Truth

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

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

The cruellest lies are often told in silence.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

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.

 

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations .

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.

Even the clearest and most perfectcircumstantial evidence is likely to be at fault, after all, and therefore ought to be received with great caution. Take the case of any pencil, sharpened by any woman: if you have witnesses, you will find she did it with a knife; but if you take simply the aspect of the pencil, you will say she did it with her teeth.

No generalization is wholly true—not even this one.

 

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination—what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not.

Man cannot live without some vision of himself. But still less can he live with a vision that is not true to his inner experience and inner feeling.

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.

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.