On Truth Quotes

“Love is nothing but Joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause (Ethics, part III, proposition 13, scholium).”
― Baruch Spinoza, On Truth

“Civilizations... cannot flourish if they are beset with troublesome infections of mistaken beliefs.”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Truth

“To establish and to sustain an advanced culture, we need to avoid being debilitated either by error or by ignorance. We need to know—and, of course, we must also understand how to make productive use of—a great many truths.”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Truth

“Is truth something that in fact we do—and should—especially care about? Or is the love of truth, as professed by so many distinguished thinkers and writers, itself merely another example of bullshit?”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Truth

“We cannot think of ourselves as creatures whose rationality endows us with an especially significant advantage over others—indeed, we cannot think of ourselves as rational creatures at all—unless we think of ourselves as creatures who recognize that facts, and true statements about the facts, are indispensable in providing us with reasons for believing (or for not believing) various things and for taking (or for not taking) various actions. If we have no respect for the distinction between true and false, we may as well kiss our much-vaunted “rationality” good-bye.”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Truth

“When working out energetically, people frequently feel more completely and more vividly alive than they do before exercising, when they are less fully and less directly aware of their own capacities, when they are less brimming with a sense of their own vitality.”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Truth

“Perhaps we may be, for a time, blissfully ignorant or happily deceived, and in those ways, despite all of the difficulties that endanger us, we may temporarily avoid being especially upset or disturbed. In the end, however, our ignorance and our false beliefs are likely just to make our circumstances worse.”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Truth