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Neither writing a truth nor thinking it is enough; every truth that is not flesh, and bones, and blood, how does it differ from a falsehood?
We must force ourselves to bring every idea to its full verbal maturity, and not trust vague riches that may dissipate at the mere attempt to write a check against them.
Falsehoods require speeches. The truth convinces us with a slight tap.
All truth is an act of the spirit, its fruit and its flower.
There is the truth of the moment, but there is also the truth of a lifetime.
Authenticity is not a given nature, but a proposed task. To be authentic is to achieve the perfection of character. It is to transform a desire of the spirit into a lived life.
True wisdom, and true love, are states, way of being, attitudes and situations of the soul. They are neither ideas, nor principles, nor systems.
Without a doubt, wisdom and love can both ascend to expression and translate into words. But if only a great poet can express love and only a great writer can translate wisdom, the poet is not necessarily the one who has loved the most, nor is the writer necessarily the most wise.
Christ is the truth. What is said about Him are mere approximations of it.
To modern man, even the most discreet truth appears to be insufferable insolence.
The fewer adjectives we use, the more difficult it is to lie.
The person who comes up with an authentic idea soon feels uncomfortable, as though he has introduced an elephant into the room.
Great ideas are crude and simple, like a rough and hearty peasant.
The one who gets used to telling the truth loses all oratory skills.
A falsely “reasonable” spirit wants opinions that conform to their own or speeches that agree with the popular and typical views.
But a spirit that longs for lucidity alone will endure what it hears, but demands that everyone is clearly aware of the causes and consequences of the ideas proposed.
Attempting to be sincere in every moment of our life can mean risking insincerity with our life entire.
Failing to seek the truth is a sign of mediocrity.
But finding it is not a sign of greatness.
The most distressing problem is not when a truth is opposed by an error, but when that error is filled with truths.
The worst hypocrisy is methodical hypocrisy, not the one offered by our weakness as a momentary escape.
Vulgarity is born when we pretend to be what we are not. Nobody, nothing is vulgar when content with being what he is. Vulgarity is a phenomenon of those societies where the instability of the social classes creates confusion, where no one occupies a secure position and anyone can take on some so-called status.
The worker who is a worker is not vulgar, but the worker who imitates the bourgeois is vulgar.
Vulgar is the peasant who imitates the man of the city,
vulgar is the petty bourgeois who imitates the rich bourgeois,
vulgar is the rich bourgeois who imitates the aristocrat,
vulgar is the aristocrat who imitates some past version of himself.
Vulgar is the fool who imitates the wise or the uneducated who imitates the refined.
Vulgarity is the characteristic of every bourgeois age.
It is easier to convince a man to accept a new truth than to abandon the errors it refutes.
The truth of our opinions can be found in the delicate system of unspoken reluctance and humility we wrap around them. Whoever imagines he speaks as an oracle, unbending, with hard edges and no shadows, only makes himself out to be a fool.
Falsehoods do not corrupt the truth, they only pervert our behavior.
Of all the tyrants, the most fearsome is the truth.
What pretexts do we invent to reject it?
What justifications do we make for our disgust?
To many, it seems insulting to God when someone denies him. But God has nothing to do with the matter. What we do not see does not cease to exist; we just don’t see it. The wrong outlook produces error, but it is not an act that ravages the truth. The world would be more tolerant if compassion replaced efforts to avenge a truth that does not need to be avenged.
We can abandon a reality more easily than we can its symbols.
My authenticity is the sum of what I am, not just the summary of what I think.
Many doctrines are valuable not so much for the truths they contain but for the falsehoods they reject.
Vulgarity is born when authenticity is lost.
Authenticity is lost when we search for it.
I am not trying to poison the wells.
But to show they are poisoned.
It is a gross methodological error to forget that if we live in the midst of lies, those lies become our substance, our very flesh.
A false and friendly laughter is a prostitution of the soul.
Superficiality consists, basically, in hatred of the contradictions of life.
To find the “truth of our time,” one must search for truth outside of time.
Whoever searches for the “truth of his time” only finds the cliches of the day.
Man tends toward superficiality like a cork floats to the surface.
An idea does not impose itself if it is not proclaimed vigorously, intemperately, absolutely and with unjust exclusivity. However, the truth lies in the soft tones, in the delicate shades, in the shadows, and, perhaps, in-between ideas.
We are distracted from our contemplation of truths, as we spend our time shouting at falsehoods in an attempt to scare them away.
All truth is born between an ox and an ass.
Contemporary thinkers differ from one another in the same way as international hotels, whose uniform structure is superficially adorned with local motifs.
More interesting is the opposite: a localist mentality expressed in a general vocabulary.
Once I believe I have mastered a truth, I am not interested in the argument that confirms it, but that which refutes it.
Clarity is the virtue of those who do not mistrust what they say.
The truth is to intelligence what happiness is to sensitivity.
Truth is the joy of intelligence.
Error almost always walks more elegantly than the truth.
Man goes out hunting less for truths than for ways of escaping.
The din of “explanations” falls silent when an individual totality raises its voice.
Truth is what the most intelligent man says. (But nobody knows who the most intelligent man is.)
There is no worse foolishness than the truth in the mouth of a fool.
The soul should open itself up to foreign invasion, refuse to defend itself, favor the enemy, so that our authentic being appears and arises, not like a fragile structure protected by our timidity, but like our rock, our incorruptible granite.
