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

Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.

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

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

Words can be said in bitterness and anger, and often there seems to be an element of truth in the nastiness. And words don’t go away, they just echo around.

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.

Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.

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.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely.

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

For an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They’re doing it for themselves.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

Facts are stubborn things.

It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.

If you’re lying, you’re lying.

We’ve been programmed, from the time that we were very, very little, about what we can’t do – about what is impossible.

Social media has given us this idea that we should all have a posse of friends when in reality, if we have one or two really good friends, we are lucky.

All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.

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

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

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times.

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.

The passive aggressive arguer comes armed with tricky tactics. They cannot take the risk that they might be wrong: their self-esteem is too intertwined with their opinions. It is more important to affirm their rightness, and sense of superiority, than to arrive at the truth.

Silence is the mother of truth.

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

Exaggeration is truth that has lost its temper.

The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn’t the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.

Truth is a pathless land.

I have two pairs of reading glasses. One pair is for reading fiction, the other for non-fiction. I’ve read the Bible twice wearing each pair, and it’s the same.

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.

Truth is weirder than any fiction I’ve seen.

In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.

Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.

Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

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

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.

Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.

For me, the world that I inhabit in reality is probably a very different world than the one people expect that I would be in.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

All knowledge or form conception is evoked through the medium of the eye, either in response to disturbances directly received on the retina or to their fainter secondary effects and reverberations. Other sense organs can only call forth feelings which have no reality of existence and of which no conception can be formed.

Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.

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.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. That’s the funniest joke in the world.

A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

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.

Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin‘ away.

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?