Quotes About Truth

Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

— Winston Churchill

Truth burns up error.

— Sojourner Truth

Error moves with quick feet . . . and truth must never be lagging behing.

— Alexander Crummell

The race problem is a moral one . . . . Its solution will come especially from the domain of principles.  Like all the other great battles of humanity, it is to be fought out with the weapons of truth.

— Alexander Crummell

Absolute truth is incompatible with an advanced state of society.

— Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

The truth should be told, though it kill.

— Timothy Thomas Fortune

You never find yourself until you face the truth.

— Pearl Bailey

It nothing profits to show virtue in words and destroy truth in deeds.

— Cyprian

Truthfulness with me is hardly a virtue.  I cannot discriminate between truths that need and those that need not to be told.

— Margot Asquith

If one cannot invent a really convincing lie, it is often better to stick to the truth.

— Angela Thirkell

Truth, like surgery, may hurt, but it cures.

— Han Suyin

Art for the sake of art itself is an idle sentence.  Art for the sake of truth, for the sake of what is beautiful and good—that is the creed I seek.

— George Sand

Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented.

— Georges Braque

The truth shall make you free.

— John 8:32

My way of joking is to tell the truth; it’s the funniest joke in the world.

— George Bernard Shaw

I never give them hell.  I just tell the truth and they think it’s hell.

— Harry S. Truman

It has always been desirable to tell the truth, but seldom if ever necessary.

— Arthur J. Balfour

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

— Mark Twain

Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.

— Mark Twain

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

— John Locke

It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

— Thomas Henry Huxley

The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.

— Oscar Wilde

No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.

— William Osler

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

— Arthur Conan Doyle

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

— Mark Twain

It is a difference of opinion that makes horse races.

— Mark Twain

The obstinate insistence that tweedledum is not tweedledee is the bone and marrow of life.

— William James

The reader deserves an honest opinion.  If he doesn’t deserve it, give it to him anyhow.

— John Ciardi, on the role of reviewers

There is nothing more fickle, more vague, or more powerful; yet capricious as it is, [public opinion] is nevertheless much more often true, reasonable, and just than we imagine.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic.

— Wilhelm Friedrich Nietzsche

Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.

— John Stuart Mill

The degree of one’s emotion varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts—the less you know, the hotter you get.

— Bertrand Russell

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.

— Bertrand Russell

Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.

— Herbert Spencer

Every man has a perfect right to his opinion, provided it agrees with ours.

— Josh Billings

We should stop kidding ourselves.  We should let go of things that aren’t true.  It’s always better with the truth.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.

— John F. Kennedy