quotations about truth
When social forces press for the rejection of age-old Truth, then those who reject it will seek meaning in their own truth. These truths will rarely be Truth at all; they will be only collections of personal preferences and prejudices.
DEAN KOONTZ
Forever Odd
The truth ... is a beautiful and terrible thing and should therefore be treated with great caution.
J. K. ROWLING
The Sorcerer's Stone
And diff'ring judgments serve but to declare
That truth lies somewhere, if we knew but where.
WILLIAM COWPER
Hope
There are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one truth and that is that there's no truth.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Wise Blood
The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook H", Aphorisms
He who shuts out truth, by the same act opens the door to all the error that supplies its place.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Left Hand of Darkness
Nature has completely hid truth in the bottom of a well.
DEMOCRITUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
All things to all men only fools will tell,
Truth profits none but those that use it well.
JOHN STUART BLACKIE
The Wise Men of Greece: In a Series of Dramatic Dialogues
Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!
URSULA K. LE GUIN
introduction, The Left Hand of Darkness
Not everything that's true needs to be said.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Bones
Truth is always revolutionary.
ELIAS KHOURY
"Truth is always revolutionary", Malta Today, August 30, 2016
A concealed truth, that's all a lie is. Either by omission or commission we never do more than obscure. The truth stays in the undergrowth, waiting to be discovered.
JOSEPHINE HART
Damage
The truth can only be recalled, never invented.
MARILYN MONROE
diary, Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters
Truth is beauty. That can be a hard thing to say, because some things are not so attractive on the surface. But by owning up to them, we change them--just by speaking them.
BONO
Oprah Magazine, April 2004
He that hath truth on his side is a fool as well as a coward if he is afraid to own it because of other men's opinions.
DANIEL DEFOE
The History of the Union Between England and Scotland
No two things can be so contradictory, so much at variance as truth and falsehood; and yet none are so mixed and united.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters and Reflections
It is almost impossible to bear the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook G", Aphorisms
Truths kindle light for truths.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
But thou, my son, study to make prevail
One colour in thy life, the hue of truth.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Merope