Truth is most often used to mean in accord with fact or reality or fidelity to an original or to a standard or ideal.
The opposite of truth is falsehood, which, correspondingly, can also take on a logical, factual, or ethical meaning. The concept of truth is discussed and debated in several contexts, including philosophy and religion. Many human activities depend upon the concept, which is assumed rather than a subject of discussion, including science, law, and everyday life.
Various theories and views of truth continue to be debated among scholars and philosophers. Language and words are a means by which humans convey information to one another and the method used to recognize a "truth" is termed a criterion of truth. There are differing claims on such questions as what constitutes truth: what things are truthbearers capable of being true or false; how to define and identify truth; the roles that revealed and acquired knowledge play; and whether truth is subjective or objective, relative or absolute.
Many religions consider perfect knowledge of all truth about all things (omniscience) to be an attribute of a divine or supernatural being.
Read more about Truth: Nomenclature, Orthography, and Etymology, Major Theories of Truth, In Medicine and Psychiatry, In Religion: Omniscience
Famous quotes containing the word truth:
“We all have bad days, of course, a secret that only makes us feel more guilty. But once my friends and I started telling the truth about how far we deviated from perfection, we couldn’t stop. . . . One mother admitted leaving the grocery store without her kids—”I just forgot them. The manager found them in the frozen foods aisle, eating Eskimo Pies.””
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“When truth is no longer free, freedom is no longer real: the truths of the police are the truths of today.”
—Jacques Prévert (1900–1977)
“It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universal favor with which the New Testament is outwardly received, and even the bigotry with which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals. I know of no book that has so few readers. There is none so truly strange, and heretical, and unpopular. To Christians, no less than Greeks and Jews, it is foolishness and a stumbling-block.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)