Selected truth quotes

1. False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

2. False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

3. If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view, science and Buddhism share a search for the truth and for understanding reality. By learning from science about aspects of reality where its understanding may be more advanced, I believe that Buddhism enriches its own worldview.

4. Media people should have long noses like an elephant to smell out politicians, mayors, prime ministers and businessmen. We need to know the reality, the good and the bad, not just the appearance.

5. Maybe the Dalai Lama is the only person who is totally honest, and even with him, he's skillful not to hurt anybody. He's skillful.

6. I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

7. Hope lies to mortals And most believe her, But man's deceiver Was never mine.

8. People who don't know anything tend to make up fake rules, the real rules being considerably more difficult to learn.

9. A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually.

10. I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him.

11. I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.

12. If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?

13. No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.

14. The only person who is a worse liar than a faith healer is his patient.

15. But now, instead of discussion and argument, brute force rises up to the rescue of discomfited error, and crushes truth and right into the dust. 'Might makes right,' and hoary folly totters on in her mad career escorted by armies and navies.

16. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.

17. Truth is a new word in Europe (and elsewhere).

18. It is thus quite simply false that whereof one cannot speak (in the sense of 'there is nothing to say about it that specifies it and grants it separating properties'), thereof one must be silent. It must on the contrary be named.

19. Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

20. I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.

21. The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

22. Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.

23. There is always a philosophy for lack of courage.

24. The important thing isn't the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.

25. I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false.

26. When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. ... there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.

27. Truth is what stands the test of experience.

28. I don't believe in mathematics.

29. If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.

30. Measured objectively, what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving is utterly infinitesimal. But the striving frees us from the bonds of the self and makes us comrades of those who are the best and the greatest.

31. The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

32. Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.

33. Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

34. I don't think that we necessarily lie. I mean, we make our living by pretending that we're someone else. I don't tell tall tales. I always tell the truth.

35. The quiet conscience is an invention of the devil.

36. Faith which refuses to face indisputable facts is but little faith. Truth is always gain, however hard it is to accommodate ourselves to it. To linger in any kind of untruth proves to be a departure from the straight way of faith.

37. Not less strong than the will to truth must be the will to sincerity. Only an age, which can show the courage of sincerity, can possess truth, which works as a spiritual force within it.

38. Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.

39. Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away.

40. Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.

41. 'Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation' yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

42. When I tell any Truth it is not for the sake of Convincing those who do not know it but for the sake of defending those who Do

43. A paranoid-schizophrenic is a guy who just found out what's going on.

44. The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is.

45. Truth is incontrovertible; malice may attack it and ignorance may deride it; but, in the end; there it is.

46. It 's no matter what you do If your heart be only true, And his heart was true to Poll.

47. Try to grasp the essence of what the great artists, the serious masters, say in their masterpieces, and you will again find God in them. One man has written or said it in a book, another in a painting.

48. The most important truth which has ever been uttered, and the greatest discovery ever made in the moral world.

49. It is like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock, which not only is itself discredited but casts a shade of doubt over all previous assertions.

50. The bigger/more blatant a lie, the more people will believe it.

51. 'Clearly, [President Bush] lied. Now if he is an unconscious liar, and doesn't realize when he's lying, then we're really in trouble.'

52. 'We stated openly that Steven Pagones did it. If we're lying, sue us, so we can go into court with you and prove you did it. Sue us - sue us right now.'

53. 'Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.'

54. There is only one group which would ever call for the banning of The Diary of Anne Frank, and I don't care what they happen to be calling themselves these days.

55. The pity of all this is, you know, a man like that [ Sri Ramakrishna ] has to have disciples, or no one would ever hear about him. But somehow, as the generations pass, the flame dies out. And eventually the disciples kill him. I wish that there was a way of putting a time-bomb into scriptures and records- not a time-bomb, but some kind of invisible ink, so that all scriptures would un-print themselves about fifty years after the master's death. And just dissolve.

56. Being able to remain on that dizzying crest - that is integrity and the rest is subterfuge.

57. By what right, moreover, could a Christian or a Marxist accuse me, for example, of pessimism? I was not the one to invent the misery of the human being or the terrifying formulas of divine malediction.

58. Indeed, it is not so much identical conclusions that prove minds to be related as the contradictions that are common to them.

59. Of all kinds of fate the least deceptive is the one that is lived.

60. The age of enlightenment, as people say, wanted to suppress the death penalty on the pretext that man was naturally good. Of course he is not (he is worse or better). After twenty years of our magnificent history we are well aware of this. But precisely because he is not absolutely good, no one among us can pose as an absolute judge and pronounce the definitive elimination of the worst among the guilty, because no one of us can lay claim to absolute innocence.

61. These paltry and essential belongings, these relative truths are the only ones to stir me. As for the others, the 'ideal' truths, I have not enough soul to understand them. Not that one must be an animal, but I find no meaning in the happiness of angels.

62. We have a right to think that truth with a capital letter is relative. But facts are facts. And whoever says that the sky is blue when it is gray is prostituting words and preparing the way for tyranny.

63. A conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against the doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs. On the other hand, representatives of science have often made an attempt to arrive at fundamental judgments with respect to values and ends on the basis of scientific method, and in this way have set themselves in opposition to religion. These conflicts have all sprung from fatal errors.

64. Does there truly exist an insuperable contradiction between religion and science? Can religion be superseded by science? The answers to these questions have, for centuries, given rise to considerable dispute and, indeed, bitter fighting. Yet, in my own mind there can be no doubt that in both cases a dispassionate consideration can only lead to a negative answer. What complicates the solution, however, is the fact that while most people readily agree on what is meant by 'science,' they are likely to differ on the meaning of 'religion.'

65. Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks... Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.

66. The ethical ideas on which civilization rests have been wandering about the world, poverty-stricken and homeless. No theory of the universe has been advanced which can give them solid foundation; in fact not one has made its appearance which can claim for itself solidity and inner consistency. The age of philosophical dogmatism had come to an end, and after that nothing was recognized as truth except the science which described reality. Complete theories of the universe no longer appeared as fixed stars; they were regarded as resting on hypothesis, and ranked no higher than comets.

67. Resignation as to knowledge of the world is for me not an irretrievable plunge into a scepticism which leaves us to drift about in life like a derelict vessel. I see in it that effort of honesty which we must venture to make in order to arrive at the serviceable world-view which hovers within sight. Every world-view which fails to start from resignation in regard to knowledge is artificial and a mere fabrication, for it rests upon an inadmissible interpretation of the universe.

68. From my youth onwards, I have felt sure that all thought which thinks itself out to an issue ends in mysticism. In the stillness of the African jungle I have been able to work out this thought and give it expression.

69. The only originality I claim is that for me this truth goes hand in hand with the intellectual certainty that the human spirit is capable of creating in our time a new mentality, an ethical mentality. Inspired by this certainty, I too proclaim this truth in the hope that my testimony may help to prevent its rejection as an admirable sentiment but a practical impossibility. Many a truth has lain unnoticed for a long time, ignored simply because no one perceived its potential for becoming reality.

70. Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers - such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.

71. I am of course confident that I will fulfil my tasks as a writer in all circumstances - from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.

72. It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.

73. A work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force - they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.

74. Writers and artists can achieve more: they can CONQUER FALSEHOOD! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art. And no sooner will falsehood be dispersed than the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its ugliness - and violence, decrepit, will fall.

75. Proverbs about truth are well-loved in Russian. They give steady and sometimes striking expression to the not inconsiderable harsh national experience: ONE WORD OF TRUTH SHALL OUTWEIGH THE WHOLE WORLD. And it is here, on an imaginary fantasy, a breach of the principle of the conservation of mass and energy, that I base both my own activity and my appeal to the writers of the whole world.

76. Harvard's motto is 'Veritas.' Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend.

77. 'Los cantaros cuanto mas vacios, mas ruido hacen.'

78. We love not this French God, the child of hell, Wild War, who breaks the converse of the wise; But though we love kind Peace so well, We dare not even by silence sanction lies. It might be safe our censures to withdraw, And yet, my Lords, not well; there is a higher law.

79. And the parson made it his text that week, and he said likewise, That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies, That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright, But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.

80. Come forth I charge thee, arise, Thou of the many tongues, the myriad eyes! Thou comest not with shows of flaunting vines Unto mine inner eye, Divinest Memory!

81. Thus truth was multiplied on truth, the world Like one great garden show'd, And thro' the wreaths of floating dark up-curl'd, Rare sunrise flow'd. And Freedom rear'd in that august sunrise Her beautiful bold brow, When rites and forms before his burning eyes Melted like snow.

82. 'Self-blinded are you by your pride: Look up thro' night: the world is wide. 'This truth within thy mind rehearse, That in a boundless universe Is boundless better, boundless worse. 'Think you this mould of hopes and fears Could find no statelier than his peers In yonder hundred million spheres?' It spake, moreover, in my mind: 'Tho' thou wert scatter'd to the wind, Yet is there plenty of the kind. 'This truth within thy mind rehearse, That in a boundless universe Is boundless better, boundless worse.

83. I wept, 'Tho' I should die, I know That all about the thorn will blow In tufts of rosy-tinted snow; 'And men, thro' novel spheres of thought Still moving after truth long sought, Will learn new things when I am not.'

84. 'That men with knowledge merely play'd, I told thee - hardly nigher made, Tho' scaling slow from grade to grade; 'Much less this dreamer, deaf and blind, Named man, may hope some truth to find, That bears relation to the mind. 'For every worm beneath the moon Draws different threads, and late and soon Spins, toiling out his own cocoon.

85. 'Cry, faint not: either Truth is born Beyond the polar gleam forlorn, Or in the gateways of the morn. 'Cry, faint not, climb: the summits slope Beyond the furthest nights of hope, Wrapt in dense cloud from base to cope. 'Sometimes a little corner shines, As over rainy mist inclines A gleaming crag with belts of pines. 'I will go forward, sayest thou, I shall not fail to find her now. Look up, the fold is on her brow. 'If straight thy track, or if oblique, Thou know'st not. Shadows thou dost strike, Embracing cloud, Ixion-like; 'And owning but a little more Than beasts, abidest lame and poor, Calling thyself a little lower 'Than angels. Cease to wail and brawl! Why inch by inch to darkness crawl? There is one remedy for all.'

86. 'He does not love me for my birth Nor for my lands so broad and fair; He loves me for my own true worth, And that is well,' said Lady Clare.

87. 'If I'm a beggar born,' she said 'I will speak out, for I dare not lie, Pull off, pull off the brooch of gold, And fling the diamond necklace by.' 'Nay now, my child,' said Alice the nurse, 'But keep the secret all you can.' She said, 'Not so; but I will know If there be any faith in man.'

88. 'If I come dressed like a village maid, I am but as my fortunes are: I am a beggar born,' she said, 'And not the Lady Clare.'

89. I apologize.' 'you aren't sorry and don't apologize.'

90. He said truth has a taste, and this had the taste of truth. A wolf would put it that way, but I agree it does. Some things just don't hang together, but others do. And a lot of times when you encounter it, you say, 'I don't want this to be right, but it probably is, even though it brings me to grief.'

91. Our only truth is our sorrow.

92. Well, the cooking continues as the commentator becomes.. very confused about things. It's the ginger cognac, I'm telling you. Iron Chef America will be right back, I'll get my head right.

93. If we love God, then it requires us to hate idolatry. If we believe there is such a thing as goodness, then we must also recognise the presence of evil. If we believe our religion is the only way to Heaven, then we must also affirm that all other paths lead to Hell. If we believe our religion is true, then it requires us to believe others are false.

94. I consider myself to be straightforward.

95. I usually try to look for something I haven't done before, a side of me I haven't completely explored. There's a truth in acting, and there is a very real part of me that can understand that or believe in that or see the ugliness in that and the statment needs to be made. So it's all kind of me.

96. [An attorney] can find it consistent with his dignity to turn wrong into right, and right into wrong, to abet a lie, nay to create, disseminate, and with all the play of his wit, give strength to the basest of lies, on behalf of the basest of scoundrels.

97. Needless to deny that the normal London plumber is a dishonest man. We do not even allow ourselves to think so. That question, as to the dishonesty of mankind generally, is one that disturbs us greatly;- whether a man in all grades of life will by degrees train his honesty to suit his own book, so that the course of life which he shall bring himself to regard as soundly honest shall, if known to his neighbours, subject him to their reproof. We own to a doubt whether the honesty of a bishop would shine bright as the morning star to the submissive ladies who now worship him, if the theory of life upon which he lives were understood by them in all its bearings.

98. He was not so anxious to prove himself right, as to be so.

99. 'I can never bring myself to believe it, John,' said Mary Walker, the pretty daughter of Mr. George Walker, attorney, of Silverbridge.

100. The fack can't be no longer disgised that a Krysis is onto us.