quotations about truth
Few men have depth enough to hear or tell the truth.
LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES
Reflections and Maxims
The best way to deceive a knave is to tell him the truth.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Truths that startled the generation in which they were first announced become in the next age the commonplaces of conversation; as the famous airs of operas which thrilled the first audiences come to be played on hand-organs in the streets.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
The only thing in the world we really possess is our knowledge of the truth.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Where the interests of truth are at actual stake, we ought, perhaps, to sacrifice even that which is our own--if, at least, we are to lay any claim to a philosophic spirit.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
But that battered word, truth, having made its appearance here, confronts one immediately with a series of riddles and has, moreover, since so many gospels are preached, the unfortunate tendency to make one belligerent.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
Some that will hold a creed unto martyrdom will not hold the truth against a sneering laugh.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
OSCAR WILDE
The Critic as Artist
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
It is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man who conforms, who follows some tradition. It is only when you are constantly inquiring, constantly observing, constantly learning, that you find truth, God, or love.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
Think on These Things
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
Belief in the truth commences with the doubting of all those "truths" we once believed.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
"Truth Will Have No Other Gods Alongside It"
Half truths were a wonderful way to inspire credibility.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Winner
The finding of one generation will not serve for the next. It tarnishes rapidly except it be reserved with an ever-renewed spirit of seeking.
ARTHUR EDDINGTON
Science and the Unseen World
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.
SAUL BELLOW
Herzog
Truth was the only daughter of Time.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci
There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and to the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried.
FRANCIS BACON
Novum Organum
I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
Collected Stories and Other Writings