quotations about truth
Let us seek truth everywhere; let us cull it wherever we can find its blossom or its seed. Having found the seed let us scatter it to the winds of heaven. Whenever it may come, whithersoever it may blow, it will be able to germinate.
ROMAIN ROLLAND
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The Forerunners
Science and mathematics
Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it,
They never touch it: consider what an explosion
Would rock the bones of men into little white fragments and unsky the world
If any mind for a moment touch truth.
ROBINSON JEFFERS
"The Silent Shepherds"
You have noticed that truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering, and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping.
NICHOLAS BLACK ELK
Black Elk Speaks
Truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an original affinity with freedom.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
History of Sexuality
The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Brothers Karamazov
Nature has completely hid truth in the bottom of a well.
DEMOCRITUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
Half the Truth is often a great Lie.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanack, 1758
Truth is a moral requirement for society, and offenses against honesty, by word or action, are violations against character, ethics, and moral decency.
VINCENT J. BOVE
"Trojan Horse in the Heart of America", The Epoch Times, May 10, 2017
The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.
NICHOLSON BAKER
U and I
Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Will you tell me how a man's to live, and face his life, if he can't believe that truth's like a fire, and will burn through and be seen though it takes all the years there are? While I stand up and have breath in my lungs I shall be one flame of that fire; it's all the life I have.
MAXWELL ANDERSON
Winterset
But thou, my son, study to make prevail
One colour in thy life, the hue of truth.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Merope
The truth can only be recalled, never invented.
MARILYN MONROE
diary, Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters
You need not tell all the truth, unless to those who have a right to know it all. But let all you tell be truth.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
The greatest friend of Truth is time, her greatest enemy is Prejudice.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon, or Many Things in Few Words
Not everything that's true needs to be said.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Bones
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.
ANAÏS NIN
diary, Fall 1943
In a free society, there comes a time when the truth -- however hard it may be to hear, however impolitic it may seem to say -- must be told.
AL GORE
fundraising letter, May 2006
For any truth, if overdone ... if exaggerated, or if carried beyond the limits of its applicability, can be reduced to absurdity.
VLADIMIR LENIN
Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder
Truth doesn't run on time like a commuter train.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion