quotations about truth
Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
letter to Elizabeth Pelham, January 4, 1939
If the whole world should agree to speak nothing but truth, what an abridgment it would make of speech! And what an unravelling there would be of the invisible webs which men, like so many spiders, now weave about each other!
WASHINGTON ALLSTON
Lectures on Art and Poems
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
The cold passion for truth hunts in no pack.
ROBINSON JEFFERS
"Be Angry at the Sun"
Condemn not truth for error's deeds.
MARTHA LAVINIA HOFFMAN
"Flowers and Weeds"
If you handle truth carelessly, it will cut your fingers.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
When all is said and done, how do we know but that our own unreason may be better than another's truth? for it has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is ready for the wild bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Celtic Twilight
Man is not permitted without censure to follow his own thoughts in the search of truth, when they lead him ever so little out of the common road.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Half truths were a wonderful way to inspire credibility.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Winner
It might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of spirit should be measured according to how much of the "truth" one could still barely endure--or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Beyond Good and Evil
Who make up the really great men of any age? It is those who have truth woven into every fiber of their being.
HENRY F. KLETZING
"Truth"
The semblance of absolute truth is nothing but absolute conformism.
PAUL FEYERABEND
Against Method
The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
ADRIENNE RICH
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence
I've always been suspicious of collective truths. I think an idea is true when it hasn't been put into words and that the moment it's put into words it becomes exaggerated. Because the moment it's put into words there's an abuse, an excess in the expression of the idea that makes it false.
EUGENE IONESCO
Conversations with Eugene Ionesco
They who know the truth are not equal to those who love it, and they who love it are not equal to those who delight in it.
CONFUCIUS
The Analects
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
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
Every dogma embodies some shade of truth to give it seeming currency.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
We can, in general, be much less sure of the truth of a thing, than of the falsehood; because though every part we have seen may agree, yet we cannot tell how many may be behind, and one failure of connection will be sufficient to falsify the whole.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
Understand that the tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes--never!
MIKHAIL BULGAKOV
The Master and Margarita