quotations about truth
If power does not listen to truth, power will reap its own destruction.
PAUL TYSON
"Adults in the Room, by Yanis Varoufakis", Open Democracy, May 11, 2017
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
The Present Crisis
Sometimes you hear a person speak the truth and you know that they are speaking the truth. But you also know that they have not heard themselves, do not know what they have said: do not know that they have revealed much more than they have said. This may be why the truth remains, on the whole, so rare.
JAMES BALDWIN
Just Above My Head
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise.
EMILY DICKINSON
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--
We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Nootbook
For the artist, the goal of the painting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspect of a universal truth that if successful, will continue to move and to touch people even as contexts, societies and cultures change. For the scientist, the goal of a theory is to convey "truth for now"--to replace an old truth, while accepting that someday this theory, too, will be replaced by a new "truth," because that is the way science advances.
DANIEL J. LEVITIN
This Is Your Brain on Music
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
Who dares to say that he alone has found the truth?
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
The New England Tragedies
All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we chose to distort it.
WOODY ALLEN
Deconstructing Harry
Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.
AYN RAND
Atlas Shrugged
All truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today's truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters
For behold, Thou lovest the truth, and he that doth it, cometh to the light.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
Truth hurts. Maybe not as much as jumping on a bicycle with a seat missing, but it hurts.
LT. FRANK DREBIN (LESLIE NIELSEN)
Naked Gun 2 1/2
One great disadvantage to the cause of truth is, its being so often in the hands of liars.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters and Reflections
How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in truth!
SOPHOCLES
Oedipus Rex
Truth is such a rare thing, it is delightful to tell it.
EMILY DICKINSON
letter to T. W. Higginson, 1870
The greatest truths are the simplest.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
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
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
There are some things that can't be the truth even if they did happen.
KEN KESEY
Sometimes a Great Notion