Truth quotes
3.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside truth — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"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."
"Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible."
"Truth ... is the sovereign good of human nature."
"I search after truth, by which man never yet was harmed."
"If the truth were self-evident, eloquence would be unnecessary."
"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."
"It is a true saying that 'one falsehood easily leads to another.'"
"Oh, how great is the power of truth! which of its own power can easily defend itself against all the ingenuity and cunning and wisdom of men, and against the treacherous plots of all the world."
"Who does not know history's first law to be that an author must not dare to tell anything but the truth? And its second that he must make bold to tell the whole truth? That there must be no suggestion of partiality anywhere in his writings? Nor of malice?"
"Most marvelous and enviable is that fecundity of fancy which can adorn whatever it touches, which can invest naked fact and dry reasoning with unlooked-for beauty, make flowers bloom even on the brow of the precipice, and, when nothing better can be had, can turn the very substance of rock itself into moss and lichens. This faculty is uncomparingly the most important for the vivid and attractive exhibition of truth to the minds of men."
"Give me truth; cheat me by no illusion."
"Truth has scarce done so much good in the world as the false appearances of it have done hurt."
"Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so."
"Sweet Truth is a queen proud and mighty-- Her throne is in heaven above."
"Follow not truth too near the heels, lest it dash out thy teeth."
"All truths are not to be told."
"Truth is one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God. Awe very properly hangs about it, since it is the immovable standard and silent witness of all our memories and assertions; and the past and the future, which in our anxious life are so differently interesting and so differently dark, are one seamless garment for the truth, shining like the sun."
"Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards."
"In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn."
"Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word."
