quotations about truth
Still another condition of knowing the truth is, I think, the willingness to make some sacrifice for it.
SAMUEL LONGFELLOW
Essays and Sermons
Our feelings often color the truth.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. But only when the reality has not been subsumed by foamy legends and fantasies that radiate outward from the actual event.
BROCK YATES
"Even the Cops Liked the Cannonball", Car and Driver, November 2002
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne--
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
The Present Crisis
Nature expresses a design of love and truth.
POPE BENEDICT XVI
Encyclical Letter, Caritas in Veritate, June 29, 2009
We may have revolved every possible idea in our minds, and yet the truth has never occurred to us, and it is from without, when we are least expecting it, that it gives us its cruel stab and wounds us forever.
MARCEL PROUST
Sodom and Gomorrah
Truth shall fear no open shame.
ANNE BOLEYN
attributed, Day's Collacon
Truth rides a long road.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
To a new truth there is nothing more hurtful than an old error.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
The sun of truth strikes each part of the earth at a little different angle.
HAMLIN GARLAND
Crumbling Idols
Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat tails.
CLARENCE DARROW
The Sign
The truth had a nasty habit of biting people who refused to confront it.
DAVID WEBER
By Schism Rent Asunder
The excellence and inspiration of truth is in the pursuit, not in the mere having of it. The pursuit of all truth is a kind of gymnastics; a man swings from one truth with higher strength to gain another. The continual glory is the possibility opening before us.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Supreme truths are the foundation on which repose the state of human society.
POPE LEO XIII
attributed, Day's Collacon
Let us not expect men to see truth before it is shown them; they do not see it afterwards.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The Unquiet Grave
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Blind Assassin
Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Lila
Powerful truth has its own gravity and eventually pulls people back to it.
DAN BROWN
The Lost Symbol