Unavoidable.

Truth is not that which is demonstrable but that which is unavoidable.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Telling.

Rockwood, Herman Melville, 1885

For in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the Great Art of Telling the Truth,—even though it be covertly, and by snatches.

Herman Melville, from "Hawthorne and His Mosses"

Truth.

If we cannot justify the very concept of the aesthetic, except as ideology, then aesthetic judgement is without philosophical foundation. An "ideology" is adopted for its social or political utility, rather than its truth. And to show that some concept—holiness, justice, beauty, or whatever—is ideological, is to undermine its claim to objectivity. It is to suggest that there is no such thing as holiness, justice or beauty, but only the belief in it—a belief that arises under certain social and economic relations and plays a part in cementing them, but which will vanish as conditions change.

Sir Roger Scruton, from Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

Deprived.

Hannah Arendt, from an interview in The New York Review of Books on October 26, 1978 ...

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

Truth.

Thanks, Kurt.

Innermost.

No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it. The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the hetacombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we are ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?

St. Maximilian Kolbe

Serve.

No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it. The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the hetacombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we are ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?

St. Maximilian Kolbe

Inescapable.

We find that in the absence of demonstrable truth, the best we can do is to exercise the greatest diligence, humility, insight, intelligence, and industry in trying to arrive at the nearest values to truth. I hope, of course, to argue convincingly that having done this, we have an inescapable duty to seek to inculcate others with these values.

William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom

Happy Birthday, Wright

Liberty may be granted but freedom cannot be conferred. Freedom is from within. Notwithstanding all the abuses to which freedom is now subject--marking man down as a commercial item and cutting him off from his birthright by senseless excess and the demoralization of the profit-system -- yet man may still be in love with life and find life less and less abundant for this very reason. 

Truth is of freedom, always safe and affirmative, therefore conservative. Truth proclaims rejection of dated minor traditions, doomed by the great Tradition of The Law of Change is truth's great "eternal." Freedom is this "great becoming.

Frank Lloyd Wright, born on this day in 1867, from A Testament

Continuous.

Ari Weinzweig on the peace of the truth ...

The news right now, as I’m sure you know, is filled with examples of outright lying. My focus, though, is on far less obvious examples of untruth. Holding to the truth can be tricky. Truth can be undercut in small ways that aren’t ill-intended but ultimately lead us in unhealthy directions. I know, because I’ve done it. Maybe you can relate. Stories that shift off-center slowly, but surely. The not-all-that-obvious line between healthy framing and conveying small falsities. Statements are made that nearly everyone knows aren’t right, but people with good intentions don’t want to make trouble. Over time, truth erodes, and with it integrity and trust—since, even when people repeat falsehoods, the actual reality remains. As writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley wrote, “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” As I’ve shared before, Irish author and story activist Gareth Higgins advises that we ask ourselves of anything we are saying, “Is the story I’m telling true? Or at least is it the truest version, and the most helpful way of telling it?” Gareth’s clear message has helped me greatly in my efforts to lean into truth. I simply challenge myself to run everything I say through that filter.

It takes work to sort through things, together, to get at it. Rebecca Solnit offers:

Precision, accuracy, and clarity matter, as gestures of respect toward those to whom you speak; toward the subject, whether it’s an individual or the earth itself; and toward the historical record. It’s also a kind of self-respect … The search for meaning is in how you live your life but also in how you describe it and what else is around you. 

All of which led me to the idea that we can adopt continuous improvement to move ever closer to deeper understanding, and the courage and craft of sharing that truth in positive and productive ways. Lying, it turns out, is not Lean. It causes enormous amounts of emotional angst, and wastes time and energy. On the other hand, if we work hard, in the spirit of the Lean approach to small 1% improvements, we will get closer to building a culture of truth every day. Even if we fall short, I can see that the effort is enormously important. In our organizations, being authentic, as per the work of the revolution of dignity, means being as real and upfront as we possibly can. Susan Griffin writes, “To grasp the truth is a delicate gesture, like taking a hand in greeting, a lightness of touch is needed if one is to feel the presence of another being.”

When we do this work, we aren’t just enhancing our integrity. We’re also moving ourselves quietly towards inner peace. And at the same time, we’re teaching those we work with an essential life skill. Truth sounds easy, but I’ve begun to understand it’s anything but. And, living as we are in a time when truth is taking a hit, it becomes all the more important to model it, teach it, recognize it, and honor it. In this sense, truth is more a skill, a sense of the world, a value system. And creating a culture where truth is a top priority becomes a big part of our work.

Truth.

Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and there defines the spirit of which Nature herself is animated.  I promise you that the artist does not see Nature as she appears to the vulgar, because his emotion reveals to him the hidden truths beneath appearances. There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character, that is to say, that which offers no outer or inner truth. 

Auguste Rodin

Seek.

Marked.

A marked characteristic of the Liberal in debate with the conservative is the tacit premise that debate is ridiculous.  Many people shrink from arguments over facts because facts are tedious, because they require a formal familiarity with the subject under discussion, and because they can be ideologically dislocative. Many Liberals accept their opinions, ideas, and evaluations as others accept revealed truths.

William F. Buckley Jr., from Up from Liberalism (1959)

One.

To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail. You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me. The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from The Gulag Archipelago

Difference.

As one may bring himself to believe almost anything he is inclined to believe, it makes all the difference whether we begin or end with the inquiry, "What is truth?"

Archbishop Richard Whately

Limousine.

Truth.

Thank you, Wrath of Gnon.

Defending.

Blake, Self-portrait, 1802

When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do.

William Blake

Escape.

His early failure had released him from any felt obligation to think along institutional lines and his thoughts were already independent to a degree few people are familiar with. He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments, and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions. He came to see his early failure as a lucky break, an accidental escape from a trap that had been set for him, and he was very trap-wary about institutional truths for the remainder of his time.

Robert M. Pirsig, from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance