Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

For he that feeds men serveth few; He serves all who dares be true.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If men would avoid that general language and general manner in which they strive to hide all that is peculiar, and would say only what was uppermost in their own minds, after their own individual manner, every man would be interesting.

Lawrence Durrell

Truth is what most contradicts itself.

Lawrence Durrell

Truth is a woman. That is why it is enigmatic.

Lawrence Durrell

Truth is a matter of direct apprehension-you can't climb a ladder of mental concepts to it.

Laura Riding

If what you write is true, it will not be so because of what you are as a writer but because of what you are as a being. There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

Laura Riding

Truth rings no bells.

Laura Riding

we shall know that we have begun to speak true by an increased hunger for true-speaking; we shall have the whole hunger only after we have given ourselves the first taste of it.

Marcus Aurelius

I search after truth, by which man never yet was harmed.

Marcus Aurelius

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.

Marcus Aurelius

If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.

Marcus Aurelius

I cannot comprehend how any man can want anything but the truth.

Marc Chagall

On cannot be precise, and still be true.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs....

Ralph Waldo Emerson

...most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, 'How do you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?' We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake.

Sharon Salzberg

We can't control what thoughts and emotions arise within us, nor can we control the universal truth that everything changes. But we can learn to step back and rest in the awareness of what's happening. That awareness can be our refuge.

Natalie Portman

We live in a real world. Come back to it.

Judy Blume

The truth will make you odd.

Leonard Cohen

Do not believe the truth. The truth is tiny compared to what you have to do.

John Keats

We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that "ridicule is the test of truth."

Linus Pauling

Science is the search for the truth--it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others. We need to have the spirit of science in international affairs, to make the conduct of international affairs the effort to find the right solution, the just solution of international problems, and not an effort by each nation to get the better of other nations, to do harm to them when it is possible. I believe in morality, in justice, in humanitarianism.

Leon Battista Alberti

Nothing overshadows truth so much as authority.

Leo Tolstoy

To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.

Leo Tolstoy

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

Leo Tolstoy

Every lie is a poison; there are no harmless lies. Only the truth is safe. Only the truth gives me consolation - it is the one unbreakable diamond.

Peter Kreeft

The scripture notion of truth is not an abstract, static, and timeless formula, but is something that comes true in time as the fulfillment of a divine promise. Truth happens in history.

Pema Chodron

We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering, we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is we only become more fearful, more hardened and more alienated. We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. This separateness becomes like a prison for us - a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears, and to caring only for the people nearest to us. Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. Yet, when we don't close off, when we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings.

Paulo Costanzo

This doesn't seem like one of those 'truth will set you free' situations.

Peter Sellers

Facts - behind them lies the whole fabric of deductive truth.