As I am an honest man, I thought you had received some bodily wound. There is more sense in that than in reputation. Reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving.
— Othello
Quotes About Truth
Lincoln said he was not bound to win but bound to be true, and to live up to the light he had. Churchill said that in wartime truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. Those two statements stand alone, each from a leader in a different conflict. Roosevelt ties truth to freedom, saying it is found when men are free to pursue it. Jackson puts it in athletic terms: lies run sprints, but the truth runs marathons. Aristotle adds a structural note: with the truth, all given facts harmonize, but with what is false, the truth soon hits a wrong note. Truth endures because it matches what is real. Deception has to fight the facts, and that fighting wears it down. The marathon image fits: truth keeps going while lies exhaust themselves.
To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.
— De Profundis
No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.
— Human, All Too Human
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
— Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World
By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.
— Orlando
— Emma
If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.
— Complete Letters, 1868-1871
We do not claim that the portrait we are making is the whole truth, only that it is a resemblance.
— Les Misérables
...I hope that simple love and truth will be strong in the end. I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.
— David Copperfield
Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.
— The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.
— A Confession
When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
— Back to Methuselah
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
— In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950
True human progress is based less on the inventive mind than on the conscience of such men as Brandeis.
— Albert Einstein, Philosopher-Scientist
On their deathbed men will speak true, they say.
— The Children of Húrin
... Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth...
— Swann's Way
To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.
— A History of Western Philosophy
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.
— A Farewell to Arms
All should be laid open to you without reserve, for there is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.
— Writings: Autobiography/Notes on the State of Virginia/Public & Private Papers/Addresses/Letters
The truth must be quite plain, if one could just clear away the litter.
— A Caribbean Mystery
The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning.
— Philosophical Dictionary
I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.
— Siddhartha
With the truth, all given facts harmonize; but with what is false, the truth soon hits a wrong note.
— The Nicomachean Ethics
I am speaking like a book, but I believe that what I am saying is true.
— The Trial and Death of Socrates