Famous Quotes & Sayings

William Blake

Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.

Werner Heisenberg

You may object that by speaking of simplicity and beauty I am introducing aesthetic criteria of truth, and I frankly admit that I am strongly attracted by the simplicity and beauty of mathematical schemes which nature presents us. You must have felt this too: the almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationship, which nature suddenly spreads out before us.

Werner Heisenberg

It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.

Werner Herzog

Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

Samuel Richardson

A departure from the truth was hardly ever known to be a single one.

Samuel Butler

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.

Samuel Butler

There is no such source of error as the pursuit of absolute truth.

Samuel Butler

There is no permanent absolute unchangeable truth; what we should pursue is the most convenient arrangement of our ideas.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There is small chance of truth at the goal, where there is not childlike humility at the starting-post.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

To all new truths, or renovation of old truths, it must be as in the ark between the destroyed and the about-to-be renovated world. The raven must be sent out before the dove, and ominous controversy must precede peace and the olive wreath.

Samuel Beckett

What is more true than anything else? To swim is true and to sink is true. One cannot speak any more of being, one must speak onlyof the mess.

Salman Rushdie

Because I've always felt, whether the fatwa or whatever, the writer's great weapon is the truth and integrity of his voice. And as long as what you're saying is what you truly, honestly believe to be the case, then whatever the consequences, that's fine. That's an honorable position.

W. H. Auden

The most important truths are likely to be those which society at that time least wants to hear.

William Cowper

All truth is precious, if not all divine; and what dilates the powers must needs refine.

William Cowper

Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true,- A truth the brilliant Frenchman never knew.

William Cowper

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

William Cowper

Ceremony leads her bigots forth, prepared to fight for shadows of no worth. While truths, on which eternal things depend, can hardly find a single friend.

William Cowper

And diff'ring judgments serve but to declare that truth lies somewhere, if we knew but where.

William Cowper

A fool must now and then be right, by chance

Ursula K. Le Guin

Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

Rodney Dangerfield

I can't figure women out. They put on makeup for three hours. They wear things that make them smaller. Things that make them bigger. Then they meet a man and they want truth.

Robertson Davies

You never see what you want to see, forever playing to the gallery.

Robert Penn Warren

For the truth is a terrible thing.

Robert M. Pirsig

Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.

Robert M. Pirsig

The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are.

Robert M. Pirsig

I've wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it, and yet we didn't see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned perhaps into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was just boring hinterland. It was a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away. I'm looking for the truth." And so it goes away. Puzzling.

Robert M. Pirsig

The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.

Robert Louis Stevenson

After all, the commonplaces are the great poetic truths.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Truth in spirit, not truth to the letter, is the true veracity.

Robert Farrar Capon

The truth that makes us free is always ticking away like a time-bomb in the basement of everybody's church.

Walt Whitman

The truth is simple. If it was complicated, everyone would understand it.

Roger Scruton

When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.