Would you say the truth to someone you care about, if you knew that your words would upset them a great deal? Especially, if not telling that particular truth would not cause any harm at all , as it concerns something trivial ; if you chose to spare that person’s feelings- you’ll be telling a white lie.
And once you have some life experience under your belt, you would have learnt that the truth is never absolute, for each person’s view of reality is different; assuming that your own point of view is more valuable than someone else’s is both immodest and naïve. Oscar seems to agree:
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
― Oscar Wilde
If you’ve been part of the situation, where telling the truth broke the family apart- for years! you might have wondered “ Was it actually worth it?” Truth should be treated with caution, it seems:
“The truth.” Dumbledore sighed. “It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.”
― J.K. Rowling
OK, so you might choose not to tell someone else the truth, but you still really want to know it, just for your own sake, right? How can you tell if someone is telling you the truth? Their apparent passionate sincerity is not necessarily sufficient, just as Oscar poignantly muses:
“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
― Oscar Wilde
And if you trust your own intellect to make a judgement what is or isn’t true, you’d be wise to keep the following in mind:
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
― Mark Twain