Quotes About Truth

So long as you allow yourself that kind of self-indulgence, you can expect to have headaches. If you can face anything, then face up to the one basic fact in all this. You told Míkál once, in Thessalonika, that you have never loved anyone. That was a lie. You feel for Sybilla quite as much as she has always felt for you.

I do not exist. What you have in your hand is my death certificate.

What is there but untruth and heartbreak wherever you go?

A lie is a broad and spacious and glittering thing, sweeping belief before it from its very grandeur. But the truth fits, like an old man cutting cloth in an attic. And that, Philippa did not need to be told, was the truth, which Lymond had guessed long before her.

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life. ( Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne , 8 September 1935)

The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.

You'd think (losing his job and degree for having made false claims as a researcher) would be a lesson to him, said Miss Hillyard. It didn't pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour for the women and children we hear so much about -- but in the end it left him worse of. But that, said Peter, was only because he committed the extra sin of being found out.

Like all male creatures Wimsey was a simple soul at bottom.

the practical utility of Formal Logic to-day lies not so much in the establishment of positive conclusions as in the prompt detection and exposure of invalid inference.

The popular mind has grown so confused that it is no longer able to receive any statement of fact except as an expression of personal feeling.

Of course, there is some truth in advertising. There's yeast in bread, but you can't make bread with yeast alone. Truth in advertising," announced Lord Peter sententiously, "is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal. It provides a suitable quantity of gas, with which to blow out a mass of crude misrepresentation into a form that the public can swallow.

though I always think that the franker you are with people, the more you're likely to deceive 'em; so unused is the modern world to the open hand and the guileless heart, what?

honestly--then dishonestly.

Any fool can tell a lie, and any fool can believe it; but the right method is to tell the truth in such a way that the intelligent reader is seduced into telling the lie for himself.

Ah, well, as the old pagan said of the Gospels, after all, it was a long time ago, and we'll hope it wasn't true.

Together with this outrage we may take the mutilation of the novel called The Search at the exact point where the author upholds, or appears for the moment to uphold, the doctrine that loyalty to the abstract truth must override all personal considerations;

The village that voted the earth was flat doubtless modified its own behavior and its system of physics accordingly, but its vote did not in any way modify the shape of the earth. That remains what it is, whether human beings agree or disagree about it, or even if they never discuss it or take notice of it at all. And if the earth's shape entails consequences for humanity, those consequences will continue to occur, whether humanity likes it or not, in conformity with the laws of nature.

You know,' he said. 'I rather liked Ferguson, and I couldn't stick Campbell at any price. I rather wish—' 'Can't be helped, Wimsey,' said the Chief Constable. 'Murder is murder, you know.' 'Not always,' said Wimsey.

The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalise false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.

facts are like cows. If you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away.

of my own honesty.

I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.

Be you wise and never sad, You will get your lovely lad. Never serious be, nor true, And your wish will come to you-- And if that makes you happy, kid, You'll be the first it ever did.

Ah, clear they see and true they say That one shall weep, and one shall stray