Quotes About Truth

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore it if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

Teach that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake.

The only true gift is a portion of thyself.

The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

I covet truth; beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth.

I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it--else it is none.

Use language what you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss.

The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.

The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.

God offers to every mind a choice between repose and truth. take which you please--you can never have both. [Essay on Intellect]

Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.

The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on midnoon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

She shows us only surfaces but Nature is a million fathoms deep.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

The life of truth is cold.