Quotes About Truth

Truth is discovered, not invented. It exists independent of anyone's knowledge of it. (Gravity existed prior to Newton.)

I hammered on the Poes' front door like Alaric on the gates of Rome. Poe said that a gaudy figure of speech was a silk cravat around a dirty neck. He didn't say whether the truth lay in the plain thing or in its fancy.

I learned words, I learned words; but half of them died from lack of exercise. And the ones I use often look at me with a look that whispers, Liar.

Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts.

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.

Even Rudyard Kipling, that most patriotic of poets, whose only son was killed on his first day on the Western front, could write in 1919, in the persona of a dead soldier, "If any question why we died / Tell them 'Because our fathers lied.

spite of every lie uttered or printed, the truth comes to the top, and it is known alike by peoples and rulers, that on the whole British influence is healthy and kindly, and makes for the general happiness and welfare of Mankind.

The insane do not share the normal prejudice in favor of external reality.

The real deceivers are the literalists, who say, I cannot tell a lie.

Jokes and folklore and poetic metaphor, the wisdom of folly, tell the secret truth.

First of all, Saddam did not win the war, even though he says he did, I mean, you know, that's a joke and everybody in the world knows it.

The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.

Time will inevitably uncover dishonesty and lies history has no place for them.

The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.

Remember too that to me the word myth, like the words fable and fiction, is a technical term in criticism, and the popular sense in which it means something untrue I regard as a debasing of language.

Anyone measuring his mind against an external reality has to fall back on an axiom of faith.

if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones.

To become properly acquainted with a truth, we must first have disbelieved it, and disputed against it.

Man has his being in truth--if he sacrifices truth he sacrifices himself. Whoever betrays truth betrays himself. It is not a question of lying--but of acting against one's conviction.

There is more truth in their romances than in learned chronicles.

La esencia de la enfermedad es tan oscura como la de la vida.

Man abides in truth. As one prizes truth, so one cherishes oneself. Whoever betrays truth, betrays himself. We speak not of lies here, but rather of acts against convictions.

Den Satz des Widerspruchs zu vernichten ist vielleicht die höchste Aufgabe der höheren Logik