Quotes About Truth

Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.

The man who boasts that he habitually tells the truth is simply a man with no respect for it. It is not a thing to be thrown about loosely, like small change; it is something to be cherished and hoarded, and disbursed only when absolutely necessary.

Thus she is almost always a failure as a lawyer, for the law requires only an armament of hollow phrases and stereotyped formulae, and a mental habit which puts these phantasms above sense, truth and justice; and she is almost always a failure in business, for business, in the main, is so foul a compound of trivialities and rogueries that her sense of intellectual integrity revolts against it.

The truth is the passion of a small and aberrant minority of men, most of them pathological. They are hated for telling it while they live, and after they die they are swiftly forgotten. What remains to the world, in the field of wisdom, is a series of long-tested and solidly-agreeable lies.

For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong.

H.L. Mencken

Per ogni problema complesso vi è una soluzione semplice. Ed è sempre sbagliata

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?

A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis towards something to which they can be true; namely, certain wistful or restless moods of the human spirit, wherein it seeks to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural law.

Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.

Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species—if separate species we be—for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.

In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes, But all the sadder tums, the more he knows!

Where does madness leave off and reality begin?

Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made

Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.

He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.

Kuranes no era moderno, y no pensaba como los demás escritores. Mientras ellos se esforzaban en despojar la vida de sus bordados ropajes del mito y mostrar con desnuda fealdad lo repugnante que es la realidad, Kuranes buscaba tan sólo la belleza. Y cuando no conseguía revelar la verdad y la experiencia, la buscaba en la fantasía y la ilusión, en cuyo mismo umbral la descubría entre los brumosos recuerdos de los cuentos y los sueños de niñez.

Damnation, is but a word bandied about by those whose blindness leads them to condemn all who can see

Efficiunt Daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi sint, conspicienda hominibus exhibeant." —Lactantius

Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon. - Beyond the Wall of Sleep

After all, the strangest and maddest of myths are often merely symbols or allegories based upon truth...

Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal;

Devils so work that things which are not appear to men as if they were real.

Befragt die Geringeren, auf daß nicht die Größeren Euch antworten und mehr heraufbeschwören, als Ihr vermöget