quotations about truth
There is a deeper pleasure in following truth to the scaffold or the cross, than in joining the multitudinous retinue, and mingling our shouts with theirs, when victorious error celebrates its triumphs.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
There is no higher religion than the truth.
HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY
The Essential Works of Helena Blavatsky
Truth ... is a hard apple, whether one is throwing it or catching it.
DONALD BARTHELME
"Rebecca"
Truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
speech in the House of Commons, May 17, 1916
Truth never was indebted to a lie.
EDWARD YOUNG
Night Thoughts
Truth, to my mind, beats fiction for dramatic interest.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
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
For decades, critical social scientists and humanists have chipped away at the idea of truth. We've deconstructed facts, insisted that knowledge is situated and denied the existence of objectivity. The bedrock claim of critical philosophy, going back to Kant, is simple: We can never have certain knowledge about the world in its entirety. Claiming to know the truth is therefore a kind of assertion of power.
CASEY WILLIAMS
"Creating Truth is Assertion of Power", Asharq Al-Awsat, April 19, 2017
Let us continue to improve until we are filled with the knowledge of the truth. We have yet much to learn.
BRIGHAM YOUNG
Journal of Discourses
One truth teacheth another.
SIR J. REYNOLDS
attributed, Day's Collacon
The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
NADINE GORDIMER
"A Bolter and the Invincible Summer"
Every man can have his own peculiar truth; and yet it is always the same.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
It is twice as hard to crush a half-truth as a whole lie.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The truth--a hideous spectacle!
CONRAD AIKEN
"Youth Penetrant"
Truth has her sterner responsibilities sooner or later in store for those who have known anything about her.
HENRY PARRY LIDDON
Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford
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
Truth is only a question of point of view.
KARL LAGERFELD
Vice Magazine, February 28, 2010
As ten millions of circles can never make a square, so the united voice of myriads cannot lend the smallest foundation to falsehood.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The Vicar of Wakefield
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
History, mythology, and folktales are filled with stories of people punished for saying the truth. Only the Fool, exempt from society's rules, is allowed to speak with complete freedom.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry