quotations about truth
Were truth our uttered language, Angels might talk with men.
GERALD MASSEY
"The World is Full of Beauty"
The demands of Truth are severe; she has no sympathy with the myrtles. All that which is so indispensable in Song is precisely all that with which she has nothing whatever to do. It is but making her a flaunting paradox to wreathe her in gems and flowers. In enforcing a truth we need severity rather than efflorescence of language. We must be simple, precise, terse. We must be cool, calm, unimpassioned. In a word, we must be in that mood, which, as nearly as possible, is the exact converse of the poetical. He must be blind, indeed, who does not perceive the radical and chasmal differences between the truthful and the poetical modes of inculcation. He must be theory-mad beyond redemption who, in spite of these differences, shall still persist in attempting to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Poetic Principle"
Half truths were a wonderful way to inspire credibility.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Winner
There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.
WILLIAM JAMES
Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness", The Varieties of Religious Experience
Understand that the tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes--never!
MIKHAIL BULGAKOV
The Master and Margarita
We cannot make things true by any amount of effort; we can merely discover what God has made true from all eternity.
HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS
Re-statements of Christian Doctrine
Men never make truths; they only recognize the value of this currency of God. They find truths, as men sometimes find bills, in the street, and only recognize the value of that which other persons have drawn.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
ADRIENNE RICH
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence
We shall find some things that are true, and some that are new, but very few things that are both true and new.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Truth -- there's no such thing.
TANKRED DORST
Freedom for Clemens
O Truth, Truth, how inwardly did even then the marrow of my soul pant after Thee, when they often and diversely, and in many and huge books, echoed of Thee to me, though it was but an echo? And these were the dishes wherein to me, hungering after Thee, they, instead of Thee, served up the Sun and Moon, beautiful works of Thine, but yet Thy works, not Thyself, no nor Thy first works. For Thy spiritual works are before these corporeal works, celestial though they be, and shining. But I hungered and thirsted not even after those first works of Thine, but after Thee Thyself, the Truth, in whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning: yet they still set before me in those dishes, glittering fantasies, than which better were it to love this very sun (which is real to our sight at least), than those fantasies which by our eyes deceive our mind. Yet because I thought them to be Thee, I fed thereon; not eagerly, for Thou didst not in them taste to me as Thou art; for Thou wast not these emptinesses, nor was I nourished by them, but exhausted rather.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
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
The semblance of absolute truth is nothing but absolute conformism.
PAUL FEYERABEND
Against Method
Truth is more deceptive than falsehood, for it is more frequently presented by those from whom we do not expect it, and so has against it a numerical presumption.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
Who make up the really great men of any age? It is those who have truth woven into every fiber of their being.
HENRY F. KLETZING
"Truth"
Slender certainty is better than portentous falsehood.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Lower a bucket into a well of self-deception, and what comes up must be immortal truth, mustn't it?
CHARLES READE
The Cloister and the Hearth
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.
CONFUCIUS
The Analects
When we walk towards the sun of Truth, all shadows are cast behind us.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk