quotations about truth
No two things can be so contradictory, so much at variance as truth and falsehood; and yet none are so mixed and united.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters and Reflections
Truth is beauty. That can be a hard thing to say, because some things are not so attractive on the surface. But by owning up to them, we change them--just by speaking them.
BONO
Oprah Magazine, April 2004
Half the Truth is often a great Lie.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanack, 1758
And diff'ring judgments serve but to declare
That truth lies somewhere, if we knew but where.
WILLIAM COWPER
Hope
There are some things that can't be the truth even if they did happen.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion
The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.
NICHOLSON BAKER
U and I
He that hath truth on his side is a fool as well as a coward if he is afraid to own it because of other men's opinions.
DANIEL DEFOE
The History of the Union Between England and Scotland
So stands Truth before worshipping man; and so she speaks to him. Truth shrouded in mystery; clothed in light; transcending our power to look upon her full and ample proportions. No man has seen her altogether as she is. Yet many a soul, gazing earnestly, reverently, has beheld the outlines; caught here and there a lineament, a feature; has seen that, when the veil has for a moment been parted, which has excited and enraptured him, and of which he has sought to speak to others. And they have, perhaps gladly, perhaps incredulously, listened to his report. No one has ever seen the whole of Truth. And because of that, and of the imperfection of the eyes which have looked, and of the words in which they have reported, the fragmentary reports men have brought back of what they have seen have been so various and seemed so contradictory. But it does not follow, because human philosophies, sciences, theologies, which are these reports, have been so various and fleeting--it does not follow that there is no reality; but only that men have had imperfect and fragmentary vision of the reality; and made imperfect and fragmentary report of it.
SAMUEL LONGFELLOW
"Truth"
Truth is always revolutionary.
ELIAS KHOURY
"Truth is always revolutionary", Malta Today, August 30, 2016
Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
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
A concealed truth, that's all a lie is. Either by omission or commission we never do more than obscure. The truth stays in the undergrowth, waiting to be discovered.
JOSEPHINE HART
Damage
Nature has completely hid truth in the bottom of a well.
DEMOCRITUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
Truth is always like oil in water ... No matter how much of water you add ... it always floats on top.
AHMED MUSA
"Who are you to judge the life I live? Leicester City's Musa slams critics", The 42, May 2, 2017
I am quite prepared to admit that being habitual liars and self-deluders, we have good cause to fear the truth, but I'm not at all ready to stop hoping. There may be some truths that are, after all, our friends in the universe.
SAUL BELLOW
The Paris Review, winter 1966
The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Brothers Karamazov
Truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an original affinity with freedom.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
History of Sexuality
Who speaks the truth stabs Falsehood to the heart.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
L'Envoi
Truth shines more brightly the more widely it is diffused.
JOHN WYCLIFFE
attributed, Day's Collacon
All things to all men only fools will tell,
Truth profits none but those that use it well.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Wise Men of Greece: In a Series of Dramatic Dialogues