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stevegrossi

truth

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The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is. (Susan Sontag)

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions – they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins. (Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense”)

You know what truth is? […] It’s some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, “Yeah, yeah - ain’t it the truth? (Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions)