The search for truth is more precious than its possession.
Interpretation
The pursuit of truth is more valuable than actually obtaining it.
In this quote, Lessing emphasizes the importance of the journey toward understanding and discovering truth. He suggests that the ongoing quest for knowledge and truth enriches our lives and shapes our character, making it more significant than simply having the truth in hand, which may lead to complacency or a lack of growth.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a philosophical discussion about the nature of truth.
Why should not every individual man have existed more than once upon this world? Why should I not come back as often as I am capable of acquiring fresh knowledge? Is this hypothesis so laughable merely because it is the oldest? Because the human understanding, before the sophistries of the schools had dissipated and debilitated it, lighted upon it at once?
A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes
Absolute truth belongs to Thee alone.
Pleasures, riches, honor and joy are sure to have care, disgrace, adversity and affliction in their train. There is no pleasure without pain, no joy without sorrow. O the folly of expecting lasting felicity in a vale of tears, or a paradise in a ruined world.
Would that we could at once paint with the eyes! In the long way from the eye through the arm to the pencil, how much is lost!
It is not the truth that a man possesses, or believes that he possesses, but the earnest effort which he puts forward to reach the truth, which constitutes the worth of a man
Before you consult your fancy, consult your purse.
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
Establish the eternal truth that acquiescence under insult is not the way to escape war.
We can be as honest as we are ignorant. If we are, when asked what is beyond the horizon of the known, we must say that we do not know.
It is astonishing that so simple a truth should ever have had an adversary; and it is one among a multitude of proofs, how apt a spirit of ill-informed jealousy, or of too great abstraction and refinement is to lead men astray from the plainest paths of reason and conviction.
I never regret anything. Because every little detail of your life is what made you into who you are in the end.
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