quotations about truth
Truth is too precious a commodity to be wasted upon mere idolators.
HERNANDEZ CORTEZ
attributed, Day's Collacon
I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
Collected Stories and Other Writings
If any man dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.
HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Cancer
Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
No matter how much we ask after the truth, self-awareness is often unpleasant. We do not feel kindly toward the Truthsayer.
FRANK HERBERT
God Emperor of Dune
Truth is literally that which is without secrecy, what discloses itself without a veil.
R. D. LAING
attributed, R. D. Laing: The Philosophy and Politics of Psychotherapy
Truth is the right hand of God.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
It is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man who conforms, who follows some tradition. It is only when you are constantly inquiring, constantly observing, constantly learning, that you find truth, God, or love.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
Think on These Things
Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
"Stammbuch"
The temple of truth is built indeed of stones of crystal, but, inasmuch as men have been concerned in rearing it, it has been consolidated by a cement composed of baser materials.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.
ELIF BATUMAN
The Possessed
Slender certainty is better than portentous falsehood.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Truth, like the sun, submits to be obscured, but, like the sun, only for a time.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Although the truth is not always pleasant, the truth is always a gift because it offers the recipient of that information the chance to change the outcome.
DENISE RESTAURI
"Four Words That Give This CEO The Courage To Take On The Beauty Industry", Forbes, December 8, 2016
If the whole world should agree to speak nothing but truth, what an abridgment it would make of speech! And what an unravelling there would be of the invisible webs which men, like so many spiders, now weave about each other!
WASHINGTON ALLSTON
Lectures on Art and Poems
It might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of spirit should be measured according to how much of the "truth" one could still barely endure--or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Beyond Good and Evil
Let us continue to improve until we are filled with the knowledge of the truth. We have yet much to learn.
BRIGHAM YOUNG
Journal of Discourses
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
OSCAR WILDE
The Critic as Artist
No combatants are so unequally matched as when one is shackled with error, while the other rejoices in the self-demonstrability of truth.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
They frequently find the truth who do not seek it, they who do, frequently lose it.
FANNY KEMBLE
Further Records, February 8, 1875