Jacque Lacan on Truth

"A truth, if it must be said, is not easy to recognize once it has become received. Not that there aren't any established truths, but they are so easily confused with the reality that surrounds them that no other artifice was for a long time found to distinguish them from it than to mark them with the sign of the spirit and, in ordr to pay them homage, to regard them as having come from another world. It is not the whole story to attribute to a sort of blindness on man's part the fact that truth is never to him a finer looking girl when the light, held aloft by his arm as in the proverbial emblem, unexpectedly illuminates her nakedness. And one must play the fool a bit to feign knowing nothing of what happens next. But stupidity remains characterized by bullheaded frankness when one wonders where one could have been looking for her before, the emblem scracely helping to indicate the well, an unseemly and even malodorous place, rather than the jewelry box in which every precious form must be preserved intact.

But now truth in Freud's mouth takes the said bull by the horns: "To you I am thus the enigma of she who slips away as soon as she appears, you men who try so hard to hide me under the tawdry finery of your properties. Still, I admit your embarrassment is sincere, for even when you take it upon yourselves to become my heralds, you acquire no greater worthy by wearing my colors than your own clothes, which are like you, phantoms that you are. Where am I going, having passed into you? And where was I prior to that? Will I perhaps tell you someday? But so you will find me where I am, I will teach you by what sign you can recognize me.

Men, listen, I am telling you the secret. I, truth, speak."

(Jacque Lacan, "The Freudian Thing")