Quotes About Truth

If we conceive of free speech as promoting the search for truth—as the metaphor of "the marketplace of ideas" suggests—we should be troubled whether that search is hindered by public officials or private citizens. The same is true of democratic justifications for free speech. If the point of free speech is to facilitate the open debate that is essential for self-rule, any measure that impairs that debate should give us pause, regardless of its source.

The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

To a clear eye the smallest fact is a window through which the infinite may be seen.

A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.

All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called "Facts". They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.

Such truth as opposeth no man's profit nor pleasure is to all men welcome.

A man's conscience and his judgment are the same thing, and, as the judgment, so also the conscience may be erroneous

There's no escaping the Taoist adage, "Those who speak do not know, those who know do not speak.

That end is an intuitive realization of a single great insight—that we and the world around are one, both part of a larger encompassing absolute. Our rational intellect merely obscures this truth, and consequently we must shut it off, if only for a moment. Rationality constrains our mind; intuition releases it.

Only in a spontaneous utterance is there real, uncalculated evidence of enlightenment.)

In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

God give me the strength to face a fact though it slay me.

My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.

Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth.

All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.

Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth.

I protest that if some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and would up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer.

Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth.

The more rapidly truth is spread among mankind the better it will be for them. Only let us be sure that it is the truth.

Freedom and order are not incompatible... truth is strength... free discussion is the very life of truth.

A world of facts lies outside and beyond the world of words.

Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe.

Only one absolute certainty is possible to man, namely that at any given moment the feeling which he has exists.

Science ... warns me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile. My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.