Quotes
Quotes about Fact
..the people of Tudor England, like the modern Irish, were great talkers. One imagines their speech as rapid, bubbling, both earthily exact and carelessly malapropistic. It was perhaps a McLuhanesque medium, itself its own message and it exhibited the essential function of language - to maintain social contact in the dark.... Speech, when you come to think of it, is not a very exact medium: it is full of stumblings and apologies for not finding the right word; it has to be helped out with animal grunts and the gestures which, one is convinced, represent man's primal mode of communication. Take speech as a flickering auditory candle, and the mere act of maintaining its light becomes enough. Tales, gossip, riddles, word-play pass the time in the dark, and out of these - not out of the need to recount facts or state a case - springs literature.
I have had a lifelong difficulty in accepting physical laws. Aeroplanes fly, and I have read all the books which explain aerodynamics, but, flying, I have sometimes been fearful of the sudden exposure of the science of flight as untenable and, with a kind of satisfaction, of hearing the pilot announce that we were falling.
Hell is a fact and no mere Sunday scare
Everyone likes to have his deepest convictions confirmed: that is one of the most abiding human satisfactions
Every fiction writer ought, once in his lifetime, to be forced to fulfil in fact what he had fashioned in fancy
Being uncommitted to veritable fact ... I can indulge in the free fancy that often turns out to be the truth
A satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!--incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who didn't know what fear was, we ought always to add the flea--and put him at the head of the procession.
Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do.
My opinions might have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
My opinions might have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving in words evidence of the fact.
Time is an illusion perpetrated by the manufacturers of space.
Time is an illusion perpetrated by the manufacturers of space.
There are no facts, only interpretations.
All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals.
Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.
What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.
I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
The world, we are told, was made especially for man--a presumption not supported by all the facts... Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?
I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn't park anywhere near the place.
The world, we are told, was made especially for man--a presumption not supported by all the facts... Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?
Science is built with facts as a house is with stones--but a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
Just as a cautious businessman avoids tying up all his capital in one concern, so, perhaps, worldly wisdom will advise us not to look for the whole of our satisfaction from a single aspiration.
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
