Truth

Beauty is the splendor of truth.

What kind of man am I? One of those who would be pleased to be refuted if I say anything untrue, and who would be pleased to refute anyone who says anything untrue; one who, however, wouldn’t be any less pleased to be refuted than to refute. For I count being refuted a greater good, insofar as it is a greater good for oneself to be delivered from the worst thing there is than to deliver someone else from it.

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.

The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criticism attitude is everything. For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.

An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story .

I have too much respect for the truth to drag it out on every trifling occasion.

If you find from your own experience that something is a fact and it contradicts what some authority has written down, 25 then you must abandon the authority and base your reasoning on your own findings.

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

The truth of a theory can never be proven, for one never knows if future experience will contradict its conclusions.

Let my name stand among those who are willing to bear ridicule and reproach for the truth's sake, and so earn some right to rejoice when the victory is won.

In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled.

No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.

He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger that man may bleed to death through the truth that he realises.

He who has a secret should not only hide it, but hide that he has it to hide.

He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God's providence to lead him alright.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

It's not a matter of what is true that counts but a matter of what is perceived to be true.

Perhaps no one has yet been truthful enough about what 'truthfulness' is.