Knowing it — knowing it's true is one thing, but believing what you know... well, there's the tough part.

To make astute people believe one is what one is not is, in most cases, harder than actually to become what one wishes to appear.

Ideally, the pursuit of truth is said to be at the heart of the intellectual's business, but this credits his business too much and not quite enough. As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying whereas consummation often turns out to be elusive. Truth captured loses its glamour; truths long known and widely believed have a way of turning false with time; easy truths are bore and too many of them become half truths. Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties. Harold Rosenberg summed up this side of the life of the mind supremely well when he said that the intellectual is one who turns answers into questions.

To make clever people believe we are what we are not is in most instances harder than really to become what we want to seem to be.

Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth.

The Course teaches throughout that you have confused the false and true, which includes confusing the world and reality, the ego and yourself, body and mind, pain and joy, imprisonment and freedom, death and life. It is the Holy Spirit’s role to separate the true from the false in your mind and “teach you to tell them apart” (T-7.IX.4:6). What is true, He teaches, is characterized by love, not fear (T-1.50.2:3-5); wholeness, not lack (T-1.48.19:1-2); and sharing, not exclusion (T-6.III.8:1-3). The true and false are told apart through a process of comparing everything “with the higher level of creation” (T-1.50.1:1). The Holy Spirit therefore “teaches you to judge every thought that you allow to enter in the light of what God put there” (T-6.VII.C.1:4); “to look upon darkness through light

It’s hard nowadays to get people to believe things. At least good things.

Truth and reality split apart.

The hardest part about gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche. As long as that niche is occupied, evidence and proof and logical demonstration get nowhere. But once the niche is emptied of the wrong idea that has been filling it — once you can honestly say, ‘I don’t know’, then it becomes possible to get at the truth.

To the intellect all else, in comparison with what is correct, counts only as feeling, subjectivity, instinct. In this division, apart from the bright world of the intellect, there is only the irrational, in which is lumped together, according to the point of view, what is despised or desired. The impulse which pursues real truth by thought springs from the dissatisfaction with what is merely correct. The division, spoken of previously, paralyses this impulse; it causes man to oscillate between the dogmatism of the intellect that transcends its limits and, as it were, the rapture of the vital, the chance of the moment, life. The soul becomes impoverished in all the multiplicity of disparate experience. Then truth disappears from the field of vision and is replaced by a variety of opinions which are hung on the skeleton of a supposedly rational pattern. Truth is infinitely more than scientific correctness.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

To express oneself honestly, not lying to oneself — that, my friend, is very hard to do.

The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed.

It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.