Truth Quotes

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Error is just as important a condition of life's progress as truth

Folk songs are evasive-the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that's exactly the way we want it to be. We wouldn't be comfortable with it any other way. A folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff. A folk song might vary in meaning and it might not appear the same from one moment to the next. It depends on who's playing and who's listening.

The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it.

The Soul rules over matter. Matter may pass away like a mote in the sunbeam, may be absorbed into the immensity of God, as a mistis absorbed into the heat of the Sun--but the soul is the kingdom of God, the abode of love, of truth, of virtue.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Buddha renounced every worldly happiness because he wanted to share with the whole world his happiness which was to be had by men who sacrificed and suffered in the search for truth.

There is a sort of homely truth and naturalness in some books which is very rare to find, and yet looks cheap enough. There may benothing lofty in the sentiment, or fine in the expression, but it is careless country talk. Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art. Some have this merit only.

Henry David Thoreau

Truth and reason are common to everyone, and are no more his who spake them first than his who speaks them after.

Michel de Montaigne

If you could say, with truth, to your own solitary heart, to-night, 'I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by!' your seventy-eight years would be seventy-eight heavy curses; would they not?

Charles Dickens

The very truth, and the nature of things, though repudiated and ordered into exile, sneaked in again through the back door, to be received by me under an unwonted guise.

Johannes Kepler

Truth is always present; it only needs to lift the iron lids of the mind's eye to read its oracles.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The forces that tend for evil are great and terrible, but the forces of truth and love and courage and honesty and generosity and sympathy are also stronger than ever before.

Theodore Roosevelt

In the long run, the most unpleasant truth is a safer companion than a pleasant falsehood.

Theodore Roosevelt

For you, o broker, there is no other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on the payment of moneys.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified.... All three were crucified for the same crime-the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The share we have in the knowledge of truth, such as it is, has not been acquired by our own powers. God has taught ushis wonderful secrets; our faith is not of our acquiring, it is purely the gift of another's bounty.

Michel de Montaigne

The error in positivism is that it takes as its standard of truth the contingently given division of labor, that between the science and social praxis as well as that within science itself, and allows no theory that could reveal the division of labor to be itself derivative and mediated and thus strip it of its false authority.

Theodor W. Adorno

In truth, no men on earth can cheer like Englishmen, who do so rally one another's blood and spirit when they cheer in earnest, that the stir is like the rush of their whole history, with all its standards waving at once, from Saxon Alfred's downwards.

Charles Dickens

They might kill me but they cannot kill Gandhism. If truth can be killed, Gandhism can be killed.

Death is at any time blessed but it is twice blessed for a warrior who dies for his cause, that is, truth.

Of lower states, of acts of routine and sense, we can tell somewhat; but the masterpieces of God, the total growths and universalmovements of the soul, he hideth; they are incalculable. I can know that truth is divine and helpful; but how it shall help me I can have no guess, for so to be is the sole inlet of so to know.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Human experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of truth. A system, built upon the discoveries of a great many minds, is always of more strength, than what is produced by the mere workings of any one mind, which, of itself, can do very little. There is not so poor a book in the world that would not be a prodigious effort were it wrought out entirely by a single mind, without the aid of prior investigators.

The truth about any man can only be calculated by the sum of everything that has been said about him.

How much more doth beauty beauteous seem by that sweet ornament which truth doth give!

William Shakespeare

Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The truth thy speech doth show, within my heart reproves the swelling pride.

In Italian: Lo tuo ver dir m'incuora Buona umilta e gran tumor m'appiani.

Dante Alighieri