Echoes

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying "there are only facts," I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations...

Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.

A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

Exactitude is not truth.

Man is what he believes.

Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood; her own straightforwardness is the severest correction.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men — that is genius.

You are neither right nor wrong because people agree with you.

I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Men trust their ears less than their eyes.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true. We have a method, and that method helps us to reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth — never there, just closer and closer, always finding vast new oceans of undiscovered possibilities. Cleverly designed experiments are the key.

All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.

It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.