quotations about facts
There are numerous layers to truth, and the simple and superficial statement of facts cannot satisfy the writer.
GAO XINGJIAN
"Literature as Testimony: The Search for Truth", Witness Literature: Proceedings of the Nobel Centennial Symposium
Facts are how we organize and interpret our surroundings. No one learns something new and then holds it entirely independent of what they already know. We incorporate it into the little edifice of personal knowledge that we have been creating in our minds our entire lives. In fact, we even have a phrase for the state of affairs that occurs when we fail to do this: cognitive dissonance.
SAMUEL ARBESMAN
The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date
Strong understanding ever keeps very close of facts, and leaves not the lead of one except under pilotage of another and to seek for more, that it may put many facts together till their relation one to another makes a circumference of knowledge.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
Essays
Facts, therefore, have merely a potential and, as it were, subsequent value, and the only advantage of possessing them is the possibility of drawing conclusions from them; in other words, of rising to the idea, the principle, the law which governs them. Our knowledge is composed not of facts, but of the relations which facts and ideas bear to themselves and to each other; and real knowledge consists not in an acquaintance with facts, which only makes a pedant, but in the use of facts, which makes a philosopher.
HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE
Essays
This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.
SUSAN JACOBY
The Age of American Unreason
You know the facts don't always add up to the truth.
CAROLEE DEAN
Take Me There
As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Tallulah", Dreams Underfoot: The Newford Collection
The more power a person has, the more his or her opinions can be pawned off as facts.
LEE THAYER
How Executives Fail
I might show facts as plain as day:
But, since your eyes are blind, you'd say,
"Where? What?" and turn away.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
"A Sketch"
You can spend your whole life building a wall of facts between you and anything real.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
attributed, How Writers Write
Since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an explanation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Public Opinion
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY
letter to Charles Kingsley, September 23, 1860
Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
THOMAS SOWELL
A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles
Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.
EDITH WHARTON
Xingu and Other Stories
I ought to know by this time that when a fact appears opposed to a long train of deductions it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
A Study in Scarlet
Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.
CHARLES DICKENS
Hard Times
Facts have a cruel way of substituting themselves for fancies. There is nothing more remorseless, just as there is nothing more helpful, than truth.
WILLIAM C. REDFIELD
address at Case School, Cleveland, Ohio, May 27, 1915
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
A Scandal in Bohemia
Science is built up 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.
HENRI POINCARE
Science and Hypothesis
Both forms of consciousness, the one that bows before the facts and the other that mistakes itself for an overlord or creator of facts, are like the shattered halves of the truth that was not fulfilled in the world and the failure of which also affects thought. The truth cannot be patched together from its pieces.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords