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The sky is not less blue because the blind man does not see it.
-Danish proverb
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Carelessness is worse than a thieve.
-Scottish Proverb
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Measure three times before you cut once.
-Proverb
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Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
-Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
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Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
-John Adams
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Twenty children can never play together for twenty years
-Michael Adelowo
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It is not the facts which guide the conduct of men, but their opinions about facts; which may be entirely wrong. We can only make them right by discussion
-Norman Angell
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Men on their side must force themselves for a while to lay their notions by and begin to familiarize themselves with facts.
-Francis Bacon
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If you get all the facts, your judgment can be right; if you don't get all the facts, it can't be right.
-Bernard Baruch
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Facts can't be recounted; much less twice over, and far less still by different persons. I've already drummed that thoroughly into your head. What happens is that your wretched memory remembers the words and forgets what's behind them.
-Augusto Roa Bastos
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
-Walter Benjamin
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Remember son, many a good story has been ruined by over verification.
-James Gordon Bennett
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A fact in itself is nothing. It is valuable only for the idea attached to it, or for the proof which it furnishes.
-Claude Bernard
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People can refute your facts, but never your feelings.
-Sharon Anthony Bower
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Facts in books, statistics in encyclopedias, the ability to use them in men's heads.
-Fogg Brackell
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Facts quite often, I fear to confess, like lawyers, put me to sleep at noon. Not theories, however. Theories are invigorating and tonic. Give me an ounce of fact and I will produce you a ton of theory by tea this afternoon. That is, after all, my job.
-Ray Bradbury, From the foreward to Mars and the Mind of Man
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It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.
-Edmund Burke
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What are your historical Facts; still more your biographical? Wilt thou know a man by stringing-together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts?
-Thomas Carlyle
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I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing -- a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows.
-Thomas Carlyle
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I deal with the obvious. I present, reiterate and glorify the obvious -- because the obvious is what people need to be told.
-Dale Carnegie
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The best current evidence is that media are mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers groceries causes change in our nutrition.
-Richard Clark
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Pedantry is the showy display of knowledge which crams our heads with learned lumber and then takes out our brains to make room for it.
-Charles Caleb Colton
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Many blunder in business through inability or an unwillingness to adopt new ideas. I have seen many a success turn to failure also, because the thought which should be trained on big things is cluttered up with the burdensome detail of little things.
-Philip Delaney
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Now, what I want is, facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!
-Charles Dickens
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As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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There is nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
You appear to be astonished, he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.
To forget it!
You see, he explained, I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.
But the Solar System! I protested.
What the deuce is it to me? he interrupted impatiently: you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.
This is Watson describing one of his earliest conversations with Sherlock Holmeshttp://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DoyScar.html
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, November, 1887
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Facts are the most important thing in business. Study facts and do more than is expected of you.
-Frederick Hudson Ecker
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Accuracy of statement is one of the first elements of truth; inaccuracy is a near kin to falsehood.
-Tryon Edwards
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Facts are God's arguments; we should be careful never to misunderstand or pervert them.
-Tryon Edwards
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If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.
-Albert Einstein
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In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled.
-Paul Eldridge
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Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
-George Eliot
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If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other; given the upper, to find the under side.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.
-William Faulkner
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Exactness and neatness in moderation is a virtue, but carried to extremes narrows the mind.
-Francois FeNelon
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While I am busy with little things, I am not required to do greater things.
-St. Francis De Sales
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To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.
-Felix Frankfurter
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Get the facts, or the facts will get you. And when you get em, get em right, or they will get you wrong.
-Thomas Fuller
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Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
-Jean Genet
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The pathetic almost always consists in the detail of little events.
-Edward Gibbon
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A concept is stronger than a fact.
-Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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Details often kill initiative, but there have been few successful men who weren't good at details. Don't ignore details. Lick them.
-William B. Given
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The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.
-Edmond de Goncourt
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In a major matter no details are small.
-Paul De Gondi
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General principles are not the less true or important because from their nature they elude immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it.
-William Hazlitt
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Men who wish to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details.
-Heraclitus
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Facts are counterrevolutionary.
-Eric Hoffer
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All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called facts. They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. Who does not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact or two that they lead after them into decent company like so many bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious suggestion, or convenient generalization, or pleasant fancy? I allow no facts at this table.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions -- adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes
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Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
-Aldous Huxley
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Facts are ventriloquist's dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense.
-Aldous Huxley
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Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
-Thomas Henry Huxley
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A world of facts lies outside and beyond the world of words.
-Thomas Henry Huxley
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I have always found that if I move with seventy-five percent or more of the facts that I usually never regret it. It's the guys who wait to have everything perfect that drive you crazy.
-Lee Iacocca
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The fatal futility of Fact.
-Henry James
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Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.
-William James
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The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
-William James
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One precedent creates another and they soon accumulate and constitute law. What yesterday was a fact, today is doctrine.
-Junius
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The fastidious are unfortunate; nothing satisfies them.
-Jean De La Fontaine
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The ultimate umpire of all things in life is -- fact.
-Agnes C. Laut
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One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways.
-Karl Menninger
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Trifles make perfection, but perfection is no trifle.
-Michelangelo Buonarroti
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Facts are facts and will not disappear on account of your likes.
-Jawaharlal Nehru
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There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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There are no facts, only interpretations.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called scientific mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.
-Cynthia Ozick
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One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite -- that particular peach is but a detail.
-Pablo Picasso
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A fact is like a sack -- it won't stand up if it's empty. To make it stand up, first you have to put in it all the reasons and feelings that caused it in the first place.
-Luigi Pirandello
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Facts have a cruel way of substituting themselves for fancies. There is nothing more remorseless, just as there is nothing more helpful, than truth.
-William C. Redfield
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The facts are always friendly, every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true.
-Carl R. Rogers
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I might show facts as plain as day: but, since your eyes are blind, you'd say, Where? What? and turn away.
-Christina Rossetti
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Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
-Philip Roth
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Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.
-Bertrand Russell
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Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.
-Bertrand Russell
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The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. ... But so long as men are not trained to withhold judgment in the absence of evidence, they will be led astray by cocksure prophets, and it is likely that their leaders will be either ignorant fanatics or dishonest charlatans. To endure uncertainty is difficult, but so are most of the other virtues.
-Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, Philosophy for Laymen
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I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
-George Santayana, The Letters of George Santayana
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She always says, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away.
-Dorothy L. Sayers
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It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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Comment is free but facts are sacred.
-Charles Prestwich Scott
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It may be said with a degree of assurance that not everything that meets the eye is as it appears.
-Rod Serling
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Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.
-Charles Simmons
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The difference between failure and success is doing a thing nearly right and doing it exactly right.
-Edward Simmons
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We should keep so close to facts that we never have to remember the second time what we said the first time.
-F. Marion Smith
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Oh, don't tell me of facts -- I never believe facts: you know Canning said nothing was so fallacious as facts, except figures.
-Sydney Smith
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Accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a lady, but a newspaper can always print a retraction.
-Adlai Stevenson
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My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologies. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought -- with these I deal.
-Henry David Thoreau
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I have always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific.
-Lily Tomlin
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Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
-Mark Twain
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I often wish that I could rid the world of the tyranny of facts. What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease.
-Source Unknown
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It is easier to believe a lie that one has heard a thousand times than to believe a fact that no one has heard before.
-Source Unknown
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Never forget the facts are important but it's the opinion of the facts that causes comment.
-Source Unknown
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Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
-Source Unknown
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Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.
-John Updike
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It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.
-Gore Vidal
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Books about Facts
