Truth

Trust none; For oaths are straws, men’s faiths are wafer-cakes, And hold-fast is the only dog, my duck.

Reule wel thyself, that other folk canst rede. And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede.

A truth that’s told with bad intent Beats all the lies you can invent.

Whenever you have truth, it must be given with love, or the message and the messenger will be rejected.

Mordre wol out; that se we day by day.

Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

I hardly ever felt as alienated from people as I do right now… The worst is that nowhere is there anything with which one can identify. Brutality and lies are everywhere.

Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles.

Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.

There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art.

To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.

The words “question” and “quest” are cognates. Only through inquiry can we discover truth.

The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.

A principle which has any soundness should stand firm not only just now, but always.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

Isn't it a bad thing to be deceived about the truth, and a good thing to know what the truth is?

The truth about a man is, first of all, what it is that he keeps hidden.

Similarly with regard to truth, won't we say that a soul is maimed if it hates a voluntary falsehood, cannot endure to have one in itself, and is greatly angered when it exists in others, but is nonetheless content to accept an involuntary falsehood, isn't angry when it is caught being ignorant, and bears its lack of learning easily, wallowing in it like a pig?