Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

Comedians are sociologists. We’re pointing out stuff that the general public doesn’t even stop to think about, looking at life in slow-motion and questioning everything we see.

As long as the people don’t fear the truth, there is hope. For once they fear it, the one who tells it doesn’t stand a chance. And today, truth is still beautiful… but so frightening.

Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.

If you seek truth you will not seek victory by dishonorable means, and if you find truth you will become invincible.

I’m personally more struck by visual things more than musical.

A lie cannot live.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

No one would talk much in society if they knew how often they misunderstood others.

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.

More than anything else, I want the folks back at home to think right of me.

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

Richard Nixon is a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in.

I don’t really care how the Patriots are perceived, truthfully. I really don’t. I really don’t. Look, if you’re a fan of our team, you root for us, you believe in our team, and you believe in what we’re trying to accomplish. If you’re not a fan of us, you have a different opinion.

I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.

Most people wouldn’t know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.

See things from the boy’s point of view.

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

The fellow that can only see a week ahead is always the popular fellow, for he is looking with the crowd. But the one that can see years ahead, he has a telescope but he can’t make anybody believe that he has it.

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

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with wrong-doing.

There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.

Truth, according to the Christian faith, is God’s love for us in Jesus Christ. Therefore, truth is a relationship.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

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

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

You cannot share your life with a dog, as I had done in Bournemouth, or a cat, and not know perfectly well that animals have personalities and minds and feelings.

Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true.

The truth is often terrifying, which I think is one of the motifs of Larry and Andrew’s cinema. The cost of knowledge is an important theme. In the second and third films, they explore the consequences of Neo’s choice to know the truth. It’s a beautiful, beautiful story.

You don’t tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

I never know what day it is. Never, ever, ever.

Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.

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

Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.

I am persuaded, you will permit me to observe, that the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction.

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that – is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

Therefore if a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune; for though she be blind, yet she is not invisible.

A person hears only what they understand.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

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.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

If it’s hard to remember, it’ll be difficult to forget.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant.

Funny thing is that the poorer people are, the more generous they seem to be.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.