quotations about truth
Some folk never handle the truth without scratching it.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
"A Liberal Decalogue", New York Times Magazine, December 16, 1951
It is not always needful for truth to take a definite shape; it is enough if it hovers about us like a spirit and produces harmony; if it is wafted through the air like the sound of a bell, grave and kindly.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
attributed, Physics, God, and the End of the World
The truth is dark under your eyelids.
CHARLES SIMIC
"Against Winter", Walking the Black Cat
The truth--a hideous spectacle!
CONRAD AIKEN
"Youth Penetrant"
Truth often spoils the dinner.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The unclouded eye was better, no matter what it saw.
FRANK HERBERT
Chapterhouse: Dune
The ultimate arbiter of truth is experiment, not the comfort one derives from one's a priori beliefs, nor the beauty or elegance one ascribes to one's theoretical models.
LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
A Universe from Nothing
Still another condition of knowing the truth is, I think, the willingness to make some sacrifice for it.
SAMUEL LONGFELLOW
Essays and Sermons
For decades, critical social scientists and humanists have chipped away at the idea of truth. We've deconstructed facts, insisted that knowledge is situated and denied the existence of objectivity. The bedrock claim of critical philosophy, going back to Kant, is simple: We can never have certain knowledge about the world in its entirety. Claiming to know the truth is therefore a kind of assertion of power.
CASEY WILLIAMS
"Creating Truth is Assertion of Power", Asharq Al-Awsat, April 19, 2017
It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
The very Truth has to change its vesture, from time to time; and be born again. But all Lies have sentence of death written down against them, and Heaven's Chancery itself; and, slowly or fast, advance incessantly towards their hour.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The French Revolution: A History
The highest knowledge can be nothing more than the shortest and clearest road to truth; all the rest is pretension, not performance, mere verbiage and grandiloquence, from which we can learn nothing.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Truth is new, as well as old. It has new forms; and where you may find a new statement, an earnest statement, you may conclude that by the law of progress it is more likely to be a correct statement than that which has been repeated for ages by the lips of tradition.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Those who pursue the stream of Truth to its sources have much climbing to do, much fatigue to encounter, but they see great sights.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
You touch on a disheartening truth. People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
The Cream of the Jest
It is much easier to recognize error than to find truth; for error lies on the surface and may be overcome; but truth lies in the depths, and to search for it is not given to everyone.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Every man can have his own peculiar truth; and yet it is always the same.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe