A Quote by William Butler Yeats
Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
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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.
Very few stories embody a human truth so definitively that we cannot think of the truth without remembering the story and cannot imagine how people ever got by without it.
I bow to all the seekers of truth. At the very outset we have to know that truth is what it is. We cannot think about it, we cannot conceptualize it. Unfortunately at this human level we cannot feel it, we cannot know it. We have to be the spirit to know the truth.
Truth is one, single, and it can never be misinterpreted. To know the truth it is essential that whatever human awareness we have got, it has to be expanded. There is something still lacking in that awareness by which we cannot know God, we cannot know the truth.
We all know that books burn, yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man's eternal fight against tyranny of every kind.
If people depend on me to be a man of truth, I have to prove again and again and again and again that I am a man of truth. It cannot be that on Monday I am a man of truth, on Tuesday I speak three-quarters truth, Wednesday I speak half-truth, on Thursday I speak one-quarter truth, on Friday I don't speak at all, and on Saturday I can't even think how to speak the truth.
Eyes blinded by the fog of things cannot see truth. Ears deafened by the din of things cannot hear truth. Brains bewildered by the whirl of things cannot think truth. Hearts deadened by the weight of things cannot feel truth. Throats choked by the dust of things cannot speak truth.
At the very outset I have to tell you that truth is what it is. You cannot mold it, you cannot change it. It is always the same. It has been the same, it is the same, it will be the same. But to say that we know the truth and that we have the truth is really a self-deception. If you had known the absolute truth there would have been no problems and everybody would have said the same thing. There would be no discussions, no arguments, no fights and wars. But when we don't know the absolute truth then we can find out our own mental conceptions as the truth. But this mind is so limited.
I'm very blue collar myself. So it was easy for me to embody that in a sense. It's much harder for me to embody Norrell than it is to embody Terry Donovan.
I've always felt that even though a man was not a Christian, he still has to know the truth some way or another. Or if he was a Christian, he could know the truth. The truth itself doesn't have any name on it to me. And each man has to find this for himself, I think.
You can run from the truth. You can run and hide from the truth.
You can deny and avoid the truth. But you cannot destroy the truth. Nor can you make the lie true. You must know that love will always uncover the truth.
The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speakes he lies.
Man must learn to know the universe precisely as it is, or he cannot successfully find his place in it. A man should therefore use his reasoning faculty in all matters involving truth, and especially as concerning his religion. He must learn to distinguish between truth and error.
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.
We are seekers of the truth, but we do not embody the truth. And in humility, we should recognize that the same can be said about our most ardent foes.
Indeed our survival and liberation depend upon our recognition of the truth when it is spoken and lived by the people. If we cannot recognize the truth, then it cannot liberate us from untruth. To know the truth is to appropriate it, for it is not mainly reflection and theory. Truth is divine action entering our lives and creating the human action of liberation.
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