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One handles truths like dynamite.
ANAIS NIN, The Diary of Anais Nin
You can be standing right in front of the truth and not necessarily see it, and people only get it when they’re ready to get it.
GEORGE HARRISON, The Beatles Anthology
The unclouded eye was better, no matter what it saw.
FRANK HERBERT, Chapterhouse: Dune
Every dogma embodies some shade of truth to give it seeming currency.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
I suppose the most revolutionary act one can engage in is ... to tell the truth.
HOWARD ZINN, Marx in Soho
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
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
One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies.
URSULA K. LE GUIN, The Left Hand of Darkness
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
ANAIS NIN, diary, Fall 1943
Truth hurts. Maybe not as much as jumping on a bicycle with a seat missing, but it hurts.
LT. FRANK DREBIN (LESLIE NIELSEN), Naked Gun 2 1/2
Truthful lips endure forever, the lying tongue, for only a moment.
Truth is inclusive of all the virtues, is older than sects and schools, and, like charity, more ancient than mankind.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!
URSULA K. LE GUIN, introduction, The Left Hand of Darkness
The truth may often be carried about by those who themselves remain all unaware of it. They bear that which has weight and substance and yet for them has no name whereby it may be evoked or called forth. They go about ignorant of the true nature of their condition, such are the wiles of truth and such its stratagems.
CORMAC MCCARTHY, The Crossing
Truth is a chameleon.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON, Dune: House Atreides
Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust.
URSULA K. LE GUIN, The Left Hand of Darkness
Only the dead know the truth.
Truth was truth, whether I darkened my eyes to it or not.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE, Remarks on the Science of History
- Hide what you have to hide
- And tell what you have to tell
- You'll see your problems multiplied
- If you continually decide
- To faithfully pursue
- The policy of truth
DEPECHE MODE, "Policy of Truth"
Nothing feels sexier than wearing the beautiful truth.
COURTNEY STODDEN, Twitter post, Oct. 6, 2011
The practice of utter sincerity towards other men would avail to no good end, if they were incapable of practising it towards their own minds. In fact, truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, "Essay on Christianity"
You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. When you get it right, it is obvious that it is right -- at least if you have any experience -- because usually what happens is that more comes out than goes in.
RICHARD FEYNMAN, attributed, Sympathetic Vibrations
We grease the truth with rhyme.
NIK HOUSER, "A Beginner's Guide to Sandcastle Alchemy," Weird Tales, Summer 2011
Just think, reader, what will happen to you if the truth of a mad beast overpowers the sane truth of man?
MAXIM GORKY, Untimely Thoughts
Truth is always unfolding. It's not an absolute.
ALAN ARKIN, Esquire, Mar. 2007
Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL, Hegel's "Stammbuch"
Truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an original affinity with freedom.
MICHEL FOUCAULT, History of Sexuality
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
THOMAS MANN, Essay on Freud
No point in ignoring the truth. Doesn't make it worse to have it said out loud.
STEPHENIE MEYER, The Host
A man may say, "From now on I'm going to speak the truth." But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking.
- They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth
- Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,
- Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
- Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, The Present Crisis
Some things are too terrible to be true.
Bob Dylan, "Honest With Me"
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