Arif

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions.

from "On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“What pillow can one have like a good conscience?”
― John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat

“Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim