quotations about truth
Sometimes you hear a person speak the truth and you know that they are speaking the truth. But you also know that they have not heard themselves, do not know what they have said: do not know that they have revealed much more than they have said. This may be why the truth remains, on the whole, so rare.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
Truth at last cannot be hidden. Dissimulation is of no avail. Dissimulation is to no purpose before so great a judge. Falsehood puts on a mask. Nothing is hidden under the sun.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci
When we mean to touch the heart, we always speak the truth in some degree. It is our last resource; and if it were our first, we should have less to lament.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Nootbook
Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.
AYN RAND
Atlas Shrugged
All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we chose to distort it.
WOODY ALLEN
Deconstructing Harry
If power does not listen to truth, power will reap its own destruction.
PAUL TYSON
"Adults in the Room, by Yanis Varoufakis", Open Democracy, May 11, 2017
A man may be in as just possession of the truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
Religio Medici
One great disadvantage to the cause of truth is, its being so often in the hands of liars.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters and Reflections
Who dares to say that he alone has found the truth?
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
The New England Tragedies
For the artist, the goal of the painting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspect of a universal truth that if successful, will continue to move and to touch people even as contexts, societies and cultures change. For the scientist, the goal of a theory is to convey "truth for now"--to replace an old truth, while accepting that someday this theory, too, will be replaced by a new "truth," because that is the way science advances.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
This Is Your Brain on Music
Truth hurts. Maybe not as much as jumping on a bicycle with a seat missing, but it hurts.
LT. FRANK DREBIN (LESLIE NIELSEN)
Naked Gun 2 1/2
Because a thing is eloquently expressed it should not be taken to be as necessarily true; nor because it is uttered with stammering lips should it be supposed false.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters
Some things are too terrible to be true.
BOB DYLAN
"Honest With Me"
Truth is such a rare thing, it is delightful to tell it.
EMILY DICKINSON
letter to T. W. Higginson, 1870
For behold, Thou lovest the truth, and he that doth it, cometh to the light.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
If we bring not the good courage of minds covetous of truth, and truth only, prepared to hear all things, and decide upon all things, according to evidence, we should do more wisely to sit down contented in ignorance, than to bestir ourselves only to reap disappointment.
FRANCES WRIGHT
Course of Popular Lectures
The greatest truths are the simplest.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in truth!
SOPHOCLES
Oedipus Rex