quotations about truth
Let us seek truth everywhere; let us cull it wherever we can find its blossom or its seed. Having found the seed let us scatter it to the winds of heaven. Whenever it may come, whithersoever it may blow, it will be able to germinate.
ROMAIN ROLLAND
The Forerunners
Most people will accept a likely lie to an unlikely truth. In fact, they prefer it.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Guilty Pleasures
Nature has completely hid truth in the bottom of a well.
DEMOCRITUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
The truth of the scholar, alone in his study, does not always accord with what the world at large considers to be true.
EIJI YOSHIKAWA
Musashi
Truth alone will endure, all the rest will be swept away before the tide of time.
MAHATMA GANDHI
Basic Education
Truth as philosophy is a gas; as art, it is visible steam.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Truth doesn't run on time like a commuter train.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
Truth is beauty. That can be a hard thing to say, because some things are not so attractive on the surface. But by owning up to them, we change them--just by speaking them.
BONO
Oprah Magazine, April 2004
Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
A concealed truth, that's all a lie is. Either by omission or commission we never do more than obscure. The truth stays in the undergrowth, waiting to be discovered.
JOSEPHINE HART
Damage
Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost ... perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well.
PHILIP K. DICK
A Scanner Darkly
I'm for truth, no matter who tells it.
MALCOLM X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
If we think we have found truth for ourselves, above all things, let us not impose it on one another. Let us lock upon it all the doors of consciousness. For however inspiring it may be to us, however ennobling, when once we try to impose it on another it becomes a poison.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Truth", Intimations
There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; the truths of fact are contingent and their opposites are possible.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
La monadologie
For any truth, if overdone ... if exaggerated, or if carried beyond the limits of its applicability, can be reduced to absurdity.
VLADIMIR LENIN
Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder
He that hath truth on his side is a fool as well as a coward if he is afraid to own it because of other men's opinions.
DANIEL DEFOE
The History of the Union Between England and Scotland
Institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
It is better by assenting to truth to conquer opinion, than by assenting to opinion to be conquered by truth.
EPICTETUS
Fragments
Love of truth shows itself in this, that a man knows how to find and value the good in everything.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
The truth
Has to be melted out of our stubborn lives
By suffering.
Nothing speaks the truth,
Nothing tells us how things really are,
Nothing forces us to know
What we do not want to know
Except pain.
And this is how the gods declare their love.
AESCHYLUS
The Oresteia