Truth Quotes

Men occasionally stumble on the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Sir Winston Leonard Spenser Churchill

Man lowers his head and lunges into civilization, forgetting the days of his infancy when he sought truth in a snowflake or a stick. Man forgets the wisdom of the child.

Jack Kerouac

Truth is the secret of eloquence and of virtue, the basis of moral authority it is the highest summit of art and life.

Henri Frdric Amiel

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

H. L. Mencken

It is unfortunate, considering that enthusiasm moves the world, that so few enthusiasts can be trusted to tell the truth.

Stanley Baldwin

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Virginia Woolf

The truth is the kindest thing we can give folks in the end.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Umberto Eco

Truth may be stretched, but cannot be broken, and always gets above falsehood, as does oil above water.

Miguel Cerbantes

Believe those who are seeking the truth doubt those who find it.

Andr Gide

Honesty is being able to tell the truth without hurting anyone.

Federico Fellini, 8 1/2

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia

When you tell the truth, people listen.

Jose Raul Bernardo, Silent Wing (Simon & Schuster, 1998)

When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth.

George Bernard Shaw

Autobiography is an unrivalled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.

Philip Guedalla

I was resolved to sustain and preserve in my college the bite of the mind, the chance to stand face to face with truth, the good life lived in a small, various, highly articulate and democratic society.

Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded.

W. Somerset Maugham

Truly, to tell lies is not honorable; but when the truth entails tremendous ruin, To speak dishonorably is pardonable.

Sophocles, Creusa

Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time.

Benjamin Disraeli

Earthly minds, like mud walls, resist the strongest batteries; and though, perhaps, somethimes the force of a clear argument may make some impression, yet they nevertheless stand firm, keep out the enemy, truth, that would captivate or disturbe them.

John Locke

Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, radio address, October 26, 1939

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Truth is a pathless land.

Krishnamurti

The truth, of course, is that a billion falsehoods told a billion times by a billion people are still false.

Travis Walton

The object of the superior man is truth.

Confucius

What makes a good follower The single most important characteristic may well be a willingness to tell the truth. In a world of growing complexity leaders are increasingly dependent on their subordinates for good information, whether the leaders want to hear it or not. Followers who tell the truth and leaders who listen to it are an unbeatable combination.

Warren Bennis

In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.

Boris Pasternak

Truth may be stretched, but cannot be broken, and always gets above falsehood, as oil does above water.

Miguel de Cervantes

When I can look life in the eyes, grown calm and very coldly wise, life will have given me the truth, and taken in exchange - - My youth.

Sara Teasdale

Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.

Mark Twain

Accent is the soul of language it gives to it both feeling and truth.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Beauty is but the sensible image of the Infinite. Like truth and justice it lives within us; like virtue and the moral law it is a companion of the soul.

George Bancroft

Truth has not special time of its own. Its hour is now - - Always and indeed then most truly when it seems unsuitable to actual circumstances.

Albert Schweitze

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Sherlock Holmes

The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

Paul Valery

Let us talk sense to the American people. Let us tell them the truth, that there are not gains without pains.

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno