Truth

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

WHAT DRAWS PEOPLE TO BE FRIENDS IS THAT THEY SEE THE SAME TRUTH. THEY SHARE IT.

Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.

 

Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling.

We don’t know each other’s secrets quite so well as we flatter ourselves we do. We don’t always know our own secrets as well as we might.

Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.

Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

One should stick by one’s own soul, and by nothing else. In one’s soul, one knows the truth from the untruth, and life from death. And if one betrays one’s own soul-knowledge, one is the worst of traitors.

A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.

What I want is to draw inspiration only from the truth. . . . My qualifications for this important role include a large head, an enormous nose, disappointment in love, and expectations of ill health.

I seem to have been like a child playing on the sea shore, finding now and then a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me.

and nothing quite so least as truth —i say though hate were why men breathe— because my father lived his soul love is the whole and more than all

To arrive at the truth in all things, we ought always to be ready to believe that what seems to us white is black if the hierarchical Church so defines it.

 

No generalization is wholly true—not even this one.

 

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.

 

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep the real and the true.

Man’s passion for truth is such that he will welcome the bitterest of all postulates so long as it strikes him as true.

Truth is a torch which gleams in the fog but does not dispel it.

Truth is a flower in whose neighbourhood others must wither.

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

When I can look Life in the eyes, / Grown calm and very coldly wise, / Life will have given me the Truth, / And taken in exchange—my youth.

Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority.