Truth Quotes

In a world where it is so easy to neglect, deny, corrupt and suppress the truth, the scientist may find his discipline severe. For him, truth is so seldom the sudden light that shows new order and beauty; more often, truth is the uncharted rock that sinks his ship in the dark.

~ John Cornforth

To me, 'beauty' means to be natural, creative, honest - to say the truth.

~ Nawal El-Saadawi

He who seeks truth shall find beauty. He who seeks beauty shall find vanity. He who seeks order shall find gratification. He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed. He who considers himself the servant of his fellow beings shall find the joy of self-expression. He who seeks self-expression shall fall into the pit of arrogance.

~ Moshe Safdie

We know the seductive alchemy of art. To transform private anguish into a narrative of truth, if not beauty; to make sense where there was none; to bring order out of chaos - these are the promises art makes.

~ Kathryn Harrison

When I was young my Father used to tell me that the two most worthwhile pursuits in life were the pursuit of truth and of beauty and I believe that Alfred Nobel must have felt much the same when he gave these prizes for literature and the sciences.

~ Frederick Sanger

Editing yourself is like an irksome coin toss. You've got to strip yourself of super ego and operate from the id. Maybe I've got my Freud mixed up. It's just hard to trade a beauty shot for the performance with truth and a brightly lit zit.

~ Vera Farmiga

If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?

~ Lily Tomlin

The truth, the absolute truth, is that the chief beauty for the theatre consists in fine bodily proportions.

~ Sarah Bernhardt

Actually being funny is mostly telling the truth about things.

~ Bernard Sahlins

I've thought for the last decade or so, the only actual place raw truth was seeping through in newspapers was on the Comics Pages. They were able to pull off intelligent social comment, pure truths not found elsewhere in the news pages, and had the ability to make it all funny, entertaining, and pertinent.

~ Elayne Boosler

I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There's something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.

~ Kara Walker

I am interested in shows that are not out-and-out gag fests: you see the truth of a broken heart behind them. That is what life is like: it's really funny, you see funny things as soon as you step out of the room, but underneath that is a whole bag of broken hearts. It's that real pain and that real hilarity that makes life so intriguing.

~ Tamsin Greig

You shouldn't get too close to the truth, because then maybe you stop being funny.

~ Bob Newhart

There's a funny thing about fame. The truth is you run as fast as you can towards it because it's everything you want. Not just the fame but what it represents, meaning work, meaning opportunity. And then you get there, and it's shocking how immediately you become enveloped in this world that is incredibly restricting.

~ George Clooney

I will say this about the truth - that it's one of those crisis rules, whether you are a client or someone who's living their life just every day - is that the truth has a funny way of not going away, and telling the truth is extremely important in dealing with any problem or crisis.

~ Judy Smith

The heroines in 'That's What She Said' are flawed, messy, damaged, hilarious and culpable and not really concerned about being acceptable to the audience in any traditional sense, which for me is what makes them all the more gorgeous. And the fearless truth of that is what makes it funny.

~ Carrie Preston

It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

When I was a young person I went to the university and I learned a rational language, to think with the left side of the brain. But in the right side of the brain you have intuition and imagination. Words are not the truth; they indicate the way to go, but you need to go alone, in silence. Symbols have a language that kills the words.

~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

~ C. S. Lewis

I have always felt that the truth is prophetic, and that if you describe precisely what you see and give it life with your imagination, then what you write ought to have lasting value, no matter what the mood of your prose.

~ Paul Theroux

The novel and the film of 'The Color Purple' are both works of the imagination that make claim to historical truth.

~ Darryl Pinckney

I know there's been a lot that's been said about animated voice work, as though it's 'you can do this in your jeans and there's no camera and no pressure there. It's no big deal. It's easy.' The truth is, it's really a great test: how deep is your ability is to access your imagination?

~ Nicolas Cage

There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized.

~ Isabel Allende

A good comic explores the imagination, but it's always got to have those notes of truth running through it.

~ Michael Pena

If the reporter has killed our imagination with his truth, he threatens our life with his lies.

~ Karl Kraus

Any acting is a stretch of the imagination. That's your job. Acting is truth in imaginary circumstances. Acting with green screen or a motion capture stage, you're striving for absolute truth in absolutely imaginary circumstances.

~ Sam Worthington

An idea is a putting truth in check-mate.

~ José Ortega Y Gasset

The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.

~ Flannery O'connor

I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.

~ Adlai E. Stevenson

The appalling reality in American politics today is that, when ideology and money mix, truth is a mere inconvenience.

~ David Horsey

It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.

~ Henry Ward Beecher

The second one, the joint Truth and Friendship Commission, which we started now with Indonesia, that is the one that has been criticized; its terms of reference call for providing amnesty for those who cooperate in telling the truth. It does not lead to prosecution.

~ José Ramos-Horta

I grew up feeling 'less than.' I was the sad, shy child hiding in the hall closet beneath coats. I'd wait for my grandmother's voice to call, 'Jewell, Jewell.' I was lost, waiting to be found. I thought being found, I'd be happier, better. All the while, I read stories. Stories with both truth and lies.

~ Jewell Parker Rhodes

The sad truth is that most of my husbands turned out to be convincing liars.

~ Joan Collins

We have but one permanent home: heaven - that's still the old truth that we always have to re-learn - and it's only through the impact of sad experiences that we assimilate it.

~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

I feel sad when I realize how much truth is being changed or obscured in the American media.

~ Sharon Stone

The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.

~ Henry Louis Gates

A lot of country music is sad. I think most art comes out of poverty and hard times. It applies to music. Three chords and the truth - that's what a country song is. There is a lot of heartache in the world.

~ Willie Nelson

The sad truth for American actors is that they really have no control whatsoever over the material that they get, or can do, particularly actresses. And if you're over 40 and you're an actress, forget it.

~ James Gray

I survived turning 60, I was not thrilled to turn 61, I was less thrilled to turn 62, I didn't much like being 63, I loathed being 64, and I will hate being 65. I don't let on about such things in person; in person, I am cheerful and Pollyanna-ish. But the honest truth is that it's sad to be over 60.

~ Nora Ephron