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- Dark should torch of Truth be never,
- For it burns with love divine.
- Light it should all people, nations,
- In our hearts should be its shrine.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON, "Truth's Torch"
Even a liar tells a hundred truths to one lie; he has to, to make the lie good for anything.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Slender certainty is better than portentous falsehood.
LEONARDO DA VINCI, Thoughts on Art and Life
No combatants are so unequally matched as when one is shackled with error, while the other rejoices in the self-demonstrability of truth.
Like the gush of the morning light, truth must go forward.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls.
- Spurn not at seeming error, but dig below its surface for the truth;
- And beware of seeming truths that grow on the roots of error.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER, Proverbial Philosophy
Half truths were a wonderful way to inspire credibility.
DAVID BALDACCI, The Winner
The excellence and inspiration of truth is in the pursuit, not in the mere having of it. The pursuit of all truth is a kind of gymnastics; a man swings from one truth with higher strength to gain another. The continual glory is the possibility opening before us.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
The discovery of truth, by slow progressive meditation, is wisdom.--Intuition of truth, not preceded by perceptible meditation, is genius.
JOHANN CASPAR LAVATER, Aphorisms on Man
The sublime delight of truthful speech to one who has the great gift of uttering it, will make itself felt even through the pangs of sorrow.
As the snow before the sun, even so is a polished lie before the naked truth.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY, Proverbs
Truth is poetry; it is the grandest poetry.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt that, if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?
New constellations of truth are daily discovered in the firmament of knowledge, and new stars are daily shining forth in each constellation.
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
No great truth bursts upon man without having its hemisphere of darkness and sorrow.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
An ingenious web of probabilities is the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.
Truth ... is the sovereign good of human nature.
Thorough truthfulness--truthfulness to others and to ourselves--is a rare virtue; and he who indeed acts upon it is the noblest of all heroes.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Truth is the bread of a noble manhood.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
You need not tell all the truth, unless to those who have a right to know it all. But let all you tell be truth.
Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.
GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch
The greatest of characters, no doubt, would be he, who, free of all trifling accidental helps, could see objects through one grand immutable medium, always at hand, and proof against illusion and time, reflecting every object in its true shape and colour through all the fluctuation of things.
JOHANN CASPAR LAVATER, Aphorisms on Man
The strict conservative says that truth is in danger. It is the idlest fear in the world. It plainly indicates no intimacy with the truth. He who has communed with great principles knows that they are everlasting, and that nothing can shake them from their orbits. He is willing to trust truth in every encounter, knowing it to be eternal and omnipotent.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Men never make truths; they only recognize the value of this currency of God. They find truths, as men sometimes find bills, in the street, and only recognize the value of that which other persons have drawn.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
There is no doubt that truth is to falsehood as light is to darkness; and so excellent a thing is truth that even when it touches humble and lowly matters, it still incomparably exceeds the uncertainty and falsehood in which great and elevated discourses are clothed; because even if falsehood be the fifth element of our minds, notwithstanding this, truth is the supreme nourishment of the higher intellects.
LEONARDO DA VINCI, Thoughts on Art and Life
I do not think that so much harm is done by giving error to a child, as by giving truth in a lifeless form.
WILLIAM E. CHANNING, Thoughts
Truths, no matter how momentous or enduring, are nothing to the individual until he appreciates them, and feels their force, and acknowledges their sovereignty. He cannot bow to their majesty until he sees their power. All the blind then, and all the ignorant--that is, all the children--must be educated up to the point of perceiving and admitting the truth, and acting according to its mandates.
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