quotations about truth
Truth is, whatever may be said to the contrary, superior to all fictions. One ought never to regret seeing clearer into the depths.
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays
Truth is what every man sees lurking at the bottom of his own soul, like the oyster shell housewives put in the kitchen kettle to collect the lime from the water. By and by each man's iridescent oyster shell of Truth becomes coated with the lime of prejudice and hearsay.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
"Truth", Mince Pie
Were truth our uttered language, Angels might talk with men.
GERALD MASSEY
"The World is Full of Beauty"
I sometimes have these spells of compulsive truth. But as Lady Macbeth would say, "The fit is momentary."
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
There is truth and falsehood in a comma.
TOM STOPPARD
The Invention of Love
Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
letter to Elizabeth Pelham, January 4, 1939
Each man has in him the potential to realize the truth through his own will and endeavour and to help others to realize it.
AUNG SAN SUU KYI
In Quest of Democracy
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"
Truth is a shining goddess, always veiled, always distant, never wholly approachable, but worthy of all the devotion of which the human spirit is capable.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
"University Education", Fact and Fiction
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"
Truth and virtue are flowers that die not.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Understand that the tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes--never!
MIKHAIL BULGAKOV
The Master and Margarita
You cannot gather much truth by searching the fields; you must sink shafts.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
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
Spurn not at seeming error, but dig below its surface for the truth;
And beware of seeming truths that grow on the roots of error.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Slender certainty is better than portentous falsehood.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Truth travels slowly and gets weaker as it goes. Suitable lies are strong and run faster.
ARIANA FRANKLIN
Mistress of the Art of Death
They frequently find the truth who do not seek it, they who do, frequently lose it.
FANNY KEMBLE
Further Records, February 8, 1875
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
Truth is always new, therefore timeless. What was truth yesterday is not truth today, what Truth is truth today is not truth tomorrow: truth has no continuity. It is the mind which wants to make the experience which it calls truth continuous, and such a mind shall not know truth.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
"What was true yesterday is not true today", The New Indian Express, March 2, 2017