Profound Truth Quotes

1. "Any faith that does not command the one who holds it is not a real belief; it is a pseudo belief only. And it might shock some of us profoundly if we were brought suddenly face to face with our beliefs and forced to test them in the fires of practical living.Many of us Christians have become extremely skillful in arranging our lives so as to admit the truthof Christianity without being embarrassed by its implications."
Author: A.W. Tozer

2. "A spirituality that is only private and self-absorbed, one devoid of an authentic political and social consciousness, does little to halt the suicidal juggernaut of history. On the other hand, an activism that is not purified by profound spiritual and psychological self-awareness and rooted in divine truth, wisdom, and compassion will only perpetuate the problem it is trying to solve, however righteous its intentions. When, however, the deepest and most grounded spiritual vision is married to a practical and pragmatic drive to transform all existing political, economic and social institutions, a holy force - the power of wisdom and love in action - is born. This force I define as Sacred Activism."
Author: Andrew Harvey

3. "This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we're most sure that love can't conquer all, it seems to anyway. It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there it swells and comforts. It gives us second winds, third winds, hundredth winds."
Author: Anne Lamott

4. "I try to write the books I would love to come upon, that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness- and that can make me laugh. When I am reading a book like this, I feel rich and profoundly relieved to be in the presence of someone who will share the truth with me, and throw the lights on a little, and I try to write these kind of books. Books, for me, are medicine."
Author: Anne Lamott

5. "Sun-worship and pure forms of nature-worship were, in their day, noble religions, highly allegorical but full of profound truth and knowledge."
Author: Annie Besant

6. "More than a building that houses books and data, the library has always been a window to a larger world--a place where we've always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts that help move the American story forward. . . . .Libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we're the most religious of people, America's innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts.And so the moment we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold into a library, we've changed their lives forever, and for the better. This is an enormous force for good."
Author: Barack Obama

7. "Those who are wounded wound others. Moses was wounded profoundly when he lost his birth family, his heritage, and his history. In the years to come, he would come to know Jehovah-rophe, the Healer of life's sicknesses and sorrows. Exodus 15: 26b says, "…for I am the Lord, who heals you." (from Under His Wings: Healing Truth for Adoptees of All Ages)"
Author: Beth Willis Miller

8. "The gifts we received from the dead: those were the world's only genuine gifts. All other things in the world were commodities. The dead were, by definition, those who gave to us without reward. And, especially: our dead gave to us, the living, within a dead context. Their gifts to us were not just abjectly generous, but archaic and profoundly confusing. Whenever we disciplined ourselves, in some vague hope of benefiting posterity, in some ambition to create a better future beyond our own moment in time, then we were doing something beyond a rational analysis. Those in that future could never see us with our own eyes: they would see us only with the eyes that we ourselves gave to them. Never our own eyes: always with their own. And the future's eyes always saw the truths of the past as blinkered, backward, halting. Superstition."
Author: Bruce Sterling

9. "This idea that it's intolerant to object to anyone else's position, hovever, is a complete perversion of the historic understanding of tolrance, which was that one had to have the respect to listen to anyone else's point of view, even one with which one might profoundly disagree. Tolerance did not reject truth claims; it respected them."
Author: Charles Colson

10. "They realized that, in fact, the lie wasn't safe. That it threatened their existence more profoundly than the truth did."
Author: Cheryl Strayed

11. "A myth... is a metaphor for a mystery beyond human comprehension. It is a comparison that helps us understand, by analogy, some aspect of our mysterious selves. A myth, in this way of thinking, is not an untruth but a way of reaching a profound truth."
Author: Christopher Vogler

12. "The profoundest of all sensualitiesis the sense of truthand the next deepest sensual experienceis the sense of justice."
Author: D.H. Lawrence

13. "Once a profound truth has been seen, it cannot be 'unseen'. There's no 'going back' to the person you were. Even if such a possibility did exist... why would you want to?"
Author: Dave Sim

14. "Does religious conviction provide a powerful reason for killing? Undeniably it often does. It also often provides the sole compelling reason for refusing to kill, or for being merciful, or for seeking peace; only the profoundest ignorance of history could prevent one from recognizing this. For the truth is that religion and irreligion are cultural variables, but killing is a human constant."
Author: David Bentley Hart

15. "A man may possess a profound knowledge of history and mathematics; he may be an authority in psychology, biology, or astronomy; he may know all the discovered truths pertaining to geology and natural science; but if he has not with this knowledge that nobility of soul which prompts him to deal justly with his fellow men, to practice virtue and holiness in his personal life, he is not truly an educated man.Character is the aim of true education; and science, history, and literature are but means used to accomplish the desired end. Character is not the result of chance work but of continuous right thinking and right acting."
Author: David O. McKay

16. "If, as has been said, man learned to lie an hour after he learned to talk, then a phenomenon such as the one we're discussing would be the genesis of the most fundamental change in human knowledge since the beginning of society; the transformations it would wreak—in fields from communications to ethics, in our most basic concepts, in every detail of daily existence—would be so profound that it is difficult to even conceive what life would be like in a subsequent new era of truth. The world as we know it would be irrevocably changed, right down to its very roots."
Author: David R. Hawkins

17. "The heart is an artist that paints over what profoundly disturbs it, leaving on the canvas a less dark, less sharp version of the truth."
Author: Dean Koontz

18. "Darkness entered into, darkness realized, is the point of departure for all profound expressions of Christian hope. 'Meaningless darkness' becomes 'revelatory darkness' when it is confronted by the courage of a thoughtfulness and hope that is born of faith's quest for truth."
Author: Douglas John Hall

19. "My father once told me that respect for truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. 'Something cannot emerge from nothing,' he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable 'the truth' can be."
Author: Frank Herbert

20. "Oh, I remember, I remember all those moments! And I want to add, too, that when such young creatures, such sweet young creatures want to say something so clever and profound, they show at once so truthfully and naively in their faces, "Here I am saying something clever and profound now" — and that is not from vanity, as it is with any one like me, but one sees that she appreciates it awfully herself, and believes in it, and thinks a lot of it, and imagines that you think a lot of all that, just as she does. Oh, truthfulness! It's by that they conquer us. How exquisite it was in her!"
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

21. "There's a truth deeper than experience. It's beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It's an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We're helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn't always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart, just as Prabhakar told it to me, just as I'm telling it to you now."
Author: Gregory David Roberts

22. "Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths."
Author: Henry Miller

23. "It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them."
Author: J. Robert Oppenheimer

24. "I cannot help remembering a remark of De Casseres. It was over the wine in Mouquin's. Said he: "The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie"
Author: Jack London

25. "Modern societies accepted the treasures and the power offered them by science. But they have not accepted - they have scarcely even heard - its profounder message: the defining of a new and unique source of truth, and the demand for a thorough revision of ethical premises, for a complete break with the animist tradition, the definitive abandonment of the 'old covenant', the necessity of forging a new one. Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the riches they owe to science, our societies are still trying to live by and to teach systems of values already blasted at the root by science itself."
Author: Jacques Monod

26. "After over six hundred hours of listening, John knew two more things: That the most profound truth lay in the labyrinths that coiled behind a green door in the interviewee's mind the very second that Alfred Kinsey said, "Tell me about your fantasies"; and, two, that with the proper information and the correct stimuli he could get carefully chosen people to break through those doors and act out their fantasies, past moral strictures and the boundaries of conscience, taking him past his already absolute knowledge of mankind's unutterable stupidity into a new night realm that he as yet was incapable of imagining. Because the night was there to be plundered; and only someone above its laws could exact its bounty and survive."
Author: James Ellroy

27. "Many people require more than just evidence before they'll accept evolution. To these folks,evolution raises such profound questions of purpose, morality, and meaning that they just can't accept it no matter how much evidence they see. It's not that we evolved from apes that bothers them so much; it's [[the emotional consequences of facing that fact.]] And unless we address those concerns, we won't progress in making evolution a universally acknowledged truth."
Author: Jerry A. Coyne

28. "It is the - actually profoundly unartistic - impulse to produce exterior likeness rather than inner truth: the same impulse as naturalistic photograpy and the "copy."
Author: Joseph Roth

29. "...Lionel turned his thoughts eagerly inward, to discover that inward was perilous, too; his soul was a sort of curved reflective surface that distorts, as in a funhouse mirror, the face of one peering into it. You might be anyone, any face. The face is mere skin. Accident. He seemed at such times to be approaching a profound yet unspeakable truth: that our identities are accidents."
Author: Joyce Carol Oates

30. "In deference to such spectacular carnage it is perhaps perverse to dwell upon one person's death, but we are creatures so constituted that the passing of one friend or one acquaintance has a profounder effect that that of 100,000 strangers. If there is any metaphorical truth in the Jewish proverb that he who saves one life saves the whole world, then there is equal metaphorical truth in the proposition that when one person dies, the whole world dies with them."
Author: Louis De Bernières

31. "You cannot do anything without God.It's a profound and elemental truth. Not, you cannot do most things without God. You will not be able to do anything that you want, truly, in fulfillment, without God."
Author: Marco Rubio

32. "When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived. When, however, it forms its judgment, as it usually does, on the intuitions of its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are often so profound and so unerring as to possess the character of truth supernaturally revealed."
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

33. "Some of the most profound truths about us are things that we stop saying in the middle."
Author: Ned Vizzini

34. "The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement. The opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth (Niels Bohr)." By this, he means that we require a larger reading of the human past, of our relations with each other, the universe and God, a retelling of our older tales to encompass many truths and to let us grow with change."
Author: Neil Postman

35. "The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth."
Author: Niels Bohr

36. "Nero, you are an example to all the children on this shuttle. Because most of them are so foolish, they think it is better to keep their stupidest thoughts to themselves. You, however, understand the profound truth that you must reveal your stupidity openly. To hold your stupidity inside you is to embrace it, to cling to it, to protect it. But when you expose your stupidity, you give yourself the chance to have it caught, corrected, and replaced with wisdom. Be brave, all of you, like Nero Boulanger, and when you have a thought of such surpassing ignorance that you think it's actually smart, make sure to make some noise, to let your mental limitations squeak out some whimpering fart of a thought, so that you have a chance to learn."
Author: Orson Scott Card

37. "We come together only to go apart again. The law of life can't be avoided. The law comes into operation the moment we detach ourselves from our mother's womb. All struggle & misery in life is due to our attempt to arrest this law or get away from it or in allowing ourselves to be hurt by it. The fact must be recognized. A profound unmitigated loneliness is the only truth of life. All else is false. The law of life. No sense in battling against it..."
Author: R.K. Narayan

38. "Amazing how the most obvious things escape your notice. Maybe the truth is exactly the things you don't notice. Maybe the aim to see and tell the truth is inherently futile, a contradiction in terms, and it's exactly those things about oneself and the world that are invisible because they are woven into one's fabric that are the truth. Just like a person can't see his own eyes. You search and search and search, and the truth, by definition, is exactly that which you don't find. You don't see the truth, you are the truth. "Habits of attention are reflexes of the complete character of an individual." And how could you notice your own habits of attention? By writing. Well, at their most profound level? It doesn't make any difference. That is the point. It's like Zen. The truth is not straining for the truth, the truth is in effortlessness. The truth is in being, not trying. Aw hell, that doesn't leave much too chew on."
Author: Richard Hell

39. "But the point is, when the writer turns to address the reader, he or she must not only speak to me—naively dazzled and wholly enchanted by the complexities of the trickery, and thus all but incapable of any criticism, so that, indeed, he can claim, if he likes, priestly contact with the greater powers that, hurled at him by the muse, travel the parsecs from the Universe's furthest shoals, cleaving stars on the way, to shatter the specific moment and sizzle his brains in their pan, rattle his teeth in their sockets, make his muscles howl against his bones, and to galvanize his pen so the ink bubbles and blisters on the nib (nor would I hear her claim to such as other than a metaphor for the most profound truths of skill, craft, or mathematical and historical conjuration)—but she or he must also speak to my student, for whom it was an okay story, with just so much description."
Author: Samuel R. Delany

40. "She saw too that man has the power of exceeding himself, of becoming himself more entirely and profoundly than he is, truths which have only recently begun to be seen in Europe and seem even now too great for its common intelligence."
Author: Sri Aurobindo

41. "A novel, in which all is created by the author's whim, must strike a more profound level of truth, or it is worthless.""And yet, I have heard you say that any novel that relieves your ennui for an hour has proved its usefulness.""You have a good memory. It must have been ten thousands of years ago that I uttered those words.""And if it was?""In another ten thousand, perhaps I will agree with them again.""In my opinion, the proper way to judge a novel is this: Does it give one an accurate reflection of the moods and characteristics of a particular group of people in a particular place at a particular time? If so, it has value. Otherwise, it has none.""You do not find this rather narrow?""Madam—""Well?""I was quoting you."
Author: Steven Brust

42. "Deep within, there is something profoundly known, not consciously, but subconsciously. A quiet truth, that is not a version of something, but an original knowing. What this, absolute, truth [identity] is may be none of our business…but it is there, guiding us along the path of greater becoming; a true awareness. It is so self-sustaining that our recognition of it is not required. We are offspring's of such a powerfully divine force – Creator of all things known and unknown."
Author: T.F. Hodge

43. "And so they would go on talking or rather, understanding, which has become the main art of speech in an age when words are growing daily so scanty in comparison with ideas that ‘the biscuits ran out' has to stand for kissing a negress in the dark when one has just read Bishop Berkeley's philosophy for the tenth time. (And from this it follows that only the most profound masters of style can tell the truth, and when one meets a simple one–syllable writer, one may conclude, without any doubt at all, that the poor man is lying.)"
Author: Virginia Woolf

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