Truth

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

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called ‘weasel words’. When a weasel sucks eggs the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a ‘weasel word’ after another, there is nothing left of the other.

Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see,

He who cheats with an oath acknowledges that he is afraid of his enemy, but that he thinks little of God.

For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

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?

It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth.

You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.

Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

I could not dig: I dared not rob:

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.

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all

Truth, Sir, is a cow, that will yield such people [sceptics] no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

I have always suspected that the reading is right, which requires many words to prove it wrong; and the emendation wrong, that cannot without so much labour appear to be right.

Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.

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.

There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.

You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

Atque inter silvas Academi quaerere verum.

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

In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.