quotations about truth
If the whole world should agree to speak nothing but truth, what an abridgment it would make of speech! And what an unravelling there would be of the invisible webs which men, like so many spiders, now weave about each other!
WASHINGTON ALLSTON
Lectures on Art and Poems
Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. We don't have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not go in to. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in -- then we will be able to speak in our own voice and to stay in the present moment. And that moment is home.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird
There are many who say more than the truth on some occasions, and balance the account with their consciences by saying less than the truth on others. But the fact is that they are in both instances as fraudulent as he would be that exacted more than his due from his debtors, and paid less than their due to his creditors.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
The highest knowledge can be nothing more than the shortest and clearest road to truth; all the rest is pretension, not performance, mere verbiage and grandiloquence, from which we can learn nothing.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
The temple of truth is built indeed of stones of crystal, but, inasmuch as men have been concerned in rearing it, it has been consolidated by a cement composed of baser materials.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Truth is the ricochet of a prejudice bouncing off a fact.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
"Truth", Mince Pie
The truth is always on trial.
D.T. OSBORN
"Truth Is Always on Trial", Liberty Voice, April 14, 2017
Those who pursue the stream of Truth to its sources have much climbing to do, much fatigue to encounter, but they see great sights.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Truth is a naked and open daylight, that doth not shew the masks and mummeries and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candlelights.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Truth", Essays
Veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls.
GEORGE ELIOT
Romola
He who clips away a little truth, and puts in a patch of falsehood to make measure, is likely to become a skilful manufacturer of lies.
JOHN THORNTON
Maxims and Directions for Youth
How wrong people always were when they said: 'It's better to know the worst than go on not knowing either way.' No; they had it exactly the wrong way round. Tell me the truth, doctor, I'd sooner know. But only if the truth is what I want to hear.
KINGSLEY AMIS
Lucky Jim
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Blind Assassin
In matter of fact, truth leaves a man at liberty to judge for himself, whilst falsehood, dreading the consequences of investigation, chooses to judge for him.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts.... It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"The Book of the Grotesque", Winesburg, Ohio
'Tis the glory of a man to vail to truth; as it is the mark of a good nature to be easily entreated.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
Some folk never handle the truth without scratching it.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. But only when the reality has not been subsumed by foamy legends and fantasies that radiate outward from the actual event.
BROCK YATES
"Even the Cops Liked the Cannonball", Car and Driver, November 2002
Call it what you want: relativism, constructivism, deconstruction, postmodernism, critique. The idea is the same: Truth is not found, but made, and making truth means exercising power.
CASEY WILLIAMS
"Creating Truth is Assertion of Power", Asharq Al-Awsat, April 19, 2017
Truth is new, as well as old. It has new forms; and where you may find a new statement, an earnest statement, you may conclude that by the law of progress it is more likely to be a correct statement than that which has been repeated for ages by the lips of tradition.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words