Truth Quotes

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of... We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart." - Blaise Pascal

For usually people resist as long as they can to dismiss the fool they harbor in their bosom, they resist to confess a major mistake or to admit a truth that makes them despair.

We say love is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage around his eyes. Blind - yes, because he does not see what he does not like; but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love for finding what he seeks, and only that.

Nonsense is nonsense whether it rhymes or not, just as bad half-pennies are good for nothing whether they jingle or lie quiet.

If in this hell of a world one can bring a little joy and peace even for a day into the heart of a single person, that much alone is true; this I have learnt after suffering all my life; all else is mere moonshine.

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.

The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.

For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

We like to be deceived.

Who has magnificent self-confidenceAnd fears nothing that exists?The man who has attained to truthAnd lives free of error.

Ten truths must you find during the day; otherwise will you seek truth during the night, and your soul will have been hungry.

Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.

It is no use dealing with illusions and make-believes. We must look at the facts. The world ... is too dangerous for anyone to be able to afford to nurse illusions. We must look at realities.

Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.

Dignity is a mask we wear to hide our ignorance.

Eternal truth needs a human language that alters with the spirit of the times.

Nature doesn't make long speeches.

A poet must never make a statement simply because it sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true." - W. H. Auden"A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness...It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.

The influence exercised over the human mind by apt analogies is and has always been immense. Whether they translate an established truth into simple language or whether they adventurously aspire to reveal the unknown, they are among the most formidable weapons of the rhetorician.

I am not at all cynical, I have merely got experience, which, however, is very much the same thing.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

There is nothing true anywhere, The true is nowhere to be seen; If you say you see the true, This seeing is not the true one.

No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.

We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause.

You can hardly convince a man of an error in a lifetime, but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow. If he is not convinced, his grandchildren may be.

Authenticity is about being true to who you are, even when everyone around you wants you to be someone else

Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them. Become a child again, even now... You have gone wrong. Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.

It is the fate of every truth to be an object of ridicule when it is first acclaimed.

In the mountains of truth, you never climb in vain.

There is none who does not lie hourly in the respect he pays to false appearance.

It's hard because people think they have something to lose and the truth is they have everything to gain in trying to love somebody.

...the reason for [this age's] anxiety and unrest is because in one direction, 'truth' increases in scope and quantity - via science and technology - while in the other, certainty and confidence steadily decline. Our age is a master in developing truths while being wholly indifferent to certitude. It lacks confidence in the good.

The true philosopher and the true poet are one,and a beauty, which is truth,and a truth, which is beauty,is the aim of both.

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

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

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles' Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable inquiry even though he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry with us the Jocasta in our hearts, who begs Oedipus, for God's sake, not to inquire further.

TRUTH may hurt temporarily, but LIES leave marks permanently.

Mountain gorses, do ye teach us. . . .That the wisest word man reachesIs the humblest he can speak?

Lies circle the earth while Truth is still trying to put on its shoes.

The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance.

Would that I could discover truth as easily as I can uncover falsehood.

Certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all.

We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty. We seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We cannot but desire truth and happiness, and are incapable of certainty or happiness.

But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is one of knowing whether two and two do make four

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

Why not simply honor your parents, love your children, help your brothers and sisters, be faithful to your friends, care for your mate with devotion, complete your work cooperatively and joyfully, assume responsibility for problems, practice virtue without first demanding it of others, understand the highest truths yet retain an ordinary manner? That would be true clarity, true simplicity, true mastery.

In politics practically everything you hear is scandal, and besides, the funny thing is that the things they are whispering ain't half has bad as the things they have been saying right out loud.

To me defeat in anything is merely temporary. Defeat simply tells me that something is wrong in my doing; it is a path leading to success and truth.

Is not the truth the truth?

Truth is no harlot who throws her arms round the neck of him who does not desire her; on the contrary, she is so coy a beauty that even the man who sacrifices everything to her can still not be certain of her favors.

Even when tied in a thousand knots, the string is still but one.

There is nothing so delightful as the hearing, or the speaking of truth. For this reason, there is no conversation so agreeable as that of the man of integrity, who hears without any intention to betray, and speaks without any intention to deceive.

It is a magnificent feeling to recognize the unity of complex phenomena which appear to be things quite apart from the direct visible truth.

If Language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant. If what is said is not what is meant, then what ought to be done, remains undone.

I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.