quotations about facts
Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.
CHARLES DICKENS
Hard Times
Sometimes we use facts. Sometimes we avoid or ignore them. Sometimes we even reshape them or dispose of them because of new knowledge. In other words, facts are partly solid and partly malleable, and they don't always reveal a clean, coherent truth.
KEITH VARGO
"Way of the Warrior", Black Belt Magazine, December 2003
There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.
MAYA ANGELOU
attributed, Sheroes
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
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
Miscellaneous facts are like shy and strange visitors at the opening of a ball; soon the music of thought and reason is heard--the disorderly assemblage changes, as if by magic, into little systems that spin around in the mazy whirlings of symmetry, beauty and grace.
J. MAHONEY
"Cramming", The Colorado School Journal, 1892
Sometimes fact-checking can feel unnatural because it goes against the way the brain is hardwired. Our brains are wired to scan for the threats in our environment and all the problems we need to fix. In psychology this is called the negativity bias. But in most cases this disposition doesn't serve us well. Instead, training the brain to look for facts that fuel a hopeful and optimistic picture of reality can help motivate us. Again, I am not talking about ignoring reality. I'm talking about moving our focus from paralyzing facts to activating ones to create an optimistic, empowered mindset.
MICHELLE GIELAN
Broadcasting Happiness: The Science of Igniting and Sustaining Positive Change
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
Facts were never pleasing to him. He acquired them with reluctance and got rid of them with relief. He was never on terms with them until he had stood them on their heads.
J. M. BARRIE
The Greenwood Hat
Most facts that we don't use in some way will be lost to us.
ROBERT MADIGAN
How Memory Works
The first job of the historian and of the journalist is to find facts. Not the only job, perhaps not the most important, but the first. Facts are the cobblestones from which we build roads of analysis, mosaic tiles that we fit together to compose pictures of past and present. There will be disagreement about where the road leads and what reality or truth is revealed by the mosaic picture. The facts themselves must be checked against all the available evidence. But some are round and hard--and the most powerful leaders in the world can trip over them. So can writers, dissidents and saints.
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
preface, Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name
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
A fact is like a sack--it won't stand up if it's empty. To make it stand up, first you have to put in it all the reasons and feelings that caused it in the first place.
LUIGI PIRANDELLO
Six Characters in Search of an Author
The most palpable facts, are exactly the contrary to what we should expect.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
Scientists have discovered a powerful new strain of fact-resistant humans who are threatening the ability of Earth to sustain life, a sobering new study reports. The research, conducted by the University of Minnesota, identifies a virulent strain of humans who are virtually immune to any form of verifiable knowledge.
ANDY BOROWITZ
"Scientists: Earth Endangered by New Strain of Fact-Resistant Humans", The New Yorker, May 12, 2015
The fatal futility of Fact.
JAMES JOYCE
Prefaces
Facts are lonely things.
DON DELILLO
Libra
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts ... they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill.
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
"Huntsman, what quarry?"
If you believe only in facts and forget stories, your brain will live, but your heart will die.
CASSANDRA CLARE
Lord of Shadows
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Sense of Beauty