The chief ingredients in the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding.

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 now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

Non-violence and truth are inseparable and presuppose one another.

I’m interested in two things. I’m interested in truth and I’m interested in fairness.

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

How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

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

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

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

The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

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

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now – always.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

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

Part of the reason there’s an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you’re in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let’s say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.

There is not a truth existing which I fear… or would wish unknown to the whole world.

Truth cannot be brought down; rather, the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountaintop to the valley. If you would attain to the mountaintop, you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices.

Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

Platitudes? Yes, there are platitudes. Platitudes are there because they are true.

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.

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

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Truth is weirder than any fiction I’ve seen.

After many years of great mercy, after tasting of the powers of the world to come, we still are so weak, so foolish; but, oh! when we get away from self to God, there all is truth and purity and holiness, and our heart finds peace, wisdom, completeness, delight, joy, victory.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

A lot of people are afraid to tell the truth, to say no. That’s where toughness comes into play. Toughness is not being a bully. It’s having backbone.

On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.

We never love a person, but only qualities.

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.

‚Classic.‘ A book which people praise and don’t read.

Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

God, as Truth, has been for me a treasure beyond price. May He be so to every one of us.

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

One truth stands firm. All that happens in world history rests on something spiritual. If the spiritual is strong, it creates world history. If it is weak, it suffers world history.

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.

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.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed.

Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak, and esteem to all.

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.

Anything in any way beautiful derives its beauty from itself and asks nothing beyond itself. Praise is no part of it, for nothing is made worse or better by praise.

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

Justice is truth in action.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

The wicked leader is he who the people despise. The good leader is he who the people revere. The great leader is he who the people say, ‚We did it ourselves.‘

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

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.