Truth Quotes

I examined the poets, and I look on them as people whose talent overawes both themselves and others, people who present themselves as wise men and are taken as such, when they are nothing of the sort.From poets, I moved to artists. No one was more ignorant about the arts than I; no one was more convinced that artists possessed really beautiful secrets. However, I noticed that their condition was no better than that of the poets and that both of them have the same misconceptions. Because the most skillful among them excel in their specialty, they look upon themselves as the wisest of men. In my eyes, this presumption completely tarnished their knowledge. As a result, putting myself in the place of the oracle and asking myself what I would prefer to be — what I was or what they were, to know what they have learned or to know that I know nothing — I replied to myself and to the god: I wish to remain who I am.We do not know — neither the sophists, nor the orators, nor the artists, nor I— what the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are. But there is this difference between us: although these people know nothing, they all believe they know something; whereas, I, if I know nothing, at least have no doubts about it. As a result, all this superiority in wisdom which the oracle has attributed to me reduces itself to the single point that I am strongly convinced that I am ignorant of what I do not know.

~ Socrates

You're so easy to read but the book is boring me.

~ Emilie Autumn

I believe in the fundamental truth of all great religions of the world.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

~ Banksy

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.

~ Khaled Hosseini

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with joy are goodness, beauty, and truth.

~ Albert Einstein

It's partly true, too, but it isn't all true. People always think something's all true.

~ J.d. Salinger

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.

~ Philip Roth

To be great, be whole;Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.Be whole in everything. Put all you areInto the smallest thing you do.So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendorBecause it blooms up above.

~ Fernando Pessoa

That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work.

~ David Foster Wallace

I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.

~ Al Pacino

The truth is always an insult or a joke, lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone's comfort

~ Katherine Dunn

An acquaintance merely enjoys your company, a fair-weather companion flatters when all is well, a true friend has your best interests at heart and the pluck to tell you what you need to hear.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

Most of what I say is complete truth. My edit button is broken.

~ Myra Mcentire

You should not honor men more than truth.

~ Plato

I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.

~ Hermann Hesse

I found power in accepting the truth of who I am. It may not be a truth that others can accept, but I cannot live any other way. How would it be to live a lie every minute of your life.

~ Alison Goodman

My bullshit meter is reading that as 'false'.

~ Charlaine Harris

Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they're used.

~ Max Brooks

The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject... And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.

~ Seneca

If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don't like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.

~ Joss Whedon

Words are like eggs dropped from great heights, you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall.

~ Jodi Picoult

One lie has the power to tarnish a thousand truths.

~ Al David

A man will never love you or treat you as well as a store. If a man doesn’t fit, you can’t exchange him seven days later for a gorgeous cashmere sweater. And a store always smells good. A store can awaken a lust for things you never even knew you needed. And when your fingers first grasp those shiny, new bags…

~ Sophie Kinsella

The truth may not set you free, but used carefully, it can confuse the hell out of your enemies.

~ Laurell K. Hamilton

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.

~ Richard Dawkins

In the end, Leck should have stuck to his lies. For it was the truth he almost told that killed him.

~ Kristin Cashore

I was in my bed trying to figure out why sometimes you can wake up and go back to sleep and other times you can't

~ Stephen Chbosky

The single best thing about coming out of the closet is that nobody can insult you by telling you what you've just told them.

~ Rachel Maddow

[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.

~ Clive Barker

In the calculus of feelings, you never really know how one person's absence will affect you more than another's.

~ Gayle Forman

What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is – I repeat it – a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.

~ Charlotte Brontë

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

~ George Orwell

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

~ Khaled Hosseini

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.

~ Meister Eckhart