Castaways more readily forgive the imprudent captain who sinks the ship than the intelligent passenger who predicts its drift towards the reef.
Man speaks of the relativity of truth because he calls his innumerable errors “truths.”
Even the greatest fool has nights during which his defenses against the truth waver.
Each moment has its own law, and not just the law which binds it to all other moments.
The individual who lies to himself, just like the society that does not, soon rots and dies.
It is the small truths, the tiny illuminations that influence our lives.
Ratiocinations carry themselves with more airs, grow more haughty, walk with more insolence, the further they move from their origin.
There are words for deceiving others, like rational.
And words like dialectic, for deceiving oneself.
He who does not preach needs an intelligent audience.
The cruelest irony of truth is that it transforms its servants into beasts of labor.
My skepticism is not a rejection of any principle, norm, or rule. It is the impossibility of receiving a rule, norm, or principle made by other hands- and the need to create them slowly, within the process of my immediate life.
The truth does not need our passion. That which exists does not care about our opinions.
Indifference to falsehood is certainty of truth.
The book that was not written to convince or seduce has an unmistakable dignity.
Truths do not die, but sometimes they wither.
No thesis is expressed clearly except when expounded by an intelligent man who does not share it.
When man grasps a truth, he soon drops it as though his hands have been burned.
It doesn’t matter that our idea serves nothing or nobody uses it. Let it be ignored, and fade, and die: it was more than an empty proposition if within it a truth crystallized.
The most clear and obvious truths are the ones most difficult to sink into the unbearable depths of the soul. Between truth understood and the truth assimilated lies the long path of wisdom.
He who does not commit himself entirely to any work he undertakes, fails.
A lie may win the battle, but it cannot win the war.
Continuous discourse tends to conceal the cracks within. The fragment is an honest expression.
The authentic vocation becomes indifferent to its failure or success.
Our choices of grave consequence are not the results of solemn and meditative hours, the moments in which, prepared and resolved, we made the grand gestures of choosing and rejecting. The decisions that govern our life are the timid and silent choices of daily life. The corner that we cross, the friend whose invitation we answer, the curiosity we rejected, the slight gesture of vanity or pride to which we ceded, the whole trivial routine of our existence, this is the spring of our destiny. From here come the tiny actions of vast consequence.
Intelligent admiration does not copy. It tries to nourish itself from whatever nourished the one it admires.
It’s easy to be clever enough so that we aren’t deceived by others- but who is not fooled by himself?
The sentimental power of a doctrine is related to the number of participants involved.
But its intellectual gravity is a function only of the truth it contains.
People often look to the echo for the origin of what they admire.
An individual is defined less by his contradictions than by the way he comes to terms with them.
The opinion that advances defenseless and naked is the one that convinces us.
Without pretending to change species, let’s try to ennoble the plant that we are.
We are unmoved by the tranquility that tries to express itself in formulas, maxims, principles, and suspect that it attempts to fearfully disguise an anxious restlessness.
The only peace that moves us is that which arises from the whole of a work, or a life, as its diffuse expression, as its natural principle of harmony.
Humanity does not suppress a falsehood without simultaneously erasing several truths.
Originality is not something that is sought, but something that is found.
Those who infer from the social utility of myths an equal social utility of lies must be reminded that myths are useful thanks to the truths they express.
In ages of maximum freedom, people become so indifferent to the truth that no one bothers to confirm or refute a claim.
That an idea is considered valid for some time is not evidence of its validity but of certain incidental circumstances.
Rhetoric is everything that goes beyond that which is strictly necessary to convince oneself.
The dangerous idea is not the false one, but the partially correct one.
To believe that an obvious truth, clearly expressed, should be convincing, is no more than a naive presumption.
Our life is an anecdote that hides our true personality.
The name by which we are known is merely our best known pseudonym.
Time should be feared not for its killing but for its unmasking.
An honest, austere intellectual life snatches from our hands the arts, letters, and sciences, in order to prepare us to confront our destiny.
The lower truths tend to overshadow the highest.
To avoid succumbing to despair when forced to live among so many foolish ideas, it helps to remember that at every moment things obviously are what they are, regardless of popular opinion.
Nothing is so rare as he who affirms or denies but does not exaggerate in order to flatter or injure.
We go on living because we do not view ourselves with the same eyes others do.
To be Christian is to stand before the one from whom we cannot hide, from whom it is impossible to disguise ourselves. It is to assume the burden of the truth, regardless of how painful.
The truth is not captured from the front, but from the flank.
There are ideas that are not true, but should be.
Every truth is a risk we assume by supporting ourselves on an indefinite series of infinitely small pieces of evidence.
There is no rhetoric of the truth. Eloquence is a symptom of a faltering faith.
Truth is a virtue – like the flower of certain hard and knotty moral roots.
Action, more than knowledge, brings man closer to his true self.
Christianity matters because it is true, not because of the services it can provide to the unholy world – something the vulgar apologist forgets.
It is the truth of an idea we must celebrate, not its triumph. Because no triumph lasts.
The truth resides in that no man’s land where opposing principles intersect and correct one another.
In the end, everything in the world rests on its own final “just because.”
Note: Dávila was a Colombian political philosopher and in the Latin church. His aphorisms are presented here for the purposes of enjoyment, study, and historical record, but do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this writer. For more information on Dávila, see this introductory post. For information on how to live your life, go to church and read the Church Fathers/Saints.
Featured image: The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
