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- 'Tis strange -- but true; for truth is always strange;
- Stranger than fiction.
Truth is the highest thing that man may keep.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, The Sign of Four
To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.
EUGENE O'NEILL, The Iceman Cometh
If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.
Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains taken to bring it to light.
Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain't so.
MARK TWAIN, Mark Twain's Notebooks
What people believe prevails over the truth.
SOPHOCLES, The Sons of Aleus [fragment]
A man may be in as just possession of the truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE, Religio Medici
Truth crushed to earth shall rise again.
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, The Battle-Field
- Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--
- Success in Circuit lies
- Too bright for our infirm Delight
- The Truth's superb surprise.
EMILY DICKINSON, Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--
They frequently find the truth who do not seek it, they who do, frequently lose it.
FANNY KEMBLE, Further Records, Feb. 8, 1875
In all perception of the truth there is a divine ecstasy, an inexpressible delirium of joy, as when a youth embraces his betrothed virgin.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Familiar Letters
Truth is like the town whore. Everybody knows her, but nonetheless, it's embarrassing to meet her on the street.
WOLFGANG BORCHERT, The Outsider
Personally, I don't give a rap for documents; for the truth in my eyes is not in them but in the mind.
LUIGI PIRANDELLO, It Is So! (If You Think So)
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"
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Annajanska
Truth never hurts the teller.
ROBERT BROWNING, Fifine at the Fair
Truth will only make you unpopular.
WOLFGANG BORCHERT, The Outsider
Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter.
JOHN MILTON, Areopagitica
I never saw any good that came of telling truth.
Truth doesn't always heal a wounded soul.
MAXIM GORKY, The Lower Depths
- A truth that's told with bad intent
- Beats all the lies you can invent.
WILLIAM BLAKE, Auguries of Innocence
The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, Parerga and Paralipomena
Truth and Good are one; and Beauty dwells in them, and they in her.
MARK AKENSIDE, The Pleasures of Imagination
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
Belief in the truth commences with the doubting of all those “truths” we once believed.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, "Truth Will Have No Other Gods Alongside It"
How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in truth!
Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.
LILLIAN HELLMAN, The Little Foxes
In a free society, there comes a time when the truth -- however hard it may be to hear, however impolitic it may seem to say -- must be told.
AL GORE, fundraising letter, May 2006
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
MATTHEW ARNOLD, Sohrab and Rustum
Truth -- there's no such thing.
TANKRED DORST, Freedom for Clemens
Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.
STEPHEN KING, The Last Gunslinger
There is truth and falsehood in a comma.
TOM STOPPARD, The Invention of Love
The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it seems to me the deepest root of all evil that is in the world.
MAX BORN, as quoted in Judith Sherven's The New Intimacy
Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
- And diff'ring judgments serve but to declare
- That truth lies somewhere, if we knew but where.
The heart is an artist that paints over what profoundly disturbs us, leaving on the canvas a less dark, less sharp version of the truth.
Truth is within ourselves.
ROBERT BROWNING, Paracelsus
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