Truth and lie
Notion of truth as introduced by Hegel
Memorable quotes
- Facts are stubborn things. -- John Adams
- An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it
contains. -- Henri-Frédéric Amiel
- The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousand-fold.
-- Aristotle
- No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth.
-- Francis Bacon
- Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion. -- Francis Bacon
- As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
-- Josh Billings
- Every thing possible to be believd is an image of truth. -- William Blake
- There are two kinds of truth, small truth and great truth. You can recognize
a small truth, because its opposite is falsehood. The opposite of a great truth
is another great truth. -- Niels Bohr
- Art remains the one way possible of speaking truth. -- Robert Browning
- Truth makes on the ocean of nature no one track of light; every eye, looking
on, finds its own. -- Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton
- Truth is always strange — stranger than fiction. -- George Byron
- Our minds possess by nature an insatiable desire to know the truth. --
Marcus
Tullius Cicero
- Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of
an error, lest you get your brains kicked out. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Only in mans imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable
existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
-- Joseph Conrad
- If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once
in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. -- René Descartes
- How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever
remains, however improbable, must be the truth? -- Arthur Conan Doyle
- The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted
to remain children all our lives. -- Albert Einstein
- Experience alone can decide on truth. -- Albert Einstein
- Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked
by the laughter of the gods. -- Albert Einstein
- If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor. --
Albert
Einstein
- Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men. --
Ralph Waldo Emerson
- The finest and noblest ground on which people can live is truth; the real with
the real; a ground on which nothing is assumed. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- The truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought. -- Richard P.
Feynman
- From error to error one discovers the entire truth. -- Sigmund Freud
- Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. -- Sigmund Freud
- Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out
of favour. -- Robert Frost
- Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and
to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to
act according to his own view of truth. -- Mahatma Gandhi
- All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to
discover them. -- Galileo Galilei
- An idea is a putting truth in check-mate. -- José Ortega Y Gasset
- The scholar seeks truth, the artist finds. -- André Gide
- Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. -- André
Gide
- Nothing is more damaging to the truth than an old error. -- Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe
- The first and last thing required of genius is the love of truth. -- Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe
- Truth is a torch but a tremendous one. That is why we hurry past it, shielding
our eyes, indeed, in fear of getting burned. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- It is easier to perceive error than to find truth, for the former lies on the
surface and is easily seen, while the latter lies in the depth, where few are willing
to search for it. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
- Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. -- Thomas
Huxley
- The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
-- William James
- Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes
what is wrong. -- Thomas Jefferson
- I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the hearts affections and the truth
of imagination. -- John Keats
- Let us learn to dream, gentlemen; then we shall perhaps find the truth. --
Friedrich Kekulé
- We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda, it is a form of truth.
-- John Fitzgerald Kennedy
- The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived,
and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. -- John
Fitzgerald Kennedy
- I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion
without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental
truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him. -- Abraham Lincoln
- Who dares
To say that he alone has found the truth?. -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open
the way to the next better one. -- Konrad Lorenz
- Truth certainly would do well enough, if she were once left to shift for herself...She
is not taught by laws, nor has she any need of force, to procure her entrance into
the minds of men. -- John Locke
- The greatest homage we can pay to truth, is to use it. -- James Russell
Lowell
- A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth. -- Thomas Mann
- Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams. --
W. Somerset Maugham
- The man who boasts that he habitually tells the truth is simply a man with no
respect for it. It is not a thing to be thrown about loosely, like small change;
it is something to be cherished and hoarded and disbursed only when absolutely necessary.
The smallest atom of truth represents some mans bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seekers grave upon some lonely ash-dump
and a soul roasting in Hell. -- H. L. Mencken
- I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better
to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.
-- H. L. Mencken
- Truth would quickly cease to become stranger than fiction, once we got as used
to it. -- H. L. Mencken
- The gulf between knowledge and truth is infinite. -- Henry Miller
- Perception is a prediction, not a truth. -- Ross Mooney
- I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been
only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding
a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth
lay all undiscovered before me. -- Isaac Newton
- What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms:
in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified,
transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be
fixed, canonical, and binding. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. -- Friedrich
Nietzsche
- Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth—to see it like it is, and
tell it like it is—to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth.
-- Richard Nixon
- Give me the fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections.
You can keep your sterile truth for yourself. -- Vilfredo Pareto
- Imagination is the deceptive part in man, the mistress of error and falsehood.
-- Blaise Pascal
- We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.
-- Pablo Picasso
- The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, Im looking for the truth."
and so it goes away. Puzzling. -- Robert Pirsig
- Facts are stupid things. -- Ronald Reagan
- The truth is cruel, but it can be loved and it makes free those who have loved
it. -- George Santayana
- I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts
in human heads. -- George Santayana
- All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second,
it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. --
Arthur Schopenhauer
- Time discovers truth. -- Lucius Seneca
- All great truths begin as blasphemies. -- George Bernard Shaw
- Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth
appear so. -- George Bernard Shaw
- Truth comes as conqueror only to those who have lost the art of receiving it
as friend. -- Rabindranath Tagore
- It takes two to speak the truth — one to speak, and another to hear. --
Henry David Thoreau
- I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest
complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most
obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions
which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught
to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their
lives. -- Leo Tolstoy
- Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it. -- Mark Twain
- Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick
to possibilities; Truth isnt. -- Mark Twain
- When in doubt, tell the truth. -- Mark Twain
- It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our
taste. -- John Tyndall
- In all science, error precedes the truth, and it is better it should go first
than last. -- Hugh Walpole
- Heresies are experiments in mans unsatisfied search for truth. -- H. G.
Wells
- Everyone wishes to have truth on his side, but not everyone wishes to be on
the side of truth. -- Richard Whately
- Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may not tomorrow be demonstrated truth.
-- Alfred North Whitehead
- There are no whole truths: All truths are half-truths. -- Alfred North Whitehead
- There are no whole truths. All truths are half truths. It is trying to treat
them as whole truths that plays the devil. -- Oscar Wilde
- The truth is rarely pure and never simple. -- Oscar Wilde
- Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he
will tell you the truth. -- Oscar Wilde
- The truth is more important than the facts. -- Frank Lloyd Wright
- If a man is in too big a hurry to give up an error he is liable to give up some
truth with it. -- Wilbur Wright
Etc
- A man should be upright, not be kept upright. Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor,
philosopher. Meditations, bk. 3, sct. 5.
- It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tost upon the
sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and
the adventures thereof below: but no pleasure is comparable to standing upon
the vantage ground of truth . . . and to see the errors, and wanderings, and
mists, and tempests, in the vale below.
Francis Bacon, English philosopher, essayist, statesman. Essays, Of Truth.
- One must live the way one thinks or end up thinking the way one has lived.
Paul Bourget, French novelist. Le Démon de Midi, Conclusion.
- Truth indeed rather alleviates than hurts, and will always bear up against
falsehood, as oil does above water.
Miguel de Cervantes, Spanish author. Don Quixote, pt. 2, bk. 5, ch. 10.
- The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. Ignorance may deride
it. But in the end, there it is.
Winston Churchill
- Since an intelligence common to us all makes things known to us and formulates
them in our minds, honorable actions are ascribed by us to virtue, and dishonorable
actions to vice; and only a madman would conclude that these judgments are matters
of opinion, and not fixed by nature.
Cicero, Roman orator, philosopher. De Legibus, bk. 1, ch. 16, sct. 45.
- You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity.
It is his clear duty.
Joseph Conrad, Polish-born English novelist. A Personal Record, A Familiar Preface.
- A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognize
truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for
himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer
love, and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his
impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like
an animal. And it all comes from lying - lying to others and to yourself.
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky, Russian author.
- The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
Nadine Gordimer, South African author. A Bolter and the Invincible Summer, in
London Magazine.
- One lie does not cost you one truth, but the truth. --
Friedrich Hebbel
- Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may
kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.
--
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senior, U.S. writer, physician. The Professor at the
Breakfast Table, ch. 5.
- Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth.
--
Thomas Huxley (1825-1895)
- Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom. -- Thomas Jefferson
- Never suppose that in any possible situation or under any circumstances
that it is best for you to do a dishonorable thing however slightly so it may
appear to you... Encourage all your virtuous dispositions, and exercise them
whenever an opportunity arises, being assured that they will gain strength by
exercise ... and that exercise will make them habitual... -- Thomas
Jefferson
- Though you cannot see, when you take one step, what will be the next, yet
follow truth, justice, and plain dealing, and never fear their leading you out
of [any difficult situation] in the easiest manner possible...
Thomas Jefferson, U.S. president, scholar, and statesman.
- Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity
is dangerous and dreadful. --
Samuel Johnson, English author, lexicographer. The astronomer, in The History
of Rasselas, ch. 41.
- For those to whom much is given, much is required. And when at some future
date the high court of history sits in judgment on each of us, recording whether
in our brief span of service we fulfilled our responsibilities to the state,
our success or failure, in whatever office we hold, will be measured by the
answers to four questions: First, were we truly men of courage...Second, were
we truly men of judgement...Third, were we truly men of integrity...Finally,
were we truly men of dedication?
John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Speech to the Massachusetts State Legislature.
- I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion
without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the
accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him. --
Abraham Lincoln
- I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither
right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.
Martin Luther (1483-1546), German leader of the Protestant Reformation. Speech,
18 April 1521, at the Diet of Worms, Germany, where he was summoned by the Holy
Roman Emperor Charles V in an attempt to effect a conciliation between Luther
and the established Church. The words, Here I stand, I can do no other-added
in Luther's handwriting to the original printed version of the speech-were later
inscribed on the monument to Luther at Worms: Hier steh' ich, ich kann nicht
anders.
- The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he
would never be found out.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, English historian, author, and statesman. Quoted
in Reader's Digest, August 1992.
- I have been asked what I mean by my word of honor. I will tell you. Place
me behind prison walls - walls of stone ever so high, ever so thick, reaching
ever so far into the ground - there is the possibility that in some way or another
I may escape; but stand me on the floor and draw a chalk line around me and
have me give my word of honor never to cross it. Can I get out of the circle?
No. Never! I'd die first!
Karl G. Maeser.
- Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change
with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there
and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will. Integrity is not
a search for the rewards of integrity. Maybe all you can ever get for it is
the largest kick in the ass the world can provide. It is not supposed to be
a productive asset.
John D. MacDonald, spoken by the character Travis McGee.
- True education seeks to make men and women not only good mathematicians,
proficient linguists, profound scientists, or brilliant literary lights, but
also honest men and women with virtue, temperance, and brotherly love.
David O. McKay.
- What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon
it and lives by it?
Henry Miller, U.S. author. Tropic of Capricorn.
- If everyone were clothed with integrity, if every heart were just, frank,
kindly, the other virtues would be well-nigh useless, since their chief purpose
is to make us bear with patience the injustice of our fellows.
Molière [Jean Baptiste Poquelin]. Le Misanthrope, act V, sc. i.
- It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to
himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists
in professing to believe what he does not believe.
Thomas Paine, Anglo-American political theorist, writer. The Age of Reason,
pt. 1, The Author's Profession of Faith.
- Truth is. Belief is not required. --
Gerry Roston
- To tell a falsehood is like the cut of a saber; for though the wound may
heal, the scar of it will remain.
Saadi (1184-1291)
- Honor has not to be won; it must only not be lost. --
Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher. Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 1, Aphorisms
on the Wisdom of Life, ch. 4.
- The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The
hard part is doing it.
General H. Norman Schwarzkopf
- The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that
he cannot believe anyone else.
George Bernard Shaw, British author.
- I ever will profess myself the greatest friend to those whose actions best
correspond with their doctrine; which, I am sorry to say, is too seldom the
case amongst those nations who pretend most to civilization.
Captain J. G. Stedman, British soldier, author, artist. Narrative of a Five
Years' Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, ch. 24.
- Your character is your destiny.
Eugene Sullivan, judge.
- Every one wishes to have truth on his side, but it is not every one that
sincerely wishes to be on the side of truth.
Richard Whately
- The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious
if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility! Oscar Wilde,
Anglo-Irish playwright, author. Algernon, in The Importance of Being Earnest,
act 1.
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