quotations about truth
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.
ELIF BATUMAN
The Possessed
I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
Collected Stories and Other Writings
I sometimes have these spells of compulsive truth. But as Lady Macbeth would say, "The fit is momentary."
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth -- and truth rewarded me.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
All Said and Done
If you handle truth carelessly, it will cut your fingers.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
Notes on Virginia
No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Truth", Essays
Slender certainty is better than portentous falsehood.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
The truth can both lift up and knock down.
KIRBY LARSON
Hattie Ever After
The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
ADRIENNE RICH
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence
Trump's relationship to the truth seems novel, if only because he doesn't try to hide his relativism. For Trump, truth is always more about how people feel than what may be empirically verifiable. Trump admits as much in The Art of the Deal, where he describes his sales strategy as "truthful hyperbole." For Trump, facts are fragile, and truth is flexible. Trump probably doesn't spend evenings poring over Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge -- but the parallels between Trump's attacks on accepted knowledge and critical philosophy's insistence that we interrogate truth claims suggest that not all assaults on the authority of facts are revolutionary.
CASEY WILLIAMS
"Creating Truth is Assertion of Power", Asharq Al-Awsat, April 19, 2017
Truth is a pillar erected by God, and upholdeth the universe.
JAMES LINEN
"Desultorious Chronicles", The Poetical and Prose Writings of James Linen
Truth is my God. Non-violence is the means of realizing Him.
MAHATMA GANDHI
Young India, January 8, 1925
Truth is not simply what is believed. A lie believed is still a lie.
CHAMBERLAIN C. OGUNEDO
"And the truth shall set you free: What is truth?", The Guardian, November 27, 2016
Each man has in him the potential to realize the truth through his own will and endeavour and to help others to realize it.
AUNG SAN SUU KYI
In Quest of Democracy
I do not think that so much harm is done by giving error to a child, as by giving truth in a lifeless form.
WILLIAM E. CHANNING
Thoughts
I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it's pretty obvious to me that more often than not the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try to call on it, just like a lightbulb cracking off when you throw the switch.
ANN PATCHETT
Truth and Beauty
If any man dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.
HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Cancer
If the feeble mind of man did not presume to resist the clear evidence of truth, but yielded its infirmity to wholesome doctrines, as to a health-giving medicine, until it obtained from God, by its faith and piety, the grace needed to heal it, they who have just ideas, and express them in suitable language, would need to use no long discourse to refute the errors of empty conjecture. But this mental infirmity is now more prevalent and hurtful than ever, to such an extent that even after the truth has been as fully demonstrated as man can prove it to man, they hold for the very truth their own unreasonable fancies, either on account of their great blindness, which prevents them from seeing what is plainly set before them, or on account of their opinionative obstinacy, which prevents them from acknowledging the force of what they do see.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God