Truth Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

It is a great mystery that though the human heart longs for Truth, in which alone it finds liberation and delight, the first reaction of human beings to Truth is one of hostility and fear!

Anthony de Mello

True, the initial ideas are in general those of an individual, but the establishment of the reality and truth is in general the work of more than one person.

The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.

Anthony Kennedy

Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress truth.

Truth is a torch that gleams through the fog without dispelling it.

Claude Adrien Helvétius

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

My hero is every American who says "My country needs me" and answers that call to fight. I had the good fortune and opportunity to come home and to tell the truth; many soldiers, like Pat Tillman... did not have that opportunity. The truth of war is not always easy. The truth is always more heroic than the hype.

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.

Muriel Rukeyser

I think that it is a relatively good approximation to truth — which is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations — that mathematical ideas originate in empirics. But, once they are conceived, the subject begins to live a peculiar life of its own and is … governed by almost entirely aesthetical motivations. In other words, at a great distance from its empirical source, or after much "abstract" inbreeding, a mathematical subject is in danger of degeneration. Whenever this stage is reached the only remedy seems to me to be the rejuvenating return to the source: the reinjection of more or less directly empirical ideas.

John von Neumann

Ah, well, the truth is always one thing, but in a way it's the other thing, the gossip, that counts. It shows where people's hearts lie.

Paul Scott (novelist)

When affection only speaks, truth is not always there.

Thomas Middleton

The Spirit is Love expressed towards man as redeeming love, and the Spirit is truth, and the Spirit is the Holy Spirit. Redemption is inconceivable without truth and holiness.

Every failure is a step to success. Every detection of what is false directs us towards what is true: every trial exhausts some tempting form of error. Not only so; but scarcely any attempt is entirely a failure; scarcely any theory, the result of steady thought, is altogether false; no tempting form of Error is without some latent charm derived from Truth.

William Whewell

If God be God and man a creature made in image of the divine intelligence, his noblest function is the search for truth.

Generally speaking, one can say that motor intelligence contains the germs of completed reason. But it gives promise of more than reason pure and simple. From the moral as from the intellectual point of view, the child is born neither good nor bad, but master of his destiny. Now, if there is intelligence in the schemas of motor adaptation, there is also the element of play. The intentionality peculiar to motor activity is not a search for truth but the pursuit of a result, whether objective or subjective; and to succeed is not to discover a truth.

If God were to hold out enclosed in His right hand all Truth, and in His left hand just the active search for Truth, though with the condition that I should always err therein, and He should say to me: Choose! I should humbly take His left hand and say: Father! Give me this one; absolute Truth belongs to Thee alone.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

We are turning against boys and forgetting a simple truth: that the energy, competitiveness, and corporal daring of normal, decent males is responsible for much of what is right in the world.

Christina Hoff Sommers

Truth does not sit in a cave and hide like a lie. It wanders around proudly and roars loudly like a lion.

We too often bind ourselves by authorities rather than by truth.

The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it, seems to me the deepest root of all that is evil in the world.

In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled.

An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel

I can't help believing that these things that come from the subconscious mind have a sort of truth to them. It may not be a scientific truth, but it's psychological truth.

I love you and, because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies.