Truth Quotes

When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie.

~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko

I can't believe I said it out loud. The truth doesn't set you free, you know. It makes you feel awkward and embarrassed and defenseless and red in the face and horrified and petrified and vulnerable. But free? I don't feel free. I feel like shit.

~ Melina Marchetta

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

~ C.s. Lewis

There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.

~ John Steinbeck

Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody. ... [My dark side says,] I am no good... I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the Beloved. Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.

~ Henri J.m. Nouwen

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

~ James Joyce

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.

~ Jane Austen

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

~ Georges Bataille

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

~ Margaret Atwood

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have.

~ Abraham Lincoln

The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.

~ Mark Twain

You don’t believe things because they make your life better, you believe them because they’re true.

~ Veronica Roth

The best lies were always mixed with truth.

~ Sarah J. Maas

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

~ Ray Bradbury

I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.

~ Hunter S. Thompson

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. Matthew 6:34

~ Anonymous

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Nothing is ever certain.

~ Alice Sebold

With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not.

~ Sara Gruen

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

~ Doris Lessing

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

~ Albert Camus

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

Never hide things from hardcore thinkers. They get more aggravated, more provoked by confusion than the most painful truths.

~ Criss Jami

I’m not sure. But there’s something about the darkness, the stillness of this hour, I think, that creates a language of its own. There’s a strange kind of freedom in the dark; a terrifying vulnerability we allow ourselves at exactly the wrong moment, tricked by the darkness into thinking it will keep our secrets. We forget that the blackness is not a blanket; we forget that the sun will soon rise. But in the moment, at least, we feel brave enough to say things we’d never say in the light.

~ Tahereh Mafi

Muhammad has always been standing higher than the Christianity. He does not consider god as a human being and never makes himself equal to God. Muslims worship nothing except God and Muhammad is his Messenger. There is no any mystery and secret in it.

~ Leo Tolstoy

If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.

~ Marcus Aurelius

What's done cannot be undone.

~ William Shakespeare

I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.I began to ask each time: What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth? Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, disappeared or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end.And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution. And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.

~ Audre Lorde

Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can't ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.

~ Sue Monk Kidd

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

~ Leo Tolstoy

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.

~ A.w. Tozer

Nothing is real.

~ John Lennon

A thing may happen and be a total lie, another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

~ Tim O'brien

The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.

~ Brent Weeks

Sometimes people think they know you. They know a few facts about you, and they piece you together in a way that makes sense to them. And if you don't know yourself very well, you might even believe that they are right. But the truth is, that isn't you. That isn't you at all.

~ Leila Sales

In a room wherepeople unanimously maintaina conspiracy of silence,one word of truthsounds like a pistol shot.

~ Czesław Miłosz

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

~ Niels Bohr

When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool you end up looking like a moron instead.

~ Robin Hobb

Does truth have a moral?

~ Rick Riordan

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

~ Niels Bohr