quotations about truth
Truth is always like oil in water ... No matter how much of water you add ... it always floats on top.
AHMED MUSA
"Who are you to judge the life I live? Leicester City's Musa slams critics", The 42, May 2, 2017
Not everything that's true needs to be said.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Bones
Even a liar tells a hundred truths to one lie; he has to, to make the lie good for anything.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Most people will accept a likely lie to an unlikely truth. In fact, they prefer it.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Guilty Pleasures
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
ANAÏS NIN
diary, Fall 1943
A concealed truth, that's all a lie is. Either by omission or commission we never do more than obscure. The truth stays in the undergrowth, waiting to be discovered.
JOSEPHINE HART
Damage
Truth, though hewn like the mangled form of Osiris into a thousand pieces, and scattered to the four winds, shall be gathered limb to limb, and moulded with every joint and member into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it. Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self sustained.
MAHATMA GANDHI
Young India 1924-1926
There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; the truths of fact are contingent and their opposites are possible.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
La monadologie
Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don't mean the argument over who came up with the word. I don't know whether it's a new thing, but it's certainly a current thing, in that it doesn't seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty.
STEPHEN COLBERT
interview, AV Club, January 25, 2006
So stands Truth before worshipping man; and so she speaks to him. Truth shrouded in mystery; clothed in light; transcending our power to look upon her full and ample proportions. No man has seen her altogether as she is. Yet many a soul, gazing earnestly, reverently, has beheld the outlines; caught here and there a lineament, a feature; has seen that, when the veil has for a moment been parted, which has excited and enraptured him, and of which he has sought to speak to others. And they have, perhaps gladly, perhaps incredulously, listened to his report. No one has ever seen the whole of Truth. And because of that, and of the imperfection of the eyes which have looked, and of the words in which they have reported, the fragmentary reports men have brought back of what they have seen have been so various and seemed so contradictory. But it does not follow, because human philosophies, sciences, theologies, which are these reports, have been so various and fleeting--it does not follow that there is no reality; but only that men have had imperfect and fragmentary vision of the reality; and made imperfect and fragmentary report of it.
SAMUEL LONGFELLOW
"Truth"
Human truth is always soiled with falsehood.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Let us seek truth everywhere; let us cull it wherever we can find its blossom or its seed. Having found the seed let us scatter it to the winds of heaven. Whenever it may come, whithersoever it may blow, it will be able to germinate.
ROMAIN ROLLAND
The Forerunners
Truths kindle light for truths.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
Truths, no matter how momentous or enduring, are nothing to the individual until he appreciates them, and feels their force, and acknowledges their sovereignty. He cannot bow to their majesty until he sees their power. All the blind then, and all the ignorant--that is, all the children--must be educated up to the point of perceiving and admitting the truth, and acting according to its mandates.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
Love of truth shows itself in this, that a man knows how to find and value the good in everything.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Truth doesn't run on time like a commuter train.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
Some truths may be proclaimed upon the housetop; others may be spoken by the fireside; still others must be whispered in the ear of a friend.
ROSSITER JOHNSON
"The Whispering Gallery"
The truth
Has to be melted out of our stubborn lives
By suffering.
Nothing speaks the truth,
Nothing tells us how things really are,
Nothing forces us to know
What we do not want to know
Except pain.
And this is how the gods declare their love.
AESCHYLUS
The Oresteia
With the truth, all given facts harmonize; but with what is false, the truth soon hits a wrong note.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics