Truth Quotes

A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence scepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone.

Denis Diderot

Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time.

Benjamin Disraeli

The greatest truths are the simplest.

Augustus Hare

Truth will always be truth, regardless of lack of understanding, disbelief or ignorance.

W. Clement Stone

Read not books alone, but men, and amongst them chiefly thyself. If thou find anything questionable there, use the commentary of a severe friend rather than the gloss of a sweet lipped flatterer; there is more profit in a distasteful truth than in deceitful sweetness.

Francis Quarles

The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatest, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found it without it.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Everyone, whether cardinal or scientist, who believes that his own truth is complete and final must become a dogmatist... The more sincere his faith, the more he is bound to persecute, to save others from falling into error.

Joyce

New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

It is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.

Jerome K Jerome

Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true.

Robert Brault

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

Thomas H. Huxley

What we have in us of the image of God is the love of truth and justice.

Demosthenes

For no man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Truth is truth To the end of reckoning.

William Shakespeare

Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.

Voltaire

Liars when they speak the truth are not believed.

Aristotle, from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.

Mark Twain

Mathematics, rightly viewed, posses not only truth, but supreme beauty - A beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.

Bertrand Russell

I do not know what I may appear to the world but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Isaac Newton

The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth.

George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical, 1866

Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.

Giordano Bruno

What is hope? nothing but the paint on the face of Existence; the least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow - Cheeked harlot we have got hold of.

Lord Byron, Letter to Thomas Moore

Who is better, they who promote truth over happiness, or happiness over truth?

Friedrich Nietzsche

Any acceptance of authority is the very denial of truth.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

The object of the superior man is truth.

Confucius

It a letter contains a misleading impression, not a lie. It was being economical with the truth.

Robert Armstrong

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

I am for integrity, if only because life is very short and truth is hard to come by.

Kermit Eby

Pretty much all the honest truth - Telling there is in the world is done by children.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The greatest and noblest pleasure which men can have in this world is to discover new truths; and the next is to shake off old prejudices.

Frederick The Great

There is no religion higher than the truth.

H Hahn Blavatsky

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - - That the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

H. L. Mencken

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

George Bernard Shaw

Every exaggeration of the truth once detected by others destroys our credibility and makes all that we do and say suspect.

Stephen Covey

The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

H. G. Wells, 1903