Lies Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.

Ernest Hemingway

Care keeps his watch in every old man's eye, And where care lodges, sleep will never lie.

William Shakespeare

But the exceedingly foul deed of Onan, the basest of wretches, follows. Onan must have been a malicious and incorrigible scoundrel. This is a most disgraceful sin. It is far more atrocious than incest and adultery. We call it unchastity, yes a Sodomitic sin. For Onan goes in to her; that is, he lies with her and copulates, and when it comes to the point of insemination, spills the semen, lest the woman conceive. Surely at such a time the order of nature established by God in procreation should be followed. Accordingly, it was a most disgraceful crime to produce semen and excite the woman, and to frustrate her at that very moment.

By telling of it,
Made such a sinner of his memory,
To credit his own lie.

William Shakespeare

There are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but commands silence.

Theodor W. Adorno

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

Emily Dickinson

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.

This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.

Arthur Conan Doyle

The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age.

George Bernard Shaw

I used to measure the heavens, now I measure the shadows of Earth.
Although my mind was heaven-bound, the shadow of my body lies here.

Johannes Kepler

Buy a pup and your money will buy Love unflinching that cannot lie.

Rudyard Kipling

What was a lie in the father becomes a conviction in the son.

Friedrich Nietzsche

We believe that part of the answer lies in pricing energy on the basis of its full costs to society. One reason we use energy so lavishly today is that the price of energy does not include all of the social costs of producing it. The costs incurred in protecting the environment and the health and safety of workers, for example, are part of the real costs of producing energy-but they are not now all included in the price of the product.

Life is more or less a lie, but then again, that's exactly the way we want it to be.

Ah fatal confidence, too prone
To trust in sea and sky!
A naked corpse on shores unknown
Shall Palinurus lie!

Let a politician die, and his worst enemies will stand up on the ﬂoor of the House and utter pious lies in his honour, but a writer or artist must be sniffed at, at least if he is any good.

This is the third time; I hope good luck lies in odd numbers.... There is divinity in odd numbers, either in nativity, chance or death.

William Shakespeare

Two gates the silent house of Sleep adorn;
Of polish'd iv'ry this, that of transparent horn:
True visions thro' transparent horn arise;
Thro' polish'd iv'ry pass deluding lies.

It is only when a man goes out into the world with the thought that there are heroisms all round him, and with the desire all alive in his heart to follow any which may come within sight of him, that he breaks away... from the life he knows, and ventures forth into the wonderful mystic twilight land where lie the great adventures and the great rewards.

Arthur Conan Doyle

He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary?

Therein lies the defect of revenge: it's all in the anticipation; the thing itself is a pain, not a pleasure; at least the pain is the biggest end of it.

So may he rest; his faults lie gently on him!

William Shakespeare

Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment, full effort is full victory.

The Heisenberg-Bohr tranquilizing philosophy — or religion? — is so delicately contrived that, for the time being, it provides a gentle pillow for the true believer from which he cannot very easily be aroused. So let him lie there.

Albert Einstein

if you tell yourself the great lie of bad art-that you are in charge-your chance at the truth will be lost. The truth isn't always pretty.