quotations about truth
In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts.... It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"The Book of the Grotesque", Winesburg, Ohio
Truth refuses to be subservient to either politics or the market.
GAO XINGJIAN
"Literature as Testimony: The Search for Truth", Witness Literature: Proceedings of the Nobel Centennial Symposium
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne--
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
The Present Crisis
Nothing endures except truth.
LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES
Reflections and Maxims
The excellence and inspiration of truth is in the pursuit, not in the mere having of it. The pursuit of all truth is a kind of gymnastics; a man swings from one truth with higher strength to gain another. The continual glory is the possibility opening before us.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Truth and myth can be impossibly deviate, but frequently still have a common starting point.
MICK FARREN
Darklost
To take thought, to take truth, and translate them into life--that is the hard, hard battle.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
John Bull's Other Island
Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.
GEORGE ELIOT
Armgart
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
THOMAS MANN
Essay on Freud
Veracity is not a stagnant feature of ideas, so the status of truth is always questionable.
TOMAS CHAMORRO-PREMUZIC
"Truth in the digital age: Blame people (not algorithms) for the filter bubble", Huffington Post, March 19, 2017
Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better looking than he had imagined.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
On Democracy
No man is convinced of truth by another's falling into passion, but rather suspects error and design.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Powerful truth has its own gravity and eventually pulls people back to it.
DAN BROWN
The Lost Symbol
Whatever of truth or approximation to truth we have attained, we must hold to it with tenacity and assurance as the truth for us and for the time; must hold to it to live and die by. It seems to me that this fidelity to the conviction of the hour, truth will not dispense with. If a man holds faintly and indecisively to what of truth he has attained, I do not see how he can gain any more beyond. Nevertheless, we must hold it in readiness to give it up the hour that a new or larger truth is revealed. For truth in our minds, our vision of it, is not a finality, but a march. And the moment the word is given, we must strike our tent, without a sigh.
SAMUEL LONGFELLOW
Essays and Sermons
Many yet are the secret truths of God which will be unfolded as they are needed.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Lila
Truth is the substance of the soul.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
What shortens the life-span of the existing truth is the volume of hypotheses offered to replace it; the more the hypotheses, the shorter the time span of the truth.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Daily News, February 25, 1905