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Truth
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“People said they wanted the truth, but what they really wanted was the segment of truth that would frank them. The whole truth was too terrible for most people to contemplate.”
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“ ... truth, in case you haven't recognized the fact, is what you can persuade the other chap to believe.”
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“Truth is often terribly thin, don't you think? ”
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“The search for truth can be compared to a cat chasing her tail: frantic in her pursuit, her quarry nevetheless eludes her; despite the fact that all the world can see it's right there, it remains just beyond her reach. It cannot be possessed because, paradoxically, it is already part of her.”
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“Truth is like nuclear waste: it needs to be dealt with carefully. Sometimes it needs to be buried way, way out of town. And sometimes it should never be uncovered at all. ”
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“Truthfulness so often goes with ruthlessness.”
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“It's important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to the friendship that we are not.”
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“Make a habit of telling the truth, or make a habit of lying: to decide each case on its own merits is exhausting, and hardly ever worth it.”
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“... you'd like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That must be the most futile oath anyone ever swears.”
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“Truth has no beginning.”
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“Truth is immortal; error is mortal.”
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“... truth can be outraged by silence quite as cruelly as by speech.”
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“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
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“Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult.”
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“Particular lies may speak a general truth.”
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“Truth has rough flavors if we bite it through.”
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“Speaking the truth, once you have started it, is too exhilarating to draw back.”
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“... I've always noticed that if you speak the truth in a rather silly way nobody believes you.”
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“Truth, however bitter, can be accepted, and woven into a design for living.”
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“The truth often does sound unconvincing.”
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“Let us accept truth, even when it surprises us and alters our views.”
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“... his truthfulness, which ignored the courteous deceits of social life, was a kind of impropriety.”
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“Truth is like heat or light; its vibrations are endless, and are endlessly felt.”
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“Did you ever notice, Ellen, that the truth always hurts people's feelings?”
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“... as everybody knows, truthfulness and agreeable manners are often divorced on the ground of incompatibility.”
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“... Truth, that fair goddess who comes always with healing in her wings.”
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“Know, though the world endure but for a span, / Deathless is truth. ”
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“Miriam's only fault is a habit of pushing the truth out in front of her like a wheelbarrow.”
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“Truth is simply whatever you can bring yourself to believe ... ”
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“Truth is its own defense.”
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“Truth, though it has many disadvantages, is at least changeless. You can always find it where you left it.”
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“He led a double life. Did that make him a liar? He did not feel a liar. He was a man of two truths ... ”
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“Truth will not be ignored. It will rise up and consume us.”
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“... the mode of delivering a truth makes, for the most part, as much impression on the mind of the listener as the truth itself.”
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“ ... the language of truth is too simple for inexperienced ears.”
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“Truth is but approved facts.”
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“ There is no power on earth more formidable than the truth.”
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“You cannot weave truth on a loom of lies.”
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“ Of course, it's the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.”
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“Give me truth; cheat me by no illusion.”
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“It amused me to think that if one told the truth when drunk, nobody believed it.”
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“ Truth is the first of jewels.”
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“Truth, to be convincing, should be specific.”
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“... many people choose, early on, their own truths from the large smorgasbord available. And once they've chosen them, for good reason or no reason, they then proceed rather selectively, wisely gathering whatever will bolster them or at least carry out the color scheme.”
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“... often when I thought I joked, I told the truth, afraid to speak it except in jest.”
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“She died for truth, and she died of it. Some truths are mortal illnesses.”
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“The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it ... ”
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“There's truth as far as you knows it; and there's truth as far as you're asked for it. But they don't represent the whole truth — not necessarily.”
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“It always comes back to the same thing: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.”
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“Not truth, but faith, it is that keeps the world alive. ”
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“So often the truth is told with hate, and lies are told with love.”
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“... when an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.”
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“... the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed.”
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“You cannot tell the truth when words are corrupted. Our country was founded on the notion that the plain words of the people are more important than the fancy words of kings.”
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“Having stopped expecting truth, we rarely get it.”
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“There is always one true inner voice. Trust it.”
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“Half the misery in the world comes of want of courage to speak and to hear the truth plainly and in a spirit of love.”
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“... the truth is the kindest thing we can give folks in the end. ”
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“You kin polish a mule's feet an' shine his hide an' put brass all over his harness an' hitch him ter a fine cah'ige. But he a mule jes' de same. He doan fool nobody.”
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“... truth ... is the first casualty of tyranny.”
