quotations about truth
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
Arguably, this strategy is not viable beyond laboratory settings, because the truth is always unknown on the streets.
ANNA K. BOBAK
"Can We Improve National Security Using What We Know about Face Recognition?", Scientific American, April 18, 2017
You're never going to see the truth. [It's] what you're shooting for always and you always miss it. Every once in a while, you catch an edge of it. That's what's you hope for, I think, as an artist.
SAM SHEPARD
interview, 2005
We shall find some things that are true, and some that are new, but very few things that are both true and new.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Truth is artless and innocent--like the eloquence of nature, it is clothed with simplicity and easy persuasion; always open to investigation and analysis, it seeks exposure, because it fears not detection.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
To speak the truth is easy and pleasant.
MIKHAIL BULGAKOV
The Master and Margarita
There must be repressed truth even in lies.
STANISLAW IGNACY WITKIEWICZ
The Madman and the Nun
The truth has no need to be uttered to be made apparent, and ... one may perhaps gather it with more certainty, without waiting for words and without even taking any account of them, from countless outward signs, even from certain invisible phenomena, analogous in the sphere of human character to what atmospheric changes are in the physical world.
MARCEL PROUST
The Guermantes Way
The truth can both lift up and knock down.
KIRBY LARSON
Hattie Ever After
The heart is an artist that paints over what profoundly disturbs us, leaving on the canvas a less dark, less sharp version of the truth.
DEAN KOONTZ
Forever Odd
One truth a man lives is worth a thousand he only utters.
EPICHARMUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
Old Time was young, men's hearts were all untried
By Grief and Sin, when round this whirling ball
Pure Truth and Falsehood journeyed side by side
In free companionship. At evenfall
Of that long day which closed the Age of Gold
They came to Pleasure's lake, and both were glad
To cast their robes and seek those waters cold.
But Falsehood, first emerging, lightly clad
Her limbs in Truth's white garments, fresh and fair,
And swiftly fled away with mocking mirth;
While Truth, disdaining Falsehood's tattered wear,
Pursued. So still around the dizzy earth
Flies Falsehood, well-disguised in Truth's array,
While Truth runs after, naked to the day.
ARTHUR GUITERMAN
"Truth and Falsehood"
Lower a bucket into a well of self-deception, and what comes up must be immortal truth, mustn't it?
CHARLES READE
The Cloister and the Hearth
Truth, to my mind, beats fiction for dramatic interest.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
Truth is universal. Perception of truth is not.
ANONYMOUS
Truth is the secret of eloquence and of virtue, the basis of moral authority; it is the highest summit of art and of life.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Truth is a torch, but a huge one, and so it is only with blinking eyes what we all of us try to get past it, in actual terror of being burnt.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Truth has no path. Truth is living and, therefore, changing.
BRUCE LEE
Tao of Jeet Kune Do
Truth ... is a hard apple, whether one is throwing it or catching it.
DONALD BARTHELME
"Rebecca"
The longest sword, the strongest lungs, the most voices, are false measures of Truth.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms