Truth Quotes
Most popular truth quotes
The question of truth is really a question of memory, deep memory, for it deals with something prior to ourselves and can succeed in uniting us in a way that transcends our petty and limited individual consciousness. It is a question about the origin of all that is, in whose light we can glimpse the goal and thus the meaning of our common path.
It is the easiest thing in the world to deny a fact. People do it all the time. Yet it remains a fact just the same.
It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.
It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
Nobody has a right to put another under such difficulty that he must either hurt the person by telling the truth, or hurt himself by telling what is not true.
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
For as bats' eyes are to daylight so is our intellectual eye to those truths which are, in their own nature, the most obvious of all.
My way of joking is telling the truth; that is the funniest joke in the world.
Truth always lags last, limping along on the arm of time.
Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers.
Every truth has two sides; it is well to look at both, before we commit ourselves to either.
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Speak the truth, but leave immediately after.
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
It takes two to speak the truth — one to speak and another to hear.
Do not expect truth to prevail in all situations.
Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.
Truth shines the brighter clad in verse.
Love truth, but pardon error.
Justice is truth in action.
The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact.
The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been kindness, beauty and truth.
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
There are only two ways of telling the complete truth - anonymously and posthumously.
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
Truth is stranger than fiction — to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it. Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.
Let me tell so much truth. I want to tell the truth in my work. The truth will lead me to the light.
We owe the truth, not just the facts. The facts can sometimes obscure the truth. I've seen many things. I've learned many things. I've certainly been exposed to many things and I've learned something: I owe it to you to tell you.
My way of joking is to tell the truth. That's the funniest joke in the world.
Where there is truth, there is also light, but don't confuse light with the flash.
When one is really searching for the truth, one is doing it for good. You don't look for the truth to divide, confront, attack, belittle, or dissolve.
In a society where lies, cover-ups, and hypocrisy have caused people to lose basic trust in the social contract, what could be more revolutionary than the truth?
Only with "the truth will set you free" is it possible to resolve the grave problems of people and nations.
The truth is always combative, but it is also combated.
Truth, goodness, and beauty are inseparable.
It's very hard, in the world of the easy, to believe in the truth.
An enemy who tells the truth contributes infinitely more to our improvement than a friend who deludes us.
He who is caught in a lie is not believed when he tells the truth.
Never assume the obvious is true.
I have one request: may I never use my reason against truth.
Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
The truth is not always dressed for the evening.
Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now—always.
Only the truth can still astonish people.
Some people so treasure the truth that they use it with great economy.
A half truth is a whole lie.
A half-truth is usually less than half of that.
A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.
The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.
Add one small bit to the truth and you inevitably subtract from it.
We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch. Nay, you may kick it about all day, and it will be round and full at evening.
Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.
Truth hurts—not the searching after; the running from!
Of course, it's the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.
The color of truth is gray.
A lie has speed, but truth has endurance.
Every time you try to smother a truth, two others get their breath.
I seem to have been like a child playing on the sea shore, finding now and then a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me.
A paradox is a truth standing on its head to gain attention.
Nothing lays itself open to the charge of exaggeration more than the language of naked truth.
It takes two to speak truth—one to speak and another to hear.
We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.
The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.
Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.
Truth exists; only lies have to be invented.
Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.
There is no god higher than truth.
A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
It is the customary fate of new truths, to begin as heresies, and to end as superstitions.
Why abandon a belief merely because it ceases to be true. Cling to it long enough, and it will turn true again, for so it goes. Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
The truth knocks on the door and you say, Go away, I'm looking for the truth, and so it goes away. Puzzling.
You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.
I never can feel certain of any truth but from a clear perception of its beauty.
Facts do not exist; only interpretations.
Tell all the truth but tell it slant.
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
Truth is a pathless land.
Truth is not always the best basis for happiness. There are certain lies which may consist a far better and more secure foundation of happiness. There are people who perish when their eyes are opened.
Truth came to market and could not be sold; we buy lies with ready cash.
Bitter truth is better than sweet falsehood.
I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
Truth burns up error.
Error moves with quick feet and truth must never be lagging behind.
The race problem is a moral one. . . . lts solution will come especially from the domain of principles. Like all the other great battles of humanity, it is to be fought out with the weapons of truth.
Absolute truth is incompatible with an advanced state of society.
The truth should be told, though it kill.
You never find yourself until you face the truth.
Truthfulness with me is hardly a virtue. I cannot discriminate between truths that need and those that need not to be told.
If one cannot invent a really convincing lie. it is often better to stick to the truth.
Truth, like surgery, may hurt, but it cures.
Art for the sake of art itself is an idle sentence. Art for the sake of truth, for the sake of what is beautiful and good — that is the creed I seek.
The truth shall make you free.
It has always been desirable to tell the truth, but seldom if ever necessary.
If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.
It is one thing to show a man that he is in an error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.
In the end truth will out.
No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.
The obstinate insisting that tweedledum is not tweedledee is the bone and marrow of life.
The reader deserves an honest opinion. If he doesn't deserve it, give it to him anyhow.
There is nothing more fickle, more vague, or more powerful; yet capricious as it is, it is nevertheless much more often true, reasonable, and just, than we imagine.
One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic.
Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.
The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts: the less you know the hotter you get.
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.
