Famous Quotes & Sayings

Brooks Atkinson

It seems not to have been written. It is the quintessence of life. It is the basic truth.

Brock Yates

As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. But only when the reality has not been subsumed by foamy legends and fantasies that radiate outward from the actual event.

Edward Young

Truth never was indebted to a lie

Edmund Burke

Fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.

Edmund Burke

Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever; but, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure, that he may speak it the longer.

Denise Levertov

I learn to affirm Truth's light at strange turns of the mind's road, wrong turns that lead over the border into wonder....

Denis Waitley

The truth is, you don't break a bad habit; you replace it with a good one.

Edward Snowden

Truth is coming and it cannot be stopped.

Edward Everett

Truth travels down from the heights of philosophy to the humblest walks of life, and up from the simplest perceptions of an awakened intellect to the discoveries which almost change the face of the world. At every stage of its progress it is genial, luminous, creative.

Edgar Degas

Truth is never ugly when one can find in it what one needs.

Eliza Farnham

The ultimate aim of the human mind, in all its efforts, is to become acquainted with Truth.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

truth outlives pain, as the soul does life.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Certainly, truth should be strenuous and bold; but the strongest things are not always the noisiest, as any one may see who compares scolding with logic.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Truth is new, as well as old. It has new forms; and where you may find a new statement, an earnest statement, you may conclude that by the law of progress it is more likely to be a correct statement than that which has been repeated for ages by the lips of tradition.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

The excellence and inspiration of truth is in the pursuit, not in the mere having of it. The pursuit of all truth is a kind of gymnastics; a man swings from one truth with higher strength to gain another. The continual glory is the possibility opening before us.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

No great truth bursts upon man without having its hemisphere of darkness and sorrow.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Truth is poetry; it is the grandest poetry.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

If ever I said in grief or pride, I'd tired of honest things, I lied.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Not Truth, but Faith it is that keeps the world alive.

Benjamin Franklin

Truth and sincerity have a certain distinguishing native lustre about them which cannot be perfectly counterfeited; they are like fire and flame, that cannot be painted.

Benjamin Franklin

A lie stands on one leg, truth on two.

Arthur Koestler

The ultimate truth is penultimately a falsehood.

Arthur Koestler

The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.

Ayn Rand

There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.

Ayn Rand

Every form has its own meaning. Every man creates his meaning and form and goal. Why is it so important - what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right - so long as it's not yourself? Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic - and only of addition at that? Why is everything twisted out of all sense to fit everything else? There must be some reason. I don't know. I've never known it. I'd like to understand.

Ayn Rand

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.

Bertrand Russell

There are infinite possibilities of error, and more cranks take up fashionable untruths than unfashionable truths.

Bertrand Russell

In the higher walks of politics the same sort of thing occurs. The statesman who has gradually concentrated all power within himself ... may have had anything but a public motive... The phrases which are customary on the platform and in the Party Press have gradually come to him to seem to express truths, and he mistakes the rhetoric of partisanship for a genuine analysis of motives... He retires from the world after the world has retired from him.

Bertrand Russell

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in infering that he is an inexact man. Every careful measurement in science is always given with the probable error ... every observer admits that he is likely wrong, and knows about how much wrong he is likely to be.

Bertrand Russell

One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to the prevalent forms of mendacity. Credulity is a greater evil in the present day than it ever was before, because, owing to the growth of education, it is much easier than it used to be to spread misinformation, and, owing to democracy, the spread of misinformation is more important than in former times to the holders of power.

Bertrand Russell

Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

Bertrand Russell

When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.

Bertrand Russell

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.