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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"Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified."
"The nimble lie Is like the second-hand upon a clock; We see it fly; while the hour-hand of truth Seems to stand still, and yet it moves unseen, And wins, at last, for the clock will not strike Till it has reached the goal."
"What the philosopher is seeking is not truth, but rather the metamorphosis of the world into man."
"The unselective knowledge drive resembles the indiscriminate sexual drive--signs of vulgarity!"
"The will to truth is merely the longing for a stable world."
"The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men."
"What are man's truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable errors."
"The drive toward knowledge has a moral origin."
"Few serve truth in truth because only few have the pure will to be just, and of those again very few have the strength to be just."
"Women are constituted in such a way that all truth (regarding men, love, children, society, the purpose of life) disgusts them, and in such a way that they try to revenge themselves on anyone who opens their eyes."
"It is not when it is dangerous to tell the truth that its advocates are hardest to find, but when it is boring."
"Error has made animals into men; is truth in a position to make men into animals again?"
"The reasons for which 'this' world has been characterized as 'apparent' are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable."
"It is terrible to die of thirst in the ocean. Do you have to salt your truth so heavily that it does not even-quench thirst any more?"
"We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live - by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody could now endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error."
"Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith... include the following: that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself."
"Could truth perhaps be a woman who has reasons for not permitting her reasons to be seen? Could her name perhaps be--to speak Greek--Baubo?... Oh, those Greeks! They understood how to live: to do that it is necessary to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore the appearance, to believe in forms, in tones, in words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial--out of profundity!"
"No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes."
"The mouth may lie, alright, but the face it makes nonetheless tells the truth."
"Antithesis is the narrow gateway through which error most prefers to worm its way towards truth."
