quotations about truth
Those who pursue the stream of Truth to its sources have much climbing to do, much fatigue to encounter, but they see great sights.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
The unclouded eye was better, no matter what it saw.
FRANK HERBERT
Chapterhouse: Dune
The truth is dark under your eyelids.
CHARLES SIMIC
"Against Winter", Walking the Black Cat
The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
The highest knowledge can be nothing more than the shortest and clearest road to truth; all the rest is pretension, not performance, mere verbiage and grandiloquence, from which we can learn nothing.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Our feelings often color the truth.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
One reason, I verily believe, why many are always learning and never coming to a knowledge of the truth is, that they have no set intent and purpose to use truth--to make it practical and operative.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
lecture at Workers' Educational Association, May 1940
As ten millions of circles can never make a square, so the united voice of myriads cannot lend the smallest foundation to falsehood.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The Vicar of Wakefield
Truth, as ever, avoids the stranger.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
City of Illusions
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Sohrab and Rustum
Truth refuses to be subservient to either politics or the market.
GAO XINGJIAN
"Literature as Testimony: The Search for Truth", Witness Literature: Proceedings of the Nobel Centennial Symposium
Truth makes all things plain.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne--
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
The Present Crisis
Let us not expect men to see truth before it is shown them; they do not see it afterwards.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
Kingdom of Fear
We're told that we're living in a post-truth (or post-factual) era, a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, a culture that eschews a foundation of solid facts. Indeed, it is said that in this post-truth time, facts have become "secondary" if not entirely irrelevant. But who gets stuck with this "post-truth" label -- and it is typically used as an insult -- is not so simple.
GILBERT DOCTOROW
"Complexities of a 'Post-Truth' Era", Consortium News, May 11, 2017
Truth lives in the cellar, error on the doorstep.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The mind's eye is perhaps no better fitted for the full radiance of truth, than is the body's for that of the sun.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
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