Quotes on Truth

When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.

It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.

To all new truths, or renovation of old truths, it must be as in the ark between the destroyed and the about-to-be renovated world. The raven must be sent out before the dove, and ominous controversy must precede peace and the olive wreath.

Truth is often eclipsed but never extinguished.

The time has come when scientific truth must cease to be the property of the few, when it must be woven into the common life of the world.

But such is the irresistable nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants is the liberty of appearing.

Two seemingly incompatible conceptions can each represent an aspect of the truth... They may serve in turn to represent the facts without ever entering into direct conflict.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

The manner in which things exist and take place, constitutes what is called the nature of things; and a careful observation of the nature of things is the sole foundation of all truth.

Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.

A man may be in as just possession of the truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.

Personally, I don't give a rap for documents; for the truth in my eyes is not in them but in the mind.

It is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man who conforms, who follows some tradition. It is only when you are constantly inquiring, constantly observing, constantly learning, that you find truth, God, or love.

Nobody ever sees truth except in fragments.

No man rides so high and in such good company as the man that allies himself to a truth.

Truth can hardly be expected to adapt herself to the crooked policy and wily sinuosities of worldly affairs; for truth, like light, travels only in straight lines.

The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.

In a free society, there comes a time when the truth - however hard it may be to hear, however impolitic it may seem to say - must be told.

Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.