Truth

"Adevărul se spune glumind."

"Totta puhuap pitiä, vaikkei tulis kun sana päiväs. (Hollola) (PLK)"

"Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived."

"Fire is to represent truth because it destroys all sophistry and lies; and the mask is for lying and falsehood which conceal truth."

"In order to be effective truth must penetrate like an arrow — and that is likely to hurt."

"[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."

"Violent zeal for truth hath an hundred to one odds to be either petulancy, ambition, or pride."

"If you want truth to go round the world you must hire an express train to pull it. But if you want a lie to go round the world, it will fly; it is light as a feather and a breath will carry it."

"My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth there's hardly any difference."

"“The Redhead is so careful of the truth,” observed one writer of MacPhail, “he used it very sparingly.”"

"I dwell on this prospect with every satisfaction which an ardent love for my Country can inspire: since there is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity. Since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained."

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

"There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil."

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

"The word "truth" applies to a man's dignity."

"Happy is the man that has found wisdom, and the man that gets discernment, for having it as gain is better than having silver as gain and having it as produce than gold itself. It is more precious than corals, and all other delights of yours cannot be made equal to it. Length of days is in its right hand; in its left hand there are riches and glory. Its ways are ways of pleasantness, and all its roadways are peace. It is a tree of life to those taking hold of it, and those keeping fast hold of it are to be called happy."

"Tell a lie and then tell the truth: it will be considered a lie."

"Truth is such a poor competitor in the marketplace of ideas."

"Indeed, it would probably be true to say that the fruit of metaphysical thought is not knowledge but understanding."

"Boris asked him to tell them how and where he got his wound. This pleased Rostov and he began talking about it, and as he went on became more and more animated. He told them of his Schon Grabern affair, just as those who have taken part in a battle generally do describe it, that is, as they would like it to have been, as they have heard it described by others, and as sounds well, but not at all as it really was. Rostov was a truthful young man and would on no account have told a deliberate lie. He began his story meaning to tell everything just as it happened, but imperceptibly, involuntarily, and inevitably he lapsed into falsehood. If he had told the truth to his hearers — who like himself had often heard stories of attacks and had formed a definite idea of what an attack was and were expecting to hear just such a story — they would either not have believed him or, still worse, would have thought that Rostov was himself to blame since what generally happens to the narrators of cavalry attacks had not happened to him. He could not tell them simply that everyone went at a trot and that he fell off his horse and sprained his arm and then ran as hard as he could from a Frenchman into the wood. Besides, to tell everything as it really happened, it would have been necessary to make an effort of will to tell only what happened. It is very difficult to tell the truth, and young people are rarely capable of it. His hearers expected a story of how beside himself and all aflame with excitement, he had flown like a storm at the square, cut his way in, slashed right and left, how his saber had tasted flesh and he had fallen exhausted, and so on. And so he told them all that."

"“What’s obvious,” Morrell observed, “isn’t always true.”"

"Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it."

"Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness; and this truth is in itself so excellent that, even when it dwells on humble and lowly matters, it is still infinitely above uncertainty and lies, disguised in high and lofty discourses; because in our minds, even if lying should be their fifth element, this does not prevent that the truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects, though not of wandering wits. But you who live in dreams are better pleased by the sophistical reasons and frauds of wits in great and uncertain things, than by those reasons which are certain and natural and not so far above us."

"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."

"Flattering as it may be to the human mind, & truly honorable as it is to receive from our fellow citizens testimonies of approbation for exertions to promote the public welfare; it is not less pleasing to know that the milder virtues of the heart are highly respected by a society whose liberal principles must be founded in the immediate laws of truth and justice."

"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."

"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."

"All truths wait in all things, They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it, They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon, The insignificant is as big to me as any, (What is less or more than a touch?) Logic and sermons never convince, The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul. (Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so, Only what nobody denies is so.)"

"As the [nineteenth] century progressed, we find that truth itself tended to be regarded no longer as eternal and changeless but as time-dependent. Attention came to be focused on the historical process rather than on an eternally valid, unchanging order of things. In other words, interest was transferred from the 'thing completed' to the genetic process, that is, from 'being' to 'becoming'. This radically new point of view received its extreme formulation in the philosophy of the 'modern Heraclitus', Henri Bergson... for whom ultimate reality was neither 'being' nor 'being changed' but the continual process of 'change' itself, which he called la durée."

"You can't handle the truth."

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

"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."

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