"Truth! stark naked truth, is the word, and I will not so much as take the pains to bestow the strip of a gauze-wrapper on it."

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“All my foundation in virtue was no other than a total ignorance of vice.”

“I imagined, indeed, that you would have been cloyed and tired with the uniformity of adventures and expressions, inseparable from a subject of this sort, whose bottom or groundwork being, in the nature of things, eternally one and the same, whatever variety of forms and modes the situations are susceptible of, there is no escaping a repetition of near the same images, the same figures, the same expressions.”

“I wrote it to prove that one could write so freely about a woman of the town without resorting to the the coarseness the School of Venus , which had quite plain words. My printer and publisher certainly were deceived by my avoiding those rank words in the work, which are all that they judge obscenity by.”

Resonant Thoughts

"Herzen was closer to the truth when he said that every memory calls up a dozen others. The real miracle of Proust is the discipline with which he stemmed the flow. Everything is a Madeleine."

— Clive James

Literature1939–2019

#truth

"In the struggle my sympathies were not neutral. But in telling the story of those great day I have tried to see events with the eye of a conscientious reporter, interested insetting down the truth."

— John Reed (journalist)

Literature1887–1920

#truth

"Indeed, you should not desire to weigh with the intellect the issues of Tawhīd and the Hereafter; the reality of Prophethood; the reality of divine attributes and every other thing beyond the scope of…"

— Ibn Khaldun

Economics1332–1406

#truth

"Vainly you talk about voting it down. When you have cast your millions of ballots, you have not reached the evil. It has fastened its root deep into the heart of the nation, and nothing but God’s trut…"

— Frederick Douglass

Social Activism1818–1895

#love