Quotes About Truth

No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.

Now then is my chance to find out what is of great importance, and I must be careful, and tell no lies.

Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.

To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is not easy.

He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds—that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.

But for ourselves, we resent teachers. Let a man get up and say, 'Behold, this is the truth,' and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

Kendisi nedir ? Herkesin gördüÄŸü ÅŸey midir? Yoksa olduÄŸunuz ÅŸey mi?

And if literature is not the Bride and Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? 'Confound it all.' he cried, 'why say Bedfellow when one's already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means and save it?

Her soliloquy crystallized itself into little fragmentary phrases emerging suddenly from the turbulence of her thought, particularly when she had to exert herself in any way, either to move, to count money, or to choose a turning. To know the truth--to accept without bitterness-- those, perhaps, were the most articulate of her utterances, for no one could have made head or tail of the queer gibberish murmured in front of the statue of Francis, Duke of Bedford...

The only truth which she could discover was the truth of what she herself felt.

to let the light of the world flood back-to say this has not happened! But why turn one's head hither and thither? This is the truth. This is fact.

Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction—so we are told.

to be engaged to marry some one with whom you are not in love is an inevitable step in a world where the existence of passion is only a traveler's story brought from the heart of deep forests and told so rarely that wise people doubt whether the story can be true.

Si no dices la verdad sobre ti mismo, difícilmente podrás decir la de las otras personas.

What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. Yes, one feels, I should never have thought that this could be so; I have never known people behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it is, so it happens

Desiring truth, awaiting it, laboriously distilling a few words, forever desiring ---

At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial—and any question about sex is that—one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

Yet few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.

Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsified.

You must remember that fiction is the mirror of life.

Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty, so that all one's perceptions, half way to truth, were tangled in a golden mesh?

when a subject is highly controversial — and any question about sex is that — one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.

it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels