Lying quotes
11.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside lying — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"A child lies like a grey pebble on the shore until a certain teacher picks him up and dips him in water, and suddenly you see all the colours and patterns in the dull stone, and it’s marvelous for the stone and marvelous for the teacher."
"T is the summer prime, when the noiseless air in perfumed chalice lies."
"What had been became what was and a story only works when you know the ending. When the people in it don’t seem like pretend. When you can think about that girl and how she was once upon a time, and see her. When you don’t already know the story is a lie."
"But I know a lie when I hear one."
"I want to lie down on the bench then, or better yet, on the grass, rest on something living and see if I can hear the dead underneath."
"Just a turn of the doorknob, and there lies freedom."
"Until changing economic conditions made the thing actually happen, struggling early society would hardly have guessed that woman's road to gentility would lie through doing nothing at all."
"If the Russians claim they are Socialist, this is just, I would say, a lie. They have no socialism at all. They have what I would call a state capitalism."
"He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider but it was a very corrupting business."
"Death is an inevitable cycle. But sickness before death is a symptom of resistance. Most people think they've got to get sick to die. But, you could be like the cat who chooses to get run over. Or, you could just lie down in your bed happily one night, so content and thoughtless, wanting nothing in this physical world; and just reemerge into Pure Positive Energy... You can play it out any way you choose."
"I say no to a double standard that men can roam and women must stay put at home. I say no to the fact that men are allowed to claim their sexuality and women just have to pretend that it doesn't matter to them. It's resisting poor relational arrangements. An affair is a way of saying, "No. I'm not playing by the rules." And sometimes betrayal is part of that because you deceive somebody else but you feel like you are, for the first time, being honest with yourself. Sometimes when people have affairs, they feel like they have been lying to themselves for years."
"And everyone is always saying that marriage is really hard and takes a lot of work. But the thing is, when you know that you love someone, those things don't matter. You have to push all the everyday things and the outside world away, and just enjoy knowing that this is the man who has the chest your head is meant to lie on."
"A successful life for a man or for a woman seems to me to lie in the knowledge that one has developed to the limit the capacities with which one was endowed; that one has contributed something constructive to family and friends and to a home community; that one has brought happiness wherever it was possible; that one has earned one's way in the world, has kept some friends, and need not be ashamed to face oneself honestly."
"Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us-if only we were worthy of it."
"Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music."
"In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty."
"Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all!"
"For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue."
"Wherein lies a poet's claim to originality? That he invents his incidents? No. That he was present when his episodes had their birth? No. That he was first to repeat them? No. None of these things has any value. He confers on them their only originality that has any value, and that is his way of telling them." Mark Twain "...every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written."
"If you can't know the truth, said Isolde, live the most awesome lie you can think off."
