more quotes, quotations and nice thoughts on truth

When you give up your
own truth to win at someone
else's game, everyone loses.

Stephen C. Paul

You ought to be true for the sake of the folks who think you are true. You never should stoop to a deed that your folks think you would not do. If you are false to yourself, be the blemish but small, you have injured your folks; you have been false to them all. Edgar A. Guest

Truth must be loved for its own sake. Those who speak the truth because they are in some way compelled to or for their own advantage, and who are not afraid to tell a lie when it is of no importance to anyone, is not truthful enough. My soul naturally shuns a lie, and hates even the thought of one. I feel an inward shame and a sharp remorse if an untruth happens to escape me--as sometimes it does if the occasion is unexpected, and I am taken unawares. Michel de Montaigne

Ask yourself: If I know something to be true, am I prepared to follow it, even though it is contrary to what I want or to what I have previously held to be true? Will I follow it if it means being laughed at, if it means personal financial loss, or some kind of hardship? Eric Liddell Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it. Pearl S. Buck

Those who love truth more than life itself turn away from the fleeting things of time with all their souls. To use an expression of Plato--God himself sets their faces in the right direction. Simone Weil

The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm
looking for the truth" and so it goes away. Puzzling.

Robert M. Pirsig

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At the core of everything I write is the feeling that the denial
of the truth imprisons us even further in ourselves. Of course,
there's no one "truth." The great things, the insights that
happen to you, come to you in some internal way.

Paula Fox

Never, ever, regret or apologize for believing that when one man or
one woman decides to risk addressing the world with truth, the world
may stop what it is doing and hear.
There is too much evidence to the contrary.

Robert Fulghum

Believe those who are seeking the truth;
doubt those who find it.

Andre Gide

The truth will set you free.
But before it does, it might make you angry.

Jerry Joiner

Truth is completely spontaneous. Lies have to be taught.

R. Buckminster Fuller

If you want to write the truth, you must write about yourself. I am the only real truth I know.

Jean Rhys

truth - truth 3

Prudent is the one who can keep silent that part of truth which
may be untimely, and by not speaking it, does not spoil
the truth of what he or she said.

Pope John XXIII

If anyone can show me, and convince me, that I have acted
or thought in error, I will gladly change; for I seek truth,
and no one was ever injured by the truth. But people injure
themselves if they live with self-deception and ignorance.

Marcus Aurelius

Not being known doesn't stop the truth from being true.

Richard Bach

You never find yourself until you face the truth.

Pearl Bailey

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until
we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

William James

All truth is safe and nothing else is safe, but those who keep back
truth, or withhold it from others, from motives of
expediency, are either cowards or criminals.

James Russell Lowell

Scientific truth is marvelous, but moral truth is divine and whoever
breathes its air and walks by its light has found the lost paradise.

Horace Mann

Truth exists only for each individual when he or she produces it through his or her actions.

Søren Kierkegaard

Not everyone can see the truth, but everyone can be the truth.

Franz Kafka

Truth exists; only falsehood needs to be invented.

George Braque

The gulf between knowledge and truth is infinite.

Henry Miller

As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.

Josh Billings

Articles and book excerpts on truth:

Integrity Paul Bauer

Those who justify themselves do not convince. To know truth one must
get rid of knowledge; nothing is more powerful and creative than emptiness.

Lao-Tzu

The search for truth is but the honest searching out of everything that interferes
with truth. Truth is. It can neither be lost nor sought nor found. It is there,
wherever you are, being within you. Yet it can be recognized or unrecognized.

A Course in Miracles

Believing ourselves to be possessors of absolute truth degrades us:
we regard every person whose way of thinking is different from ours
as a monster and a threat and by so doing turn our own selves
into monsters and threats to our fellows.

Octavio Paz

If you tell the truth, you have infinite power supporting you;
but if not, you have infinite power against you.

Charles Gordon

The simplest and commonest truth seems new and wonderful
when we experience it for the first time in our own life.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties
through my love for truth, and truth rewarded me.

Simone de Beauvoir

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.
Take which you please; you can never have both.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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If we regard truth as something handed down from authorities on high,
the classroom [or office] will look like a dictatorship. If we regard
truth as a fiction determined by personal whim, the classroom will look
like anarchy. If we regard truth as emerging from a complex process
of mutual inquiry, the classroom will look like a resourceful
and interdependent community.

Parker J. Palmer
The Courage to Teach

To find the gold of truth often means getting a more universal viewpoint
of life, of yourself, of everything that comprises your world. The
greatness and power of many souls of the past resulted in their seeing
in a higher context than perhaps the average person. They knew
where to look to find the golden nuggets of truth. Time does not
prevent us from knowing these higher truths; our stage
of consciousness makes the difference.

John Marks Templeton
Worldwide Laws of Life

Every new truth begins in a shocking heresy.

Margaret Deland

truth - truth 3

Opinion is a flitting thing,
But Truth outlasts the Sun--
If then we cannot own them both--
Possess the oldest one.

Emily Dickinson

Talent is by no means rare in the world; nor is even genius. But can the
talent be trusted?--can the genius? Not unless based on truthfulness--
on veracity. It is this quality more than any other that commands the
esteem and respect, and secures the confidence of others. Truthfulness
is at the foundation of all personal excellence. It exhibits itself in
conduct. It is rectitude--truth in action, and shines through every word
and deed. It means reliableness, and convinces other people that it can be
trusted. And we are already of consequence in the world when it is
known that we can be relied on,--that when we say we know a thing, we
do know it,--that when we says we will do a thing, we can do, and do
it. Thus reliableness becomes a passport to the general
esteem and confidence of humankind.

Samuel Smiles
Character

My prediction is that The Truth will be phased out of our society,
almost unnoticed, in less than a generation. It will become a curio
like the two-dollar bill. Probably there will be museums where
samples of The Truth will be displayed for the benefit of curious
children who want to know what it was like. One can only hope
that the curators of these Truth Museums will have the good taste
not to fake the exhibits.
The Truth is that The Truth has become old-fashioned. It’s full of
odd-shaped little nooks and crannies, like so many old-fashioned
things, some people find them fascinating, but most people find them
a pain in the neck. For those who care, it is a wonderful feeling to
hold The Truth in your possession, to keep it and cherish it, never
to misuse it, then to pass it along freely to anyone who wants it,
giving it to them undamaged, unpainted, unadded to and unsubtracted
from, and every bit as glowingly alive as ever. To find all those joys
in the handling of The Truth is a labor of love, but most of us in
today’s society have no time for such things.

Allan Sherman
The Rape of the APE (American Puritan Ethic)