Quotes About Truth

The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre.

If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.

How many things we held yesterday as articles of faith which today we tell as fables.

What of a truth that is bounded by these mountains and is falsehood to the world that lives beyond?

Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known.

It is not without good reason said, that he who has not a good memory should never take upon him the trade of lying.

I put forward formless and unresolved notions, as do those who publish doubtful questions to debate in the schools, not to establish the truth but to seek it.

I speak the truth, not my fill of it, but as much as I dare speak; and I dare to do so a little more as I grow old.

Their [the Skeptics'] way of speaking is: "I settle nothing…. I do not understand it…. Nothing seems true that may not seem false." Their sacramental word is E?___, which is to say, I suspend my judgment.

The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.

For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits.

Even on the highest throne in the world, we are still sitting on our ass.

He who has not a good memory should never take upon himself the trade of lying.

He who is not very strong in memory should not meddle with lying.

Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.

Combien de choses nous servoyent hier d'articles de foy, qui nous sont fables aujourd'huy? How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us?

Anyone who does not feel sufficiently strong in memory should not meddle with lying.

How many things which served us yesterday as articles of faith, are fables for us today.

We are born to inquire into truth; it belongs to a greater to possess it.

The problem is not changing people's consciousnesses---or what's in their heads---but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth.

The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes.

Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.

Si la sincérité, en elle-même, n'est rien, elle est la condition de tout.

Il n'y a pas d'amour dans la liberté individuelle, dans l'indépendance, c'est tout simplement un mensonge, et l'un des plus grossiers qui puisse se concevoir; il n'y a d'amour que dans le désir d'anéantissement, de fusion, de disparition individuelle, dans une sorte comme on disait autrefois de sentiment océanique, dans quelque chose qui de toute façon était, au moins dans un futur proche, condamné.