Quotes about truth and honesty
We must invert the tradition: philosophy is not the search for truth, it is the search for the question.
The truth arrives only in the void of the question.
The question is not after the fact — how is truth possible? — but before the fact: how does the matter stand with understanding itself?
Language is the medium in which truth is disclosed.
Understanding is not a private act between me and my object.
Every age has its own truth.
Being that can be understood is language.
Language is neither a conduit nor a veil, it is reality itself.
It is right emphatically to affirm that the mind can never know the human object. Indeed, engrossed in the individual object, the human mind is almost blind to it.
The Other forcibly reveals to me the world in which my security is rooted.
Ethics is an optics, through which the face of the other is revealed to me.
He who believes only that which he can fully comprehend, ceases to believe at all.
The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.
The entire visible world is but their thickened skin.
To believe that what exists is more powerful and important than what does not is the opus of despair.
We should not so much look at what a man has said, as at what he has done.
Certum est quia impossibile est (It is certain because it is impossible).
The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.
It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.
In space there are countless constellations, suns and planets; we see only the suns because they give light. The planets remain invisible, for they are small and dark.