What Makes What We Say True?

We may happen to be right about something when we make a guess or repeat what we’ve heard, but what we think and say is truest when we think and speak that which we know to be true. A word is true, says Augustine, when it has “sprung from things that are known.” As one of the poets has said,

No man could stop my flow

Because I know what I speak and I speak what I know.

Let’s think and speak in this way.