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.

Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth to see it like it is, and tell it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man’s most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

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

Too much and too little wine. Give him none, he cannot find truth; give him too much, the same.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.

Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear.

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

There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

The beauty of a woman is not in the clothes she wears, the figure that she carries or the way she combs her hair.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

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

Through Kurt I saw the beauty of minimalism and the importance of music that’s stripped down.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty.

People really had a problem with my disinterest in submission. They had a problem with my intellect, and they had a problem with my choice of lovers. They had a problem with my choice of everything.

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

Ankles are nearly always neat and good-looking, but knees are nearly always not.

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

Where there is righteousness in the heart, there is beauty in the character. When there is beauty in the character, there is harmony in the home. When there is harmony in the home, there is order in the nation. When there is order in the nation, there is peace in the world.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.

Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.

God doesn’t love me any more or less because I had some work done on my face.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

I think dress, hairstyle and make-up are the crucial factors in projecting an attractive persona and give one the chance to enhance one’s best physical features.

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.

A lot of truth is said in jest.

The pursuit of truth does not permit violence on one’s opponent.

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

There are some people who need to wear a label round their necks to show that they are Christians at all, or else we might mistake them for sinners, their actions are so like those of the ungodly.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

To be an atheist requires an indefinitely greater measure of faith than to recieve all the great truths which atheism would deny.

You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.

There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.

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.

It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.

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.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

Silence is the mother of truth.

If you would judge, understand.

I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else.

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

I don’t care how many beauty treatments you have, I don’t care which bag you’re carrying – you have to have a dress.

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

Dissident intellectuals aren’t all beautiful.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

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

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.

I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.