Quotes About Truth

What is a logical mind?... It is the antiseptic which destroys the bacilli of unreason whereby true happiness is vivified.

Me, I'm complicated. But it's a living, I tell myself. Also, every once in a long while this disease manages to produce a fine and beautiful truth--as (they say) some oyster illness makes the wondrously perfect pearl.

If you want to be thought a liar, always tell the truth.

It's an odd thing about this universe that, though we all disagree with each other, we are all of us always in the right.

How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true!

What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for Beauty, and never see the Dawn!

The best things in life are simple. Simple things work. They don't foul up. It's the complicated things that get twisted around on you.

It is far better to know the painful truth than to live with a kindly falsehood.

Honesty is the best policy. But insanity is a hell of a lot more effective in court. So your set, McMullen

Honest friends is kinda nice, but it's hard to beat a big-ass lie and a six-pack of brewskies.

The man that I named the Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things. [from her Newberry Award acceptance speech]

You may lie.

If you desire a man to tell you comfortable lies about your prowess, and so fetter any hope of true excellence, I'm sure you may find one anywhere. Not all prisons are made of iron bars. Some are made of feather beds.

Surely only correct understanding could lead to correct action.

Je n'aime personne et je ne fous rien, je ne veux pas tenter de me distraire, ou de m'occulter la vérité. La vie est une saloperie, et chaque seconde de lucidité est un supplice.

He began with the profound assumption that because the true, unadulterated consciousness of each human is ultimately godhead, then godhead already is our true, natural, and essential identity. We don't need to climb anywhere. Each of us already is number One on the Tree of Life. All lower (sleepier) levels of consciousness with which we may currently identify are illusionary—dream selves that we temporarily misidentify as our Self.

Alcohol tells truth, but its truth is not normal.

I am. I was. I am not. I never am.

Life, in a sense, is living and surviving. And all that makes for living and surviving is good. He who follows the fact cannot go astray, while he who has no reverence for the fact wanders afar.

Some sorts of truth are truer than others.

There are things greater than our wisdom, beyond our justice. The right and wrong of this we cannot say, and it is not for us to judge.

For there are roads and roads, and of truth there are orders and orders.

If one denies that, when the meaning is true, then the meant is what is so, one rejects propositional truth. If the rejection is universal, then it is the self-destructive proposition that there are no true propositions. If the rejection is limited to the dogmas, then it is just a roundabout way of saying that all the dogmas are false.

A smile is not true or false in the manner in which a conceptual meaning is true or false. It is truth in the sense in which one can say that a person is true, a thing is true. But it is usually not true in the sense in which a proposition is true or false.