Quotes About Truth

Lying is an indispensable part of making life tolerable.

Euphemisms persist because lying is an indispensable part of making life tolerable.

To be naked is to be without disguises.

The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts

Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through idealism that we resume contact with reality.

In the pursuit of truth we must beware of being misled by terms which we do not rightly understand. That is the chief point. Almost all philosophers utter the caution; few observe it.

Truth is the cry of all, but the game of the few.

The eye by long use comes to see even in the darkest cavern: and there is no subject so obscure but we may discern some glimpse of truth by long poring on it.

I might as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things I actually see and feel.

It is impossible a man who is false to his friends and neighbours should be true to the public.

Doth the reality of sensible things consist in being perceived? or, is it something distinct from their being perceived, and that bears no relation to the mind?

To one who regards things with a philosophical eye, and hath a soul capable of being delighted with the sense that truth and knowledge prevail among men, it must be a grateful reflection to think that the sublimest truths, which among the heathens only here and there one of brighter parts and more leisure than ordinary could attain to, are now grown familiar to the meanest inhabitants of these nations.

Christ is indeed the center of God's revelation, but for that very reason cannot be the startingpoint.

There is an element of truth in every idea that lasts long enough to be called corny.

Only secrets can be conquered'- most of all the secrets that lie within ourselves.

How is it that we fail to recognize that the mask of pleasure, stripped of all hypocrisy, is that of anguish?

Democracies cannot dispense with hypocrisy any more than dictatorships can with cynicism.

When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one's own truth does all inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears?

Bernard Bailyn

Approach each new problem not with a view of finding what you hope will be there, but to get the truth, the realities that must be grappled with. You may not like what you find. In that case you are entitled to try to change it. But do not deceive yourself as to what you do find to be the facts of the situation.

Every man has a right to be wrong in his opinions. But no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.

History has taught us the futility of the conspiracy theory. Complexity gives rise to error, and in error we grow our prejudice.

A society that fears knowledge is a society that fears itself.

If there is some truth in the Zen dictum that the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon, then it follows that the notion of pure experience is by no means the pure experience itself. Assuming that such an experience can be found, any attempt to characterize it, even the least reifying one, will betray it.