"There are certain persons for whom pure Truth is a poison"
About this Quote
Truth, in Maurois's hands, isn’t the clean, antiseptic virtue we pretend to want; it’s a substance with dosage and side effects. “Pure Truth” lands like a laboratory term, implying something stripped of the buffers that make reality tolerable: tact, narrative, selective emphasis, even mercy. The provocation is in the word “poison,” which refuses the modern self-help fantasy that more honesty is always liberating. For some people, Maurois suggests, uncut truth doesn’t clarify; it corrodes.
The intent is less to defend lying than to diagnose fragility and the social machinery built around it. Certain temperaments require illusion the way skin requires a barrier: remove it and the world becomes abrasion. The subtext carries a quiet warning about moral absolutists, the kind who treat “telling it like it is” as a badge of courage while ignoring that truth, delivered without context or care, can function as cruelty. “Certain persons” also lets Maurois aim at both individuals and institutions. Nations, families, religions, reputations: whole systems can be organized around the strategic dilution of facts.
Context matters. Writing in the first half of the 20th century, Maurois lived through eras when “truth” arrived not just as personal revelation but as historical rupture: war propaganda exposed, old hierarchies collapsing, psychoanalysis and modernism insisting that comforting stories were suspect. In that climate, purity becomes a loaded ideal. Maurois’s line reads like a cosmopolitan’s skepticism toward fanatic clarity: the world is too psychologically and politically messy for truth-as-weaponry. The most cutting implication is that the people who demand “pure truth” loudest may be least able to survive it.
The intent is less to defend lying than to diagnose fragility and the social machinery built around it. Certain temperaments require illusion the way skin requires a barrier: remove it and the world becomes abrasion. The subtext carries a quiet warning about moral absolutists, the kind who treat “telling it like it is” as a badge of courage while ignoring that truth, delivered without context or care, can function as cruelty. “Certain persons” also lets Maurois aim at both individuals and institutions. Nations, families, religions, reputations: whole systems can be organized around the strategic dilution of facts.
Context matters. Writing in the first half of the 20th century, Maurois lived through eras when “truth” arrived not just as personal revelation but as historical rupture: war propaganda exposed, old hierarchies collapsing, psychoanalysis and modernism insisting that comforting stories were suspect. In that climate, purity becomes a loaded ideal. Maurois’s line reads like a cosmopolitan’s skepticism toward fanatic clarity: the world is too psychologically and politically messy for truth-as-weaponry. The most cutting implication is that the people who demand “pure truth” loudest may be least able to survive it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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