Truth

"Some day Love shall claim his own Some day Right ascend his throne, Some day hidden Truth be known; Some day—some sweet day."

"How sweet the words of Truth, breath'd from the lips of Love."

"La vérité n'a point cet air impétueux."

"Le vrai peut quelquefois n'être pas vraisemblable."

"Truth makes on the ocean of nature no one track of light—every eye looking on finds its own."

"Arm thyself for the truth!"

"More proselytes and converts use t' accrue To false persuasions than the right and true; For error and mistake are infinite, But truth has but one way to be i' th' right."

"No words suffice the secret soul to show, For Truth denies all eloquence to Woe."

"When fiction rises pleasing to the eye, Men will believe, because they love the lie; But truth herself, if clouded with a frown, Must have some solemn proof to pass her down."

"Qui semel a veritate deflexit, hic non majore religione ad perjurium quam ad mendacium perduci consuevit."

"For truth is unwelcome, however divine."

"But what is truth? 'Twas Pilate's question put To Truth itself, that deign'd him no reply."

"Truth is elusive to those who refuse to see with both eyes."

"The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest."

"What matter that the man stands for much I cannot love—the moment he touches the realms of truth he enters my world and is my friend."

"In the same way as you know that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles: that this is sufficient, will be denied by no one whose brain is sound, and who does not go dreaming of evil spirits inspiring us with false ideas like the true. For the truth is the index of itself and of what is false."

"Truth eludes he who does not seek it with both eyes wide."

"The truth hurts, but not as much as the consequences of willful ignorance."

"A man who behaves like a damp reed towards his fellow men does not tell the truth either."

"The god of the river ordeal will admire the hearts of those who bear words of truth."

"Every step forward in our certain knowledge of nature is always a step toward the truth of things and, ultimately, toward Truth with a capital T."

"The present article is almost wholly devoted to a single problem—the definition of truth. Its task is to construct—with reference to a given language—a materially adequate and formally correct definition of the term 'true sentence. This problem, which belongs to the classical problems of philosophy, raises considerable difficulties. For although the meaning of the term 'true sentence' in colloquial language seems to be quite clear and intelligible, all attempts to define this meaning more precisely have hitherto been fruitless, and many investigations in which this term has been used and which started with apparently evident premisses have often led to paradoxes and antinomies (for which, however, a more or less satisfactory solution has been found). The concept of truth shares in this respect the fate of other analogous concepts in the domain of the semantics of language."

"I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth."

"It takes two to speak the truth — one to speak, and another to hear."

"I never gave anybody hell. I just told the truth and they think it's hell."

"It is a confusion to present the items of one sort in the idioms of another -- without awareness. For to do this is not just to cross two different sorts; it is to confuse them. It is to mistake, for example, the theory for the fact, the for the , the myth for history, the model for the thing and the metaphor for the face of literal truth."

"A man who couldn’t see truth when it tried to shoot him wouldn’t live long, and didn’t deserve to."

"When in doubt, tell the truth."

"Truth was the only daughter of Time."

"To lie is so vile, that even if it were in speaking well of godly things it would take off something from God's grace; and Truth is so excellent, that if it praises but small things they become noble."

"Man has much power of discourse which for the most part is vain and false; animals have but little, but it is useful and true, and a small truth is better than a great lie."

"Tell the truth boldly, whether it hurts or not. Never pander to weakness. If truth is too much for intelligent people and sweeps them away, let them go; the sooner the better."

"We have abundant reason to rejoice, that, in this land, the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition, and that every person may here worship God according to the dictates of his own heart.... Your prayers for my present and future felicity are received with gratitude; and I sincerely wish, Gentlemen, that you may in your social and individual capacities taste those blessings, which a gracious God bestows upon the righteous."

"There is nothing so powerful as truth — and often nothing so strange."

"Just as a vagrant accused of stealing a carrot from a field stands before a comfortably seated judge who keeps up an elegant flow of queries, comments and witticisms while the accused is unable to stammer a word, so truth stands before an intelligence which is concerned with the elegant manipulation of opinions."

"The human soul has need of truth and of freedom of expression. The need for truth requires that intellectual culture should be universally accessible, and that it should be able to be acquired in an environment neither physically remote nor psychologically alien."

"Truth without love is brutality, and love without truth is hypocrisy."

"[S]ome scientists focus on ideal beauty, others on empirical truth. My own approach, following a great tradition going back to Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, has been to use beauty as a guide to truth."

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

"The end will show the whole truth."

"Occult historians generally agree that V.V.V.V.V. signified Vi Veri Vniversum Vivus Vici ("By the force of truth I have conquered the universe"), one of the eleven magic mottoes of Aleister Crowley."

"Truth conceived as God is of course the Absolute. Truth perceived by man must always be relative, changing according to human contacts developing as men understand better each other, their circumstances and themselves."

"The identification of Truth as the goal of political action, as well as of religious devotion, and the refusal to distinguish between religion and politics, form the background to the great divergences between Gandhi's revolutionary ideas and techniques and those of other contemporary revolutionists. … Unorthodox though he might be, Gandhi fitted into the traditional pattern of the sanyassi who practices non‑attachment in the search for Truth; he was the karma yogin, the man who perfects and purifies himself through action. Yogic disciplines of all kinds are held in India to confer power over destiny, and Gandhi believed that positive action — love and nonviolence — could intangibly influence men and therefore events. With Truth as the goal and at the same time as the principle of action (for in Gandhian terms ends are emergent from means and hence virtually indistinguishable from them), there was no place in Gandhi's idea of revolution for conspiratorial methods or guerrilla activities."

"I believe that in the end the truth will conquer."

"Truth, like a woman, must be wooed and won - and this only through the purity of mind and the heart’s deep love."

"If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way."

"There are cases when the simple truth is difficult to tell, When 'tis better that the truth should not be known, So we'd better leave her lying at the bottom of the well, And agree to let both truth and well alone."

"Hell is truth seen too late—duty neglected in its season."

"Persecution cannot harm him who stands by Truth. Did not Socrates fall proudly a victim in body? Was not Paul stoned for the sake of the Truth? It is our inner selves that hurt us when we disobey it, and it kills us when we betray it."

"Truth here makes Falsehood torment lying tongues."