I am a humble but very earnest seeker after truth.

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

Nothing is more noble, nothing more venerable than fidelity. Faithfulness and truth are the most sacred excellences and endowments of the human mind.

I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: ‚This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.‘ Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

Can the mind see the truth of its own incapacity to know the unknown? Surely if I see very clearly that my mind cannot know the unknown, there is absolute quietness.

I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.

One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.

If I am judged for my work, many myths about me as an autocrat or otherwise would become clearer. I feel false propaganda will not last, and truth will ultimately prevail.

Silence is the mother of truth.

In matters of truth the fact that you don’t want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.

Intense feeling too often obscures the truth.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.

We learned about honesty and integrity – that the truth matters… that you don’t take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules… and success doesn’t count unless you earn it fair and square.

In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

Live truth instead of professing it.

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

I have never entered into any controversy in defense of my philosophical opinions; I leave them to take their chance in the world. If they are right, truth and experience will support them; if wrong, they ought to be refuted and rejected. Disputes are apt to sour one’s temper and disturb one’s quiet.

Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time.

Know then this truth, enough for man to know virtue alone is happiness below.

Knowledge is true opinion.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Reality has a way of intruding. Reality eventually intrudes on everything.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest – that would be like a blind man willing to see.

Error is always more busy than truth.

Biographies, as generally written, are not only misleading but false… In most instances, they commemorate a lie and cheat posterity out of the truth.

When virtue is lost, benevolence appears, when benevolence is lost right conduct appears, when right conduct is lost, expedience appears. Expediency is the mere shadow of right and truth; it is the beginning of disorder.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

Wisdom is found only in truth.

No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to.

Truth is what works.

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

Science is but an image of the truth.

The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don’t like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they’re 95 percent dead wood.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man – the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.

Frankly, I think that the news industry is critically important because it points out things and surfaces truths that can often be uncomfortable. I think that that’s working, and the spotlight has been pointed on things that we have a responsibility to do better, and I accept that.

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

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

Morality is the basis of things and truth is the substance of all morality.

A remark generally hurts in proportion to its truth.

Occasionally, some brother sings very earnestly through his nose, often disturbing those around him, but it does not matter how the voice sounds to the ears of man. What is important is how the heart sounds to the ears of God.