Echoes

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.

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...

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

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

Exactitude is not truth.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnameable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things. Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

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

Truth lies open for all; it has not yet been monopolized. And there is plenty of it left even for posterity to discover.

It is not truth that makes man great, but man that makes truth great.

I have endowed everyone with a temperament of his own, given everyone an idiom of his own; so that what is praise for him is blame for thee, what is honey for him is poison for thee, what is light for him is fire for thee, what is rose for him is thorn for thee, what is good for him is evil for thee, what is beautiful for him is ugly for thee. In the people of Hindustan the idiom of Hindustan is praiseworthy; in the people of Sind, the idiom of Sind is praiseworthy. I do not see the outward and the speech; I see the inward and the state [of feeling]. For the heart is the substance and speech an accident. So, the accident is subservient, the substance is the [real] object. The religion of love stands apart from all religions. For lovers the [only] religion and creed is God.

Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Man knows much more than he understands.

We cling to our own point of view, as though everything depended on it. Yet our opinions have no permanence; like autumn and winter, they gradually pass away.

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.

Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in the imperfection is perfect reality.

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

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.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more — more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Last of all he will be able to see the sun, not turning aside to the illusory reflections of it in the water, but gazing directly at it in its own proper place and contemplating it as it is.

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.