Quotes About Truth

Human misery universally arises from some error that man admits as true. We confound our fears with the idea feared, and place the evil in the thing seen or believed. Here is a great error, for we never see what we are afraid of.

Now, I stand alone on this rock, fighting the errors of this world, and establish the science of life by my works. What is my mode of warfare? With the axe of truth I strike at the root of every tree of error and hew it down, so that there shall not be one error in man showing itself in the form of disease.

Man is made of opinions,—of truth and error; and his life is a warfare like all other lives before him... Man goes on developing error upon error till he is buried in his own belief... It is the office of wisdom to explain the phenomena in man called disease, to show how it is made, and how it can be unmade. This is as much a science as it is to know how to decompose a piece of metal.

History ain't what it is. It's what some writer wanted it to be.

History is a vast dust-heap of falsehood with a few pennies of truth scattered through it.

Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.

The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.

The study of history is the playground of patriotism, and we may easily imagine the difficulties of Boards of Education in finding books of history which will be true to fact and will also give no offence to the varied elements of the population of the United States.

History is stained with the bloody ink of truth — beware historians who whitewash.

Who lies for you will lie against you.

Grant us the truth in creed, in trade and state, The truth in systems, methods, laws, innate, Falsehoods, illusions, myths may sound more sweet, Fallacious, false, framed but to dupe and cheat. The weak may hug a lie and call it good, Yet truth is right, when fully understood.

A half truth is a whole lie.

Those that think it permissible to tell white lies soon grow color-blind.

If you want to ruin the truth, stretch it.

I may be a liar, but at least I'm a gentleman.

A lie is just the truth waiting to be itself.

Beware of the half-truth; you may have gotten hold of the wrong half.

Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain't so.

The highest compact we can make with our fellow, is, — 'Let there be truth between us two forevermore.'

Yes, it is always the best policy to speak the truth — unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.

...and it often happens, that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it hath done its work... Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect: like a man, who has thought of a good repartee, when the discourse has changed; or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.

He had opened up for me the world of the real, of which I had known practically nothing and from which I had always shrunk. I had learned to look more closely at life as it was lived, to recognize that there were such things as facts in the world, to emerge from the realm of mind and idea and to place certain values on the concrete and objective phases of existence.

That man from Sulphur Creek had spoken the truth when telling how cold it sometimes got in the country. And he had laughed at him at the time! That showed one must not be too sure of things.

You are metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics; and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician wrong—to his own satisfaction.