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“Victory is a matter of chance; but truth, if a man so elects, he can have at any time. ”
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“Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.”
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“Somehow even a popular fallacy has an aspect of truth when it suits one's own case. ”
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“Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken ...”
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“The simplest and most familiar truth seems new and wonderful the instant we ourselves experience it for the first time.”
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“Many a truth is the result of an error.”
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“Some level of truthfulness has always been seen as essential to human society, no matter how deficient the observance of other moral principles.”
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“... there are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.”
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“A world of vested interests is not a world which welcomes the disruptive force of candor.”
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“... influence which is given on the side of money is usually against truth.”
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“It is hard to tell which is worse; the wide diffusion of things that are not true, or the suppression of things that are true.”
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“Everything but truth becomes loathed in a sick-room ... Let the nurse avow that the medicine is nauseous. Let the physician declare that the treatment will be painful. Let sister, or brother, or friend, tell me that I must never look to be well. When the time approaches that I am to die, let me be told that I am to die, and when.”
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“... we live in a country where denial of the truth is considered far less oppressive than the truth itself.”
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“It is impossible that the whole of truth should not be present at every time and every place, available for anyone who desires it.”
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“All profound truths startle you in the first announcement.”
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“The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.”
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“The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.”
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“I feel inauthentic at a party. ... Going to a party is a 'low' activity — the authentic self is compromised, fragmented — one plays 'roles.' One isn't fully present, beyond role-playing. One doesn't (can't) tell the full truth, which means one is lying, even if one doesn't literally tell lies.”
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“Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.”
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“What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable.”
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“... the truth just gradually dripped through, like coffee through a percolator.”
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“... the truth is artistically fallacious.”
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“Acting a part is not always synonymous with lying; it is far more often the best way of serving the truth. It is more truthful to act what we should feel if the community is to be well served rather than behave as we actually do feel in our selfish private feelings.”
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“... words can never get at the truth.”
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“The trouble about man is twofold. He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.”
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“It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.”
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“If you are terribly truthful, the ground will always move from under you, and you will have to shift with the constantly shifting truth.”
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“To me the truth is something which cannot be told in a few words, and those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.”
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“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.”
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“One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.”
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“One may gain one truth at the expense of another.”
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“I don't tell the truth any more to those who can't make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself, because it always changes me, does something to me.”
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“Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.”
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“There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing. A truth is something that everyone can be shown to know and to have known, as people say, all along.”
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“There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth' — truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.”
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“When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.”
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“... remember truth and justice have two ears.”
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“Truths are not always to be spoken.”
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“Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon, human intercourse.”
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“It is when people are told their own thoughts that they think they are being insulted.”
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“The truth came slowly like a story told by people interrupting each other.”
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“A lie hides the truth, a story tries to find it ...”
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“Words are nets through which all truth escapes.”
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“... truth outlives pain, as the soul does life.”
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“Truth is such a rare thing, it is delightful to tell it.”
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“Truth — is as old as God — ...”
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“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant — / Success in Circuit lies / Too bright for our infirm Delight / The Truth's superb surprise.”
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“The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind --.”
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“The truth I do not dare to know / I muffle with a jest.”
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“... lying matters. Truth is a rock; if you chip away at it enough, you wind up with gravel, then sand.”
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“Truth is the vital breath of Beauty; Beauty the outward form of Truth ...”
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“All I have told is true, but it is not the whole truth.”
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“From the earliest age on, even as we toy with it, we instinctively know there is something mighty about the truth, that it is an immobile, looming star. We grow to crave it ...”
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“There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.”
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“You cannot demand truth, and then select half and throw the inconvenient remainder away.”
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“... truth, like the burgeoning of a bulb under the soil, however deeply sown, will make its way to the light.”
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“... there is in the end no remedy but truth. It is the one course that cannot be evil.”
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“Truth is a hard master, and costly to serve, but it simplifies all problems.”
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“Not only are there as many conflicting truths as there are people to claim them; there are equally multitudinous and conflicting truths within the individual.”
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“The truth which may not be told, is the truth which cannot be told.”
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“I never know how much of what I say is true. If I did, I'd bore myself to death.”
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“Emotional access to the truth is the indispensable precondition of healing.”
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“I sincerely believe that we not only have the right to know what is good and what is evil; we have the duty to acquire that knowledge if we hope to assume responsibility for our own lives and those of our children. Only by knowing the truth can we be set free.”
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“Much sheer effort goes into avoiding truth: left to itself, it sweeps in like the tide.”
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“Time is the mother of truth, and Sire, time will tell I speak truly!”
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“The road to honor is paved with thorns; but on the path to truth, at every step you set your foot down on your own heart.”
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“Marvelous Truth, confront us / at every turn, / in every guise ...”
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“Truth is the hardest substance in the world to pin down. But the one certainty is the awesome penalty exacted sooner or later from a society whose reporters stop trying.”
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“... Miss Milner had the quality peculiar to wits, to speak the thought that first occurs, which thought has generally truth on its side.”
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“There are truths that can only be learned when you're dancing in chains.”
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“... my husband, who is a lawyer, is very careful with words and with the truth. He thinks that the truth exists, and it's something that is beyond questioning, which I think is totally absurd. I have several versions of how we met and how wonderful he was and all that. At least twenty. And I'm sure that they are all true. He has one. And I'm positive that it's not true.”
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“Truth, acceptance of the truth, is a shattering experience. It shatters the binding shroud of culture trance. It rips apart smugness, arrogance, superiority, and self-importance. It requires acknowledgment of responsibility for the nature and quality of each of our own lives, our own inner lives as well as the life of the world. Truth, inwardly accepted, humbling truth, makes one vulnerable. You can't be right, self-righteous, and truthful at the same time.”
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“Only equals dare tell each other the truth.”
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“Truth has a way of rising like yeast ...”
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“We are better deceived by having some truth told us than none.”
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“Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraduluent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act — truth is always subversive.”
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“Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act — truth is always subversive.”
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“I'm profoundly interested in how things that are not true shape the things that are true and influence us.”
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“Oh, it's true! I'm sure it's true! Horrid things always are.”
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“The truth needs so little rehearsal.”
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“Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.”
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“... I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for the truth; and truth rewarded me.”
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“What was the use of trying to expound a truth, if the majority preferred a lie?”
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“There is nothing so inconvenient in this world as an absolutely truthful person, who can both speak and write, and has the courage of his convictions. One can always arrange matters with liars ... But with the man or woman who holds truth dearer than life, and honor more valuable than advancement, there is nothing to be done, now that governments cannot insist on the hemlock-cure, as in the case of Socrates.”
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“Whenever there is polarization, there is an unhappy tendency to think the truth lies somewhere in between.”
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“The quest of the truth had been born in me — the most tragic and incomplete, as well as the most essential, of man's quests.”
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“Never affirm anything unless you are sure it is true.”
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“However, when all is said, truth suffers, but never dies ...”
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“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.”
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“[Preface to second edition:] ... truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.”
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“Truth bred truth as surely as cabbages bred cabbages, or as lies bred lies.”
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“The most curious aspect of truth seems to be that nobody will believe it. We can swallow any quantity of falsehoods and fancies, but not the truth.”
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“You can ring practically indefinite changes on a lie but there's only one truth — and it's always the same.”
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“... nothing good ever comes out of denying the truth about our situation.”
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“No one can burn the truth.”
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“Bit by bit the truth began to seep out like a dangerous gasoline.”
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“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life flow no longer into our souls. Every truth we see is one to give to the world, not to keep to ourselves alone ...”
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“... truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.”
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“Once we've started on the road to truth, there's no turning back. The Universe doesn't like secrets.”
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“Some of the men and women who will not say in so many words the thing which is not, will deliberately give a false impression. They are not the servants of truth; they are the parasites of truth.”
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“Do nothing for effect. Do it for truth.”
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“I speak the truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little more, as I grow older.”
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“Truth, like surgery, may hurt, but it cures.”
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“The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.”
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“He told them the truth in a loud voice, and they thought he was a humorist.”
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“But truth, that dangerous commodity, has a way of sticking ...”
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“... the uncomfortable position of telling the truth, / like the lotus, can't be held long.”
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“Not even the most devastating truth can be told; it must be evoked.”
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“... like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth ...”
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“Through anger, the truth looks simple.”
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“If what you write is true, it will not be so because of what you are as a writer but because of what you are as a being. There can be no literary equivalent to truth.”
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“... we shall know that we have begun to speak true by an increased hunger for true-speaking; we shall have the whole hunger only after we have given ourselves the first taste of it.”
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“Truth rings no bells.”
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“... the truth is seldom found in extremes. Central truths can be revolutionary if put to work.”
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“Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination — or to intelligence, to love — than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.”
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“I am the only real truth I know.”
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“Truth is so impossible. Something has to be done for it.”
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“The first casualty in every war is truth.”
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“If nothing will finally survive of life besides what artists report of it, we have no right to report what we know to be lies.”
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“... the true and the plausible are rarely the same.”
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“One can lie, but truth is more interesting.”
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“I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily.”
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“Any truth creates a scandal.”
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“In trying to keep as close as possible to the truth it may seem at times that I am contradicting myself, but that is merely proof of my accuracy, for truth is as many-sided as a well-cut diamond.”
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“The truth that could be extracted from words was such a fluctuating, relative truth.”
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“Truth is a rough, honest, helter-skelter terrier, that none like to see brought into their drawing-rooms ...”
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“It is useless either to hate or to love truth — but it should be noticed.”
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“Truth burns up error.”
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“To have arrived at the truth means that one no longer fears death. For death and truth are similar in that they both require a great courage if one wishes to face them.”
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“I used to think truth was eternal, that once I knew, once I saw, it would be with me forever, a constant by which everything else could be measured. I know now that this isn't so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things.”
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“History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and end as superstitions ...”
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“... there are only two ways to tell the one hundred percent truth: anonymously and posthumously.”
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“Tell people the truth, they laugh. The truth is so tragic they have to pretend it's a joke.”
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“I read it plain on his face, an implacable determination to get at the truth. C.B. Greenfield had mounted his mental charger, and he had a second horse waiting for me.”
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“The truth has a ring of its own. You learn in time to identify it.”
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“If now isn't a good time for the truth, I don't see when we'll get to it.”
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“Nothing is too bad to be true, Mr. Douglas, and nothing is true that is not bad. Those are two axioms I never can persuade you to remember ...”
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“And people do think that if they avoid the truth, it might change to something better before they have to hear it.”
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“... there is at least one thing more brutal than the truth, and that is the consequence of saying less than the truth. One becomes an accessory to any facts one attempts — however much — to conceal.”
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“For there is a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light.”
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“The truth we have to face about the world we live in is that it's driven by profit, and contradictions and doubts are not profitable. They yield wisdom, but wisdom is not profitable. I find pleasure in doubt, but let's face it, my pleasure is not very profitable. To me, the truth is that things mean many things at once, and all of them opposed to each other, and all of them true.”
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“Truth is a theory that is constantly being disproved. Only lies, it seems, go on forever.”
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“Even though I saw the executioner and the fire, I could not say anything but what I have said.”
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“The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.”
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“... neither of them ever / said what they meant / and i guess nobody ever does.”
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“Just be truthful — and if you can fake that, you've got it made.”
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“Every new truth has its birth-place in a manger, lives thirty years, is crucified, and then deified.”
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“... truth is not a series of facts but a series of patterned observations colored by our imaginations.”
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“There are facts, and there's truth. They're not always the same thing.”
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“Truth has divine properties, and the ability to see it is a gift that's given, not acquired.”
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“Half the world's troubles come from men not being trained to resent a fallacy as much as an insult.”
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“... what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!”
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“Sometimes the truth is not as believable as a well-crafted lie.”
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“Between the two poles of whole-truth and half-truth is slung the chancy hammock in which we all rock.”
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“There is, occasionally, humor in truth.”
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“A sharp knife cuts the quickest and hurts the least.”
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“... things can be logical without being true.”
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“Reality has actually very little to do with truth; there is no necessary connection between the two.”
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“Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”
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“You didn't tell a lie, you just left a big hole in the truth.”
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“Half-truths are the devil's IOUs.”
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“Truth has as many coats as an onion ... and each one of them hollow when you peel it off.”
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“Distrust my wisdom, but regard my truth.”
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“... the naked truth is always better than the best-dressed lie.”
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“To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth.”
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“Like a bed we make and remake at whim, / the truth is always changing, / always shaped by the latest / collective urge to destroy.”
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“Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth, and that is not speaking.”
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“Truth is relative, and there is always something missing in truth that prevents it from being perfect.”
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“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.”
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“... the U.S. body politic can become septic when enough lies, distortions, and smears are relentlessly pumped into it. Millions of us now 'know' things that are not true ...”
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“Real is what everyone agrees about. True is what you somehow know inside yourself.”
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“... truth has a certain buoyancy — it makes its way to the surface, in time.”
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“The truth has always been a more complex commodity than the market can easily package and sell.”