Truth Quotes

He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Never tell the truth to those unworthy of it....

Mark Twain

Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth.

Socrates, Quoted in: Plato, Phaedrus, sct. 262.

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions? especially selfish ones.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Peace and Violence, sct. 2, in Index, no. 4 (London, 1973.

I do not know what I may appear to the world but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Isaac Newton

Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

Roland, "The Last Gunslinger".

Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of its charms.

Giovanni Jacopo Casanova

What we have in us of the image of God is the love of truth and justice.

Demosthenes

What plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.

Daisy Bates

Anything more than the truth would be too much.

Robert Frost

There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.

William James

If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.

Turkish prove

Modesty is a shining light it prepares the mind to receive knowledge, and the heart for truth.

Madam Guizot

Only the refusal to listen guarantees one against being ensnared by the truth.

Nozick

Never lie when the truth is more profitable.

Stanislaw J. Lec

I have been truthful all along the way. The truth is more interesting, and if you tell the truth you never have to cover your tracks.

Real Live Preacher, RealLivePreacher. com Weblog, January 04, 2004

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

I seem to have been like a child playing on the sea shore, finding now and then a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me.

Isaac Newton

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

George Orwell

Read not books alone, but men, and amongst them chiefly thyself. If thou find anything questionable there, use the commentary of a severe friend rather than the gloss of a sweet lipped flatterer; there is more profit in a distasteful truth than in deceitful sweetness.

Francis Quarles

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

Paul Valery

Till a man can judge whether they be truths or not, his understanding is but little improved, and thus men of much reading, though greatly learned, but may be little knowing.

John Locke

The truth is not always the same as the majority decision.

Pope John Paul II

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

Lenin

Intense feeling too often obscures the truth.

Harry S Truman

Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.

Katherine Mansfield

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia

Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error.

Johann von Goethe

We are born to inquire into truth it belongs to a greater to possess it.

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Have patience awhile; slanders are not long - Lived. Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee.

Immanuel Kant

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

Rene Descartes

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

Niels Boh

I feel my immortality over sweep all pains, all tears, all time, all fears, - And peal, like the eternal thunders of the deep, into my ears, this truth, - Thou livest foreve.

George Gordon Byron

A good novel tells you the truth about its hero but a bad novel tells you the truth about its author.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

People say they love truth, but in reality they want to believe that which they love is true.

Robert J. Ringe