quotations about truth
Truth is always revolutionary.
ELIAS KHOURY
"Truth is always revolutionary", Malta Today, August 30, 2016
If a man lived in a desert for six months without food, drink or companionship he would be reasonably free from prejudice and would be in a condition to enunciate great truths. But even then his vision of reality would have been warped by so much sand and so many sunsets. Even if he survived and brought us his Truth with all the gravity and long night-gown of a Hindu faker, as soon as any one listened to him his message would no longer be Truth. The complexion of his audience, the very shape of their noses, would subtly undermine his magnificent aloofness.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
"Truth", Mince Pie
He that hath truth on his side is a fool as well as a coward if he is afraid to own it because of other men's opinions.
DANIEL DEFOE
The History of the Union Between England and Scotland
Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!
URSULA K. LE GUIN
introduction, The Left Hand of Darkness
And diff'ring judgments serve but to declare
That truth lies somewhere, if we knew but where.
WILLIAM COWPER
Hope
The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Brothers Karamazov
Not everything that's true needs to be said.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Bones
No two things can be so contradictory, so much at variance as truth and falsehood; and yet none are so mixed and united.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters and Reflections
Let us seek truth everywhere; let us cull it wherever we can find its blossom or its seed. Having found the seed let us scatter it to the winds of heaven. Whenever it may come, whithersoever it may blow, it will be able to germinate.
ROMAIN ROLLAND
The Forerunners
Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.
LILLIAN HELLMAN
The Little Foxes
Truth is beauty. That can be a hard thing to say, because some things are not so attractive on the surface. But by owning up to them, we change them--just by speaking them.
BONO
Oprah Magazine, April 2004
Truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an original affinity with freedom.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
History of Sexuality
The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook H", Aphorisms
It is almost impossible to bear the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook G", Aphorisms
Will you tell me how a man's to live, and face his life, if he can't believe that truth's like a fire, and will burn through and be seen though it takes all the years there are? While I stand up and have breath in my lungs I shall be one flame of that fire; it's all the life I have.
MAXWELL ANDERSON
Winterset
Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don't mean the argument over who came up with the word. I don't know whether it's a new thing, but it's certainly a current thing, in that it doesn't seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty.
STEPHEN COLBERT
interview, AV Club, January 25, 2006
The truth can only be recalled, never invented.
MARILYN MONROE
diary, Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters
But thou, my son, study to make prevail
One colour in thy life, the hue of truth.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Merope
To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.
EUGENE O'NEILL
The Iceman Cometh
Nature has completely hid truth in the bottom of a well.
DEMOCRITUS
attributed, Day's Collacon