Truth

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

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

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

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.

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.

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.

People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try' to be “consistent.”

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

Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.

 

Honesty pays, but it don’t seem to pay enough to suit a lot of people.

A belief is not true because it is useful.

There's nothing that keeps its youth, So far as I know, but a tree and truth.

Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.

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