Truth Quotes

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A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Truth and untruth often co-exist; good and evil often are found together

The ideal scientific mind should be capable of thinking out a point of abstract knowledge in the interval between its owner falling from a balloon and reaching the earth. Men of this strong fiber are needed to form the conquerors of nature and the bodyguard of truth.

Arthur Conan Doyle

God, who is the embodiment of Truth and Right and Justice, can never have sanctioned a religion or practice which regards one - fifth of our vast population as untouchables.

By convention are sweet and bitter, hot and cold, by convention is color; in truth are atoms and the void.... In reality we apprehend nothing exactly, but only as it changes according to the condition of our body and the things that impinge on or offer resistance to it.

To give a satisfactory decision as to the truth it is necessary to be rather an arbitrator than a party to the dispute.

Truth and sincerity have a certain distinguishing native lustre about them which cannot be perfectly counterfeited; they are like fire and flame, that cannot be painted.

Benjamin Franklin

The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie

Friedrich Nietzsche

He who is not sage and wise, humane and just, cannot use secret agent.s. And he who is not delicate and subtle cannot get the truth out of them.

To bring deserving things down by setting undeserving things up is one of its perverted delights; and there is no playing fast and loose with the truth, in any game, without growing the worse for it.

Charles Dickens

I would reply that fiction is all the better the more it looks like truth, and gives the more pleasure the more probability and possibility there is about it.

Miguel de Cervantes

During the late war I had an infallible rule for deciding what Great Britain would do on every occasion. It was, to consider what they ought to do, and to take the reverse of that as what they would assuredly do, and I can say with truth that I was never deceived.

Thomas Jefferson

All cognition of things from mere pure Understanding and Reason is nothing but mere illusion and only in experience is there truth.

If I have renounced the search of truth, if I have come into the port of some pretending dogmatism, some new church, some Schelling or Cousin, I have died to all use of these new events that are born out of prolific time into multitude of life every hour. I am as bankrupt to whom brilliant opportunities offer in vain. He has just foreclosed his freedom, tied his hands, locked himself up and given the key to another to keep.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

That excitement about Kossuth, consider how characteristic, but superficial, it was!--only another kind of politics or dancing. Men were making speeches to him all over the country, but each expressed only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stood on truth. They were merely banded together, as usual one leaning on another, and all together on nothing.

Henry David Thoreau

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

This fond reiteration of the oldest expressions of truth by the latest posterity, content with slightly and religiously retouchingthe old material, is the most impressive proof of a common humanity.

Henry David Thoreau

What I seek to accomplish is simply to serve with my feeble capacity truth and justice, at the risk of pleasing no one.

Albert Einstein

This is some fellow,
Who having been prais'd for bluntness, doth affect
A saucy roughness and constrains the garb
Quite from his nature: he can't flatter, he!
An honest mind and plain,--he must speak truth!
And they will take it so; if not he's plain.
These kind of knaves I know, which in this plainness
Harbor more craft, and far corrupter ends,
Than twenty silly, ducking observants,
That stretch their duty nicely.

William Shakespeare

The heroes and discoverers have found true more than was previously believed, only when they were expecting and dreaming of something more than their contemporaries dreamed of, or even themselves discovered, that is, when they were in a frame of mind fitted to behold the truth. Referred to the world's standard, they are always insane. Even savages have indirectly surmised as much.

Henry David Thoreau

I am not at all concerned with appearing to be consistent. In my pursuit after Truth I have discarded many ideas and learnt many new things.

Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

War is in truth a disease in which the juices that serve health and maintenance are used for the sole purpose of nourishing something foreign, something at odds with nature.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There are places where the mind dies so that a truth which is its very denial may be born.

But he who has been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom, and has exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, must have thoughts immortal and divine. If he attain truth, and in so far as human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he must altogether be immortal.