Quotes About Truth

Matilda told such dreadful lies,It made one gasp and stretch one's eyes;Her aunt, who, from her earliest youth,Had kept a strict regard for truth,Attempted to believe Matilda:The effort very nearly killed her.

Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelet and the intolerable, so with autobiography.

The moment a man talks to his fellows he begins to lie.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people, some of the time, but you can fool yourself anytime you need to badly enough.

So truth created the ultimate lie. Was this what the world was like for wizards? This thorny, gray tangle where right and wrong were so mixed there was no telling them apart?

Makenna's "He does" clashed with Cogswhallop's "She does." They looked at each other, and she saw the love in his eyes -- but he saw the truth in hers. "He does," she told the Hierarch firmly.

The glamour of inexperience is over your eyes," Mr. Rochester answered; "and you see it through a charmed medium: you cannot discern that the gilding is slime and the silk draperies cobwebs; that the marble is sordid slate, and the polished woods mere refuse chips and scaly bark.

Everyone sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are. —Niccolò Machiavelli

All I know for sure right now is that my sister gave me a small fraction of the truth." "I don't want to sound like a cynical lawyer," he said. "But I think that's all anybody ever gives anyone.

What is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstandings and twisted tales. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

He needs guilty men. So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.

The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.

He knows different now. It's the living that chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives. Thomas More had spread the rumor that Little Bilney, chained to the stake, had recanted as the fire was set. It wasn't enough for him to take Bilney's life away; he had to take his death too.

But if you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?

But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious act and face our future. It seems there is no mercy in this world, but a kind of haphazard justice: men pay for crimes, but not necessarily their own.

Thomas More syas that the imperial troops, for their enjoyment, are roasting live babies on spits. Oh, he would! says Thomas Cromwell. Listen, soldiers don't do that. They're too busy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money.

A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs.

When Gregory says, 'Are they guilty?' he means, 'Did they do it?' But when he says, 'Are they guilty?' he means, 'Did the court find them so?' The lawyer's world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.

But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future.

But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future. It seems there is no mercy in this world, but a kind of haphazard justice: men pay for crimes, but not necessarily their own.

Repetition of false teachings does not make them true.

Tom Truth says, 'I do not know if I wrote this verse.' 'You have forgot it,' he says. 'As would any man of sense. Yet in the fifth stanza you write, Pardon me, your man, Tom Truth. Which you rhyme, unfortunately, with growth.' Christophe sniggers. 'Even I know better, and I am French.

Lying gives him a deep and subtle pleasure, so deep and subtle he does not know he is lying; he thinks he is the most truthful of princes.

Beneath every history, another history.