A Quote by Mario Vargas Llosa

The truths that seem most truthful, if you look at them from all sides, if you look at them close up, turn out to be either half truths or lies.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Quote Topics

Close Either Half Half Truth Lies Look Most Out Seem Sides Them Truthful Truths Turn Up

Quote Author

Mario Vargas Llosa
Peruvian - Novelist
Born: March 28, 1936

There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.

Alfred North Whitehead

On the eve of the election last month my wife Judith and I were driving home late in the afternoon and turned on the radio for the traffic and weather. What we instantly got was a freak show of political pornography: lies, distortions, and half-truths - half-truths being perhaps the blackest of all lies. They paraded before us as informed opinion.

Bill Moyers

I look to find the heart and soul of people, of my characters. I look for the truth of them and the truths about life that are presented through them.

Elizabeth Berg

Both in verse and in prose [Karl] Shapiro loves, partly out of indignation and partly out of sheer mischievousness, to tell the naked truths or half-truths or quarter-truths that will make anybody's hair stand on end; he is always crying: "But he hasn't any clothes on!" about an emperor who is half the time surprisingly well-dressed.

Randall Jarrell

The misdeeds of ordinary men can be buried with them, and their lives described in half-truths that are really half-lies. But not a public man. Particularly not this one.

Anna Quindlen

We make our own truths and lies....Truths are often lies and lies truths.

Bernhard Schlink

Hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly.

J. D. Vance

Politics has become incendiary. People don't find it so funny now so I have to be careful, but I have to wake them up with some truths and the truths I aim at them are over 100 years old. Facts that no one can dispute.

Hal Holbrook

Truths are not truths to you unless you realize them within yourself. Without realization, they are just ideas. For spiritual perception, spiritual consciousness, lies not in vague theological ideas, but in the acquisition of Self-realization.

Paramahansa Yogananda

How does life become totally painful By total retreat. Total noninspection becomes total pain.But existence is basically composed of a very few truths onto which have hung a great many artificialities and which man has adorned with enormous numbers of lies. And man is prisoner of his own shadows. Now one of the things you can do with man is to get him to look up and find out that he can look through the shadows and look at the shadows and find out what they are.

L. Ron Hubbard

It was possible, maybe, to have facts in your mind that weren't facts at all. You could build a whole life's story on false assumptions. You could make truths out of untruths and untruths out of truths. Until you spoke them, really said them out loud or checked for sure, you may not have known which were which.

Deb Caletti

Stories," he'd said, his voice low and almost husky, "we are made up of stories. And even the one's that seem the most like lies can be our deepest hidden truths.

Jane Yolen

There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.

Mary McCarthy

There are several kinds of truths, and it is customary to place in the first order mathematical truths, which are, however, only truths of definition. These definitions rest upon simple, but abstract, suppositions, and all truths in this category are only constructed, but abstract, consequences of these definitions ... Physical truths, to the contrary, are in no way arbitrary, and do not depend on us.