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Quote

There is no wisdom save in truth. Truth is everlasting, but our ideas about truth are changeable. Only a little of the first fruits of wisdom, only a few fragments of the boundless heights, breadths and depths of truth, have I been able to gather.

Martin Luther 

Comments

mtspace said…
It's a great quotation, one which I needed to hear.

I think that truth can take on at least two common senses in natural language. One is a kind of verifiable factuality. Today when we speak of something being true, this us almost always what we mean. The second is a kind of useful wisdom or adherence to a high ideal. When one of Shakespeare's men said of a friend that he was 'good and true' he was speaking much more of that friend's loyalty, than of his veracity. Similarly, a true wheel was a round wheel centered on its hub and perpendicular to its shaft: a true wheel behaves in a kind of idealized way.

Martin Luther in the above passage is talking about truth not as fact, but as a body of ideas that help us find meaning and satisfaction in life. I find it useful to hear this passage because I have been blaming the protestant reformation for dumbing down the notion of truth to exclude the second more abstract meaning, thereby stripping holy texts of any nourishment they might have for the soul. I might still imagine that this happened, but at least it's good to know that it was not Luther's fault.
I especially like how he says that TRUTH is everlasting, but our ideas are changeable...I think he IS saying truth is a FACT but that our perception of it changes...

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