, I learned that it's possible for two people to fall in love all over again, even when there's been a lifetime of disappointment between them. — Nicholas Sparks

In science, there are no universal truths, just views of the world that have yet to be shown to be false. — Brian Cox

The truths that are found in the Bible are universal truths. And it shapes who you are and guides you throughout your life. — Ernie Hudson

Giants bleed like everybody else. — Dan Groat

Nothing in the Shastra, which is manifestly contrary to universal truths and morals, can stand. — Mahatma Gandhi

The only truths which are universal are those gross enough to be thought so. — Paul Valery

No matter who the characters are, you can strip them down and find small universal truths. — Jena Malone

Throughout history there have been those who have created change, and others who have feared it. — T.A. Uner

Life has never been All or Nothing- it's All and Nothing. Forget the binaries. — Jeanette Winterson

To be angered by evil is to partake of it, stupid. - Phrases of Import and Salvation, Chapter IX, The Book of Universal Truths and Other Humorous Anecdotes — Alan Dean Foster

Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the Pythagorean theorem just waiting to be discovered by Platonic reasoners? Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings? — Jonathan Haidt

While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because they represent and embody great universal truths (and will explore several such myths later in this book), the myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie. Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the species by its encouragement and seeming validation of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth. — M. Scott Peck

The Tarot embodies symbolical presentations of universal ideas, behind which lie all the implicits of the human mind, and it is in this sense that they contain secret doctrine, which is the realization by the few of truths embedded in the consciousness of all. — A. E. Waite

Materialized in a female body, with a life of an ordinary person, through centuries, She ascends to meet the ones that are ready for Her, that call Her, that have a wish to understand. She is the personification of the Universal Mother. She lives Love and Clarity and She dies at Will, when She decides that it is time to go. Her name is Ama. — Natasa Nuit Pantovic

Communism starts with the proposition that there are no universal truths or general truths of human nature. — Richard M. Nixon

But now, where the spirit of the Western nationalism prevails, the whole people is being taught from boyhood to foster hatreds and ambitions by all kinds of means - by the manufacture of half-truths and untruths in history, by persistent misrepresentation of other races and the culture of unfavourable sentiments towards them, by setting up memorials of events, very often false, which for the sake of humanity should be speedily forgotten, thus continually brewing evil menace towards neighbours and nations other than their own. This is poisoning the very fountainhead of humanity. It is discrediting the ideals, which were born of the lives of men who were our greatest and best. It is holding up gigantic selfishness as the one universal religion for all nations of the world. — Rabindranath Tagore

Experience alone cannot deliver to us necessary truths; truths completely demonstrated by reason. Its conclusions are particular, not universal. — John Dewey

One way or another, I think we are all destined to learn the same lessons in life. Universal truths are universal truths. They cannot be changed. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Understanding vibrations helps us in making decision for building positive circumstances within us instead of outside. — Hina Hashmi

The more uncompromisingly specific you are the more you end up touching the bigger universal truths. — Tom Hooper

The truths embodied in historical stories are thus not absolute or universal, but relative to the cultural context in which they are made. — Richard Handler

-Let us celebrate the joy and sorrow, Sidip suddenly recited, -the wonder and mystery of all we see, so that we might live and learn as we were meant to. They say of stardust we are formed, that the ocean flows through our veins, and our thoughts are of quantum particles strung together by slender threads of charged ions. Therefore all things are connected, all things have spirit, you, me, the animals, plants, rocks, the oceans, planets, stars and the whole universe, these quantum particles are forming webs of awareness focusing at the centre where dwells the collective unconsciousness of all that has and ever will exist. — Andrew James Pritchard

... in the latter half of the twentieth century, postmodernism upended everything. Universal truths were no longer accepted. "Truth" (postmodernism loves quotation marks) was instead a social construct that depended heavily on cultural context. Nothing was either true or false, but was instead open to interpretation. — Gudjon Bergmann