Truth

The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

Grant me an old man’s frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call.

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.

And if, to be sure, sometimes you need to conceal a fact with words, do it in such a way that it does not become known, or, if it does become known, that you have a ready and quick defence.

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.

Freedom is a very great reality. But it means, above all things, freedom from lies.

Accuracy to a newspaper is what virtue is to a lady; but a newspaper can always print a retraction.

What we have in us of the image of God is the love of truth and justice.

What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them.

Candor ends paranoia.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

The matters I relate Are true lies. 3

Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?

The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.

There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

Facts were never pleasing to him. He acquired them with reluctance and got rid of them with relief. He was never on terms with them until he had stood them on their heads.

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

In battling evil, excess is good for he who is moderate in announcing the truth is presenting half-truth.

You cannot condemn a man for what may only be a figment of your own imagination.

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.

 

‘But the Emperor has nothing on at all!’ cried a little child.

But, my dearest Agathon, it is truth which you cannot contradict; you can without any difficulty contradict Socrates.