quotations about truth
Each truth helps on the discovery of another.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
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
Truth is the bread of a noble manhood.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
No great truth bursts upon man without having its hemisphere of darkness and sorrow.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
The Truth, with a capital T, is what ought to be. Not simply what was, or what is.
JENNIFER LEE CARRELL
Interred With Their Bones
I always tell the truth when I'm drunk. In vino vomitas.
GUY BELLAMY
The Man Who Won
Truth at last cannot be hidden. Dissimulation is of no avail. Dissimulation is to no purpose before so great a judge. Falsehood puts on a mask. Nothing is hidden under the sun.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci
Who dares to say that he alone has found the truth?
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
The New England Tragedies
When the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be their yet.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
No Country for Old Men
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
We must not put Truth into the place of a means, but into the place of an end.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
The most foolish of all errors is for clever young men to believe that they forfeit their originality in recognizing a truth which has already been recognized by others.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
A man may be in as just possession of the truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
Religio Medici
We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Journal of Arnold Bennett
Because a thing is eloquently expressed it should not be taken to be as necessarily true; nor because it is uttered with stammering lips should it be supposed false.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.
GRAHAM GREENE
Travels with My Aunt
Some things are too terrible to be true.
BOB DYLAN
"Honest With Me"
I am quite prepared to admit that being habitual liars and self-deluders, we have good cause to fear the truth, but I'm not at all ready to stop hoping. There may be some truths that are, after all, our friends in the universe.
SAUL BELLOW
The Paris Review, winter 1966
Those only who can bear the truth will hear it.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
The greatest friend of Truth is time, her greatest enemy is Prejudice.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon, or Many Things in Few Words