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Truth is heavy, so few men carry it.
-Jewish Folk Saying
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Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
-Matthew Arnold
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It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tost upon the sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below: but no pleasure is comparable to standing upon the vantage ground of truth... and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below.
-Francis Bacon
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Truth is a naked and open daylight… Truth which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the enquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it, and the belief of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.
-Francis Bacon, Essay Of Truth
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I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for the truth; and truth rewarded me.
-Simone de Beauvoir
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There are joys which long to be ours. God sends ten thousands truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.
-Henry Ward Beecher
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"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand."
-Josh Billings
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When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.
-Otto von Bismarck
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"When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do."
-William Blake
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There are two kinds of truth, small truth and great truth. You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth.
-Neils Bohr
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Truth lies within ourselves: it takes no rise from outward things, whatever you may believe. There is an inmost center in us all, where truth abides in fullness and to Know rather consists in opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendor may escape than in effecting entry for light supposed to be without.
-Robert Browning
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One of the sublimest things in the world is plain truth.
-Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
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Truth indeed rather alleviates than hurts, and will always bear up against falsehood, as oil does above water.
-Miguel de Cervantes
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Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
-Sir Winston Churchill
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"The object of the superior man is truth."
-Confucius
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He is the freeman whom the truth makes free.
-William Cowper, The Task. Book v. The Winter Morning Walk. Line 733.
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Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails.
-Clarence Darrow
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"It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, "The Beryl Coronet"
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"I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand is the relation among signs . . . I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe."
"But in imagining an erroneous order you still found something. . . ."
"What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you. The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless . . . The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away."
-Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
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Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.
-Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be?, 1979
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Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it; doubt all, but do not doubt yourself.
Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité, doutez de ceux qui la trouvent; doutez de tout, mais ne doutez pas de vous-même.
-André Gide, from "Ainsi soit-il" [So Be It] (Journal 1939-1949, Souvenirs, Gallimard, «Bibliothèque de la Pléiade», 1954, p. 1233) Translated from the French by the editor.
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Truth for its own sake can be a deadly weapon in family relations. Truth without compassion can destroy love. Some parents try too hard to prove exactly how, where and why they have been right. This approach will bring bitterness and disappointment. When attitudes are hostile, facts are unconvincing.
-Haim Ginott, Between Parent and Teenager, New York, NY: Scribner.
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Truth is power, but only when one has patience and requires of it no immediate effect. And one must have no specific aims. Somehow, lack of an agenda is the greatest power. Sometimes it is better not to think in terms of plans; here months may mean nothing, and also years. Truth must be sought for its own sake, its holy, divine greatness.
-Romano Guardini
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"Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's hard to get it back in!"
-H.R. Haldeman
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"Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality."
-Frank Herbert
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"Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Never explain. Your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe it anyway.
-Elbert Hubbard, 1912
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"No one is entitled to the truth."
-E. Howard Hunt
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"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."
-Aldous Huxley
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Error, indeed, is never set forth in its naked deformity, lest, being thus exposed, it should at once be detected. But it is craftily decked out in an attractive dress, so as, by its outward form, to make it appear to the inexperienced…more true than the truth itself. One far superior to me has well said…, 'A clever imitation in glass casts contempt, as it were, on that precious jewel the emerald...' Lest, therefore, through my neglect, some should be carried off, even as sheep are by wolves, while they perceive not the true character of these men, because they outwardly are covered with sheep's clothing (against whom the Lord has enjoined us to be on our guard), and because their language resembles ours, while their sentiments are very different.
-Irenaeus of Lyons
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He who has learnt to control his tongue has attained self-control in a great measure. When such a person speaks he will be heard with respect and attention. His words will be remembered, for they will be good and true. When one who is established in truth prays with a pure heart, then things he really needs come to him when they are really needed: he does not have to run after them. The man firmly established in truth gets the fruit of his actions without apparently doing anything. God, the source of all truth, supplies his needs and looks after his welfare.
-B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Yoga
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"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."
-Thomas Jefferson
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"It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar."
-Jerome K. Jerome
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The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie--diliberate, contrived, and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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"A lie told often enough becomes truth."
-Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov), attributed, probably proverbial
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“A man can’t be always defending the truth; there must be a time for him to feed on it.”
-C.S. Lewis
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Seek not greatness, but seek truth and you will find both.
-Horace Mann
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"It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place."
-H. L. Mencken
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But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
-John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Chapter 2: Of the liberty of thought and discussion, 1859
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To be persuasive, we must be believable; to be believable, we must be credible; to be credible, we must be truthful.
-Edward R. Murrow
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On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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And as for our future, one will hardly find us again on the paths of those Egyptian youths who endanger temples by night, embrace statues, and want by all means to unveil, uncover, and put into a bright light whatever is kept concealed for good reasons. No, this bad taste, this will to truth, to "truth at any price," this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost their charm for us: for that we are too experienced, too serious, too gay, too burned, too deep. We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn; we have lived enough not to believe this. Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and "know" everything. Tout comprendre—est tout mépriser. ["To understand all is to despise all."]
-Friedrich Nietzsche, "on Wagner"
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During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
-George Orwell
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No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.
-William Osler
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In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable, and must be content with finding broken portions.
-William Osler
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Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us - and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along.
-Carl Sagan
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The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.
-Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, ch. 1, sct. 17, 1851
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"All great truths begin as blasphemies."
-George Bernard Shaw
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Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth.
-Socrates
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We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.
-Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
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"The only reason one will respect you as a journalist is because of your integrity. Your integrity is based on your credibility. Your credibility comes from your truthfulness. All these come from you submitting yourself as a servant of the truth, a servant of issues."
-Shaka Ssali, interview
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We are hidden in ourselves, like a truth hidden in isolated facts. When we know that this One in us is One in all, then our truth is revealed.
-Rabindranath Tagore
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"Be true to your work, your word, and your friend."
-Henry David Thoreau
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I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.
-Leo Tolstoy
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The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all its beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth.
Sevastopol
-Leo Tolstoy, May, 1855
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"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
-Mark Twain
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"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."
-Oscar Wilde
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If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow up, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.
-Emile Zola
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Books about Truth