Every man has a perfect right to his opinion, provided it agrees with ours.
We should stop kidding ourselves. We should let go of things that aren't true. It's always better with the truth.
He who tells the truth is not we liked.
The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.
Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth.
The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even to murder, with the truth.
All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy; we reason from our hands to our head.
There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art.
A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Truth is never to be expected from authors whose understanding is warped with enthusiasm.
An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains.
Truth emerges more readily from error than confusion.
It seems, indeed, a necessary weakness of our mind to be able to reach truth only across a multitude of errors and obstacles.
There is no such source of error as the pursuit of absolute truth.
Error proliferates. Man tracks it down and cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth.
To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.
The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
If you shut your door to all errors, truth will be shut out.
It is the essence of truth that it is never excessive. Why should it exaggerate?
In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled.
Those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.
Between the two poles of whole-truth and half-truth is slung the chancy hammock in which we all rock.
Sincerity that thinks it is the sole possessor of the truth is a deadlier sin than hypocrisy, which knows better.
The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.
There are few human beings who receive the truth complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellular, like a laborious mosaic.
To search for truth, one has to be drunk with imagination.
If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.
I love you and, because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies.
Like all valuable commodities, truth is often counterfeited.
The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.
A snare for the truth of human experience.
Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.
If you ever injected truth into politics you'd have no politics.
Truth walks toward us on the path of our questions.
It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions—especially selfish ones.
When you shoot an arrow of truth, dip its point in honey.
He who wishes to teach us a truth should not tell it to us, but simply suggest it with a brief gesture, a gesture which starts an ideal trajectory in the air along which we glide until we find ourselves at the feet of the new truth.
Every truth has two sides; it is well to look at both before we commit ourselves to either.
The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even to murder, for the truth.
The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.
Truth's like a fire, and will burn through and be seen.
When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore and to see ships tossed upon the sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below: but no pleasure is comparable to standing upon the vantage ground of truth...and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below.
Pushing any truth out very far, you are met by a counter-truth.
A man may say, "From now on I'm going to speak the truth." But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking.
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
Many people choose, early on, their own truths from the large smorgasbord available.
A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.
Nothing is so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth!
Men take so much delight in lying, that truth is sometimes forced to disguise herself in the habit of falsehood to get entertainment, as in fables...by the ancients.
Truth may be stretched, but cannot be broken, and always gets above falsehood, as oil does above water.
To the scientific mind, truth comes first. Truth, however bitter, can be accepted, and woven into a design for living.
In wartime, Truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
Truth is irresistible. The vivacity of its coloring has quite a different effect from the daub of falsity or invention.
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.
Truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between the arms the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the main river.
Pure truth, like pure gold, has been found unfit for circulation, because men have discovered that it is far more convenient to adulterate the truth than to refine themselves.
Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant.
The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked.
Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
Whoever is careless with truth in small matters cannot be trusted in important affairs.
Truth has rough flavors if we bite it through.
Wherever the truth is injured, defend it.
Truth is a flower in whose neighborhood others must wither.
Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth."
The color of truth is grey.
When they're offered to the world in merry guise, Unpleasant truths are swallowed with a will — For he who'd make his fellow-creatures wise Should always gild the philosophic pill!
The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
Add a few drops of venom to a half truth and you have an absolute truth.
Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.
The man who finds a truth lights a torch.
Truth is a clumsy servant that breaks the dishes while cleaning them.
Truth, like the juice of the poppy, in small quantities, calms men; in larger, heats and irritates them, and is attended by fatal consequences in its excess.
The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth. It is not possession of the Truth, but rather the pursuit of Truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing perfectibility is to be found.
Who dares To say that he alone has found the truth?
Who speaks the truth stabs Falsehood to the heart.
Truth, like gold, is not less so for being newly brought out of the mine.
Truth uncompromisingly told will always have ragged edges.
Truth has nutritional value.
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.
Truth is a rough, honest, helter-skelter, terrier, that none like to see brought into their drawing rooms.
Such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.
The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.
The truth never arrives neatly wrapped.
He who would speak the truth must first have one foot in the stirrup.
Truth never is undone; Its shafts remain.
Discussion is impossible with someone who claims not to speak the truth, but already to possess it.
The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.
We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other married couples they sometimes live apart.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
Perhaps The truth depends on a walk around a lake.
Truth looks tawdry when she is overdressed.
Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.
The truth is really an ambition which is beyond us.
The best mind-altering drug is truth.
Sometimes in writing of myself—which is the only subject anyone knows intimately—I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure, an antic sound.
There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.
Many a truth is the result of an error.
Error is to truth as sleep is to waking. I have observed that one turns, as if refreshed, from error back to truth.
History warns us, however, that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.
First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.
Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.
It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.
False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.
Of life's two chief prizes, beauty and truth, I found the first in a loving heart and the second in a labourer's hand.
Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.'
The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words which are clear; the great truth has great silence.
Truth is not determined by majority vote.
Most men would kill the truth if truth would kill their religion.
To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth.
Don't despise empiric truth. Lots of things work in practice for which the laboratory has never found proof.
It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it.
Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate ways. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power.
As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it – and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control it.
Your duty is to scream those truths that one should shout but that are merely whispered.
Life offers everyone truth and comfort. Choose carefully. You rarely can have both.
