truth quotes

Abraham Lincoln: 

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four; calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

Abraham Lincoln: 

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away."

Abraham Lincoln: 

Truth is generally the best vindication against slander.

Abraham Lincoln (attributed): 

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

Adrienne Rich: 

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

Adrienne Rich: 

False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news.

Albert Einstein: 

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

Albert Einstein: 

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

Albert Einstein: 

The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. . . . The ordinary objects of human endeavour -- property, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.

Alfred North Whitehead: 

There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

Anais Nin: 

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

Anais Nin: 

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

Andre Gide: 

Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.

Arthur Conan Doyle: 

Whenever you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Benjamin Disraeli: 

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.

Bertrand Russell: 

What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.

Blaise Pascal: 

You always admire what you really don't understand.

Blaise Pascal: 

We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart. 

Blaise Pascal: 

There are truths on this side of the Pyranees, which are falsehoods on the other.

Blaise Pascal: 

We know the truth, not only by the reason, but by the heart.

Brad Holland: 

Postmodernists believe that truth is myth, and myth, truth. This equation has its roots in pop psychology. The same people also believe that emotions are a form of reality. There used to be another name for this state of mind. It used to be called psychosis.

Buddha: 

Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it. Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held. Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books. Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe nothing just because someone else believes it. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true. [paraphrased]

Christopher Morley: 

There is no squabbling so violent as that between people who accepted an idea yesterday and those who will accept the same idea tomorrow.

Clarence Darrow: 

Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails.

Corliss Lamont: 

The intuition of free will gives us the truth.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan: 

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.

David Hume: 

Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

Demosthenes: 

Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.

Dorothy Thompson: 

Fear grows in darkness; if you think there's a bogeyman around, turn on the light.

Dorothy Thompson: 

There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth, the persistent refusal to analyze the causes of happenings.

E. L. Doctorow: 

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.

Edward R. Murrow: 

Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton: 

Reformers who are always compromising, have not yet grasped the idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.

Elizabeth Kenny: 

Some minds remain open long enough for the truth not only to enter but to pass on through by way of a ready exit without pausing anywhere along the route.

Emily Dickinson: 

Truth is such a rare thing, it is delighted to tell it.

Felix Adler: 

The truth which has made us free will in the end make us glad also.

Friedrich Nietzsche: 

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Galileo: 

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

George Bernard Shaw: 

New opinions often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions open to discussion, and finally as established truths.

George Eliot: 

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.

George Eliot: 

[I]t is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

George Orwell: 

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

George Orwell: 

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

Gloria Steinem: 

The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.

Harry Emerson Fosdick: 

The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth. The Living of These Days, 1956

Henri Frederic Amiel: 

Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence.

Henry David Thoreau: 

The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.

Henry David Thoreau: 

Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction; but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies. They go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful.

Henry Ward Beecher: 

It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.

Heraklietos of Ephesos: 

Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.
Knowledge is not intelligence.
In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected.
Change alone is unchanging.
The same road goes both up and down.
The beginning of a circle is also its end.
Not I, but the world says it: all is one.
And yet everything comes in season.

Isaac Asimov: 

[W]hen people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

Isaac Asimov: 

A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.

Jean-Paul Sartre: 

Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.

Joan of Arc: 

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

John F. Kennedy: 

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive and unrealistic

John Locke: 

It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth.

John Trapp: 

Unity without verity is no better than conspiracy.

Josh Billings: 

As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.

Leonardo da Vinci: 

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

Marcus Aurelius: 

If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.

Margaret Mead: 

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.

Mark Twain: 

Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain't so.

Mark Twain: 

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.
1908, notebook


Mark Twain: 

If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.

Mark Twain: 

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

Mark Twain: 

If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.

Mark Twain: 

The old saw says, "Let a sleeping dog lie." Right. Still, when there is much at stake it is better to get a newspaper to do it.

Mark Twain: 

In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing. 
Autobiography, 1959


Mark Twain: 

Always tell the truth. That way, you don't have to remember what you said.

Mark Twain: 

Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain't so.

Mark Twain: 

When in doubt, tell the truth.

Martin Luther King, jr.: 

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

Max Planck: 

It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him.

Maya Angelou : 

One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

Michael Friedlander: 

There are many more wrong answers than right ones, and they are easier to find.

Molly Ivins: 

I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil. And that no one knows the truth.

Noam Chomsky: 

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: 

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

Pearl S. Buck: 

The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.

Peter F. Drucker: 

There are no creeds in mathematics.

Pierre Abelard: 

The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.

Rabindranath Tagore: 

Truth comes as conqueror only to those who have lost the art of receiving it as friend.

Rabindranath Tagore: 

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us. 
Stray Birds


Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Truth is our element.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Reform is affirmative, conservatism negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth.
The Conservative


Richard Avedon: 

There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Sam Rayburn: 

Son, always tell the truth. Then you'll never have to remember what you said the last time.

Soren Kierkegaard: 

Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion—and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion ... while Truth again reverts to a new minority.

Stephen King: 

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Thomas Jefferson: 

Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.

Thomas Jefferson: 

The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.

Umberto Eco: 

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Virginia Woolf: 

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Virginia Woolfe: 

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Voltaire: 

As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities.

Wilfred Owen: 

All the poet can do today is warn.
That is why true Poets must be truthful. 

Will Rogers: 

I guess truth can hurt you worse in an election than about anything that can happen to you.

Will Rogers: 

I have always noticed that people will never laugh at anything that is not based on truth.

William James: 

Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
Pragmatism (1907)


William James: 

[T]he true is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our thinking.

William James: 

Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.

William James: 

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.

William Sloane Coffin: 

The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.