Famous Quotes & Sayings

Phyllis Bottome

Truth is its own defense.

Phyllis Bottome

Truth, though it has many disadvantages, is at least changeless. You can always find it where you left it.

Phyllis Rose

When you realize how hard it is to know the truth about yourself, you understand that even the most exhaustive and well-meaning autobiography, determined to tell the truth, represents, at best, a guess. There have been times in my life when I felt incredibly happy. Life was full. I seemed productive. Then I thought,"Am I really happy or am I merely masking a deep depression with frantic activity?" If I don't know such basic things about myself, who does?

Philip Pullman

I told him I was going to betray you, and betray Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness; he looked so deep I felt sure he'd see the truth. But I lied too well. I was lying with every nerve and fiber and everything I'd ever done...I wanted him to find no good in me, and he didn't. There is none.

Rabindranath Tagore

Truth reveals itself in beauty.

Rabindranath Tagore

Truth looks tawdry when she is overdressed.

Rabindranath Tagore

Compliments win friends, honesty loses them.

Rabindranath Tagore

The false can never grow into truth by growing in power.

Pythagoras

Truth is to be sought with a mind purified from the passions of the body. Having overcome evil things, thou shalt experience the union of the union mortal divinity with the mortal man.

Joss Whedon

Half of writing history is hiding the truth.

Konrad Lorenz

Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.

Kenneth Branagh

Truth is like most opinions - best unexpressed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

How much more the seeker of abstract truth, who needs periods of isolation, and rapt concentration, and almost a going out of thebody to think!

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The nobler the truth or sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

[on Thoreau:] For not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of men, but homage solely to truth itself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

You need not fear to handle the truth roughly. She is no invalid.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truth has already ceased to be itself if polemically said.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

No man has a right perception of any truth, who has not been reacted on by it, so as to be ready to be its martyr.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest homage to truth is to use it.

Lily Tomlin

The best mind-altering drug is the truth.

Laurie Halse Anderson

I have survived. I am here. Confused, screwed up, but here. So, how can I find my way? Is there a chain saw of the soul, an ax I can take to my memories or fears?

Tertullian

The first reaction to truth is hatred.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid - in which case all comment is superfluous - or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.

Emanuel Swedenborg

It is no proof of a man's understanding to be able to affirm whatever he pleases; but to be able to discern that what is true is true, and that what is false is false, this is the mark and character of intelligence.

Elizabeth Fry

The confusion and undesigned inaccuracy so often to be observed in conversation, especially in that of uneducated persons, proves that truth needs to be cultivated as a talent, as well as recommended as a virtue.

John Burroughs

One goes to Nature only for hints and half-truths. Her facts are crude until you have absorbed them or translated them ... It is not so much what we see as what the thing seen suggests.

John Bunyan

Old truths are always new to us, if they come with the smell of heaven upon them.

Louis Agassiz

Every great scientific truth goes through three states: first, people say it conflicts with the Bible; next, they say it has been discovered before; lastly, they say they always believed it.

Madeleine L'Engle

No matter how true I believe what I am writing to be, if the reader cannot also participate in that truth, then I have failed.

Lysander Spooner

For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be a falsehood, or falsehood a truth.

John Florio

From the physician and lawyer keep not the truth hidden.