The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

All truth is simple… is that not doubly a lie?

Until it’s on the radio or online, it’s not real. With U2, our album isn’t finished until it’s in the stores.

There is nothing in the world more shameful than establishing one’s self on lies and fables.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

I’m not going to say I’m cool, because I don’t really feel that. I just don’t care at all, and I guess that’s what people think is cool.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

Peace if possible, truth at all costs.

Take the complications, rules, shoulds, musts, have tos, and so on out of your life. By uncomplicating your life and removing the trivial pursuits that occupy so much of it, you open a channel for the genius within you to emerge.

My life is not to be somebody else’s impact – you know what I mean?

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

My definition of country music is really pretty simple. It’s when someone sings about their life and what they know, from an authentic place.

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

Ultimately, I’m not doing that much. I’m only doing what a human being who feels wants to do – in my way, without stepping out of my flow, while staying in my lane. Without, I guess, boring people.

The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.

I’ll never tell a lie. I’ll never make a misleading statement. I’ll never betray the confidence that any of you had in me. And I’ll never avoid a controversial issue.

Few men would dare to read their own autobiography if all their deeds were recorded in it; few can look back upon their entire career without a blush.

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

Some sarcasm is best told simply.

I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.

You just have to have a simple faith.

Truth is a pathless land.

I don’t know that you can put a label on growth. I’m just me.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

Appearance is something absolute, but reality is not that way – everything is interdependent, not absolute. So that view is very helpful to maintain a peace of mind because the main destroyer of a peaceful mind is anger.

The influence of a mother upon the lives of her children cannot be measured. They know and absorb her example and attitudes when it comes to questions of honesty, temperance, kindness, and industry.

The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.

We’re all capable of mistakes, but I do not care to enlighten you on the mistakes we may or may not have made.

Those thoughts are truth which guide us to beneficial interaction with sensible particulars as they occur, whether they copy these in advance or not.

A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.

True praise comes often even to the lowly; false praise only to the strong.

I’ve never been a manipulator, even in my bachelor days. I never wanted to do things to people that could catch up with me later on.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

I have been a professor, and I have been a policymaker, and as a professor, you think in terms of truth or absolutes.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

The thing about delirium is you think it’s great, but it actually isn’t.

The precepts of the law are these: to live honestly, to injure no one, and to give everyone else his due.

Friends accept you the way you are.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

The best thing is to always keep honest people around, because when you have a bunch of yes men around that know that you’re making a mistake but let you go on with it, that’s when it ruins your mind state as an artist.

The only passion that guides me is for the truth… I look at everything from this point of view.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, ‚Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!‘

There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

Facts are stubborn things.

I never gave anybody hell! I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.

Whatever you believe with feeling becomes your reality.

I just think you ought to talk straight with your people.

It’s important for me to let my fans know I really don’t care. I’m confident.

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

Confession of errors is like a broom which sweeps away the dirt and leaves the surface brighter and clearer. I feel stronger for confession.

Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.