Lies Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Theodor W. Adorno

Pablo Picasso

Bertrand Russell

Mother Teresa

Louis Pasteur

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Denis Diderot

Kids, the fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

John F. Kennedy

The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.

Maximilien Robespierre

The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort and independence, lies in the fact that people close their hearts and become selfish.

Pope John Paul II

The only thing that will redeem mankind is co-operation, and the first step towards co-operation lies in the hearts of individuals.

Bertrand Russell

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. If he only shows in his work that he has searched, and re-searched, for the way to put over lies, he would never accomplish anything.

Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.

Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.

We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.

I find that the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail — sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it — but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man. A man who himself does not believe what he tells another … has even less worth than if he were a mere thing. … makes himself a mere deceptive appearance of man, not man himself.

If only we try to live sincerely, it will go well with us, even though we are certain to experience real sorrow, and great disappointments, and also will probably commit great faults and do wrong things, but it certainly is true, that it is better to be high-spirited, even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent. It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love, is well done.

Vincent van Gogh

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Theodor W. Adorno

Go tell the Spartans, thou who passest by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

Simonides of Ceos

This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other.

Mikhail Bakunin

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.

The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.

Hermann Minkowski

Our very strength as lesbians lies in the fact that we are outside of patriarchy; our existence challenges its life.

Charlotte Bunch

Assuming that his talent can survive the increasing strain, there is one scarcely avoidable danger that lies ahead of the pupil on his road to mastery.

If you want external happiness, it can be an elusive desire. Internal happiness needs only to be revealed. It is not elusive because it is within you. It is your treasure. If you take someone else's treasure, it is stealing, but if you turn to your own, it is not. Happiness is your own treasure because it lies within you.

It is by going down into the abyss
that we recover the treasures of life.
Where you stumble,
there lies your treasure.

Joseph Campbell

Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.

Mario Vargas Llosa

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.

Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity do not easily resume life.

I was transfixed with horror, and over me there swept the sudden conviction that that hanging was a mistake — worse, a crime. It was my awakening to one of the most terrible facts of life — that justice and judgment lie often a world apart.

Emmeline Pankhurst