quotations about truth
The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
It is not always needful for truth to take a definite shape; it is enough if it hovers about us like a spirit and produces harmony; if it is wafted through the air like the sound of a bell, grave and kindly.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
There is no higher religion than the truth.
HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY
The Essential Works of Helena Blavatsky
Truth is new, as well as old. It has new forms; and where you may find a new statement, an earnest statement, you may conclude that by the law of progress it is more likely to be a correct statement than that which has been repeated for ages by the lips of tradition.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
The truth is dark under your eyelids.
CHARLES SIMIC
"Against Winter", Walking the Black Cat
Truth shall fear no open shame.
ANNE BOLEYN
attributed, Day's Collacon
There are always men who are ready to ask, with an idle curiosity, with an interest too superficial to wait for an answer, this question, "What is truth?" There are always those who are ready to ask it, with a saddened or scornful skepticism, as quite sure there is no answer to be given; no truth; nothing but fancies, speculations, notions, opinions, fleeting, contradictory, and futile. And, thank God, there have always been men, like Jesus, who have seen the truth to be such an transcendent, vital, divine reality that they knew it to be a thing worth living, worth dying for. So Jesus could declare the truth to be, no fancy, no delusion, no mere opinion or speculation, but that thing to bear witness to which was the one purpose of his existence, the thing for which he was born.
SAMUEL LONGFELLOW
"Truth"
Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.
ROBERT FROST
"The Black Cottage"
Every man can have his own peculiar truth; and yet it is always the same.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
So multifarious are the different classes of truths, and so multitudinous the truths in each class, that it may be undoubtingly affirmed that no man has yet lived who could so much as name all the different classes and subdivisions of truths, and far less anyone who was acquainted with all the truths belonging to any one class. What wonderful extent, what amazing variety, what collective magnificence! And if such be the number of truths pertaining to this tiny ball of earth, how must it be in the incomprehensible immensity!
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
But O the truth, the truth! the many eyes
That look on it! the diverse things they see!
GEORGE MEREDITH
"A Ballad of Fair Ladies in Revolt"
Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
"A Liberal Decalogue", New York Times Magazine, December 16, 1951
Truth makes all things plain.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Still another condition of knowing the truth is, I think, the willingness to make some sacrifice for it.
SAMUEL LONGFELLOW
Essays and Sermons
Man is here to search for truth, and to search until he finds it. And he will enjoy it all the more that he has had to search for it.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
Nature expresses a design of love and truth.
POPE BENEDICT XVI
Encyclical Letter, Caritas in Veritate, June 29, 2009
We may have revolved every possible idea in our minds, and yet the truth has never occurred to us, and it is from without, when we are least expecting it, that it gives us its cruel stab and wounds us forever.
MARCEL PROUST
Sodom and Gomorrah
The ultimate arbiter of truth is experiment, not the comfort one derives from one's a priori beliefs, nor the beauty or elegance one ascribes to one's theoretical models.
LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
A Universe from Nothing
It is much easier to recognize error than to find truth; for error lies on the surface and may be overcome; but truth lies in the depths, and to search for it is not given to everyone.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
You touch on a disheartening truth. People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
The Cream of the Jest