Truth Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Stephen King

Elie Wiesel

Mao Zedong

Mark Twain

John Locke

René Descartes

John F. Kennedy

Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife.

Johannes Kepler

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.

We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them.

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

Every Communist must grasp the truth, 'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun'.

But in truth, should I meet with gold or spices in great quantity, I shall remain till I collect as much as possible, and for this purpose I am proceeding solely in quest of them.

Christopher Columbus

Of course it's the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.

Margaret Thatcher

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

Variant translation: The seeker after truth must, once in the course of his life, doubt everything, as far as is possible.

René Descartes

When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.

Miracles in mysticism don't occupy such an important place. It's metaphor, for the peasants, for the crowds, to impress people. What does mysticism really mean? It means the way to attain knowledge. It's close to philosophy, except in philosophy you go horizontally while in mysticism you go vertically. You plunge into it. Philosophy is a slow process of logic and logical discourse: A bringing B bringing C and so forth. In mysticism you can jump from A to Z. But the ultimate objective is the same. It's knowledge. It's truth.

For us, with the rule of right and wrong given us by Christ, there is nothing for which we have no standard. And there is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

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

Truth scarce ever yet carried it by Vote any where at its first appearance: New Opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other Reason, but because they are not already common.

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Theodor W. Adorno

You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence,... and loathing seizes him.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other.

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

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

[...] all knowledge, and especially the weightiest knowledge of the truth, to which only a brief triumph is allotted between the two long periods in which it is condemned as paradoxical or disparaged as trivial.

Sometimes misquoted as: All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Arthur Schopenhauer

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

If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.

A newspaper is of necessity something of a monopoly, and its first duty is to shun the temptations of monopoly. Its primary office is the gathering of news. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted. Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation must the unclouded face of truth suffer wrong. Comment is free, but facts are sacred.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.

Flannery O'Connor

Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie.