Quotes about truth and lies

When you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

’Tis strange,—but true; for truth is always strange;
Stranger than fiction

If it is not right, do not do it: if it is not true, do not say it.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal

This above all: to thine own self be true;
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

The course of true love never did run smooth.

Reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments, love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds

Ability wins us the esteem of the true men, luck that of the people.

Weak persons cannot be sincere.

Envy is destroyed by true friendship, flirtation by true love.

However rare true love is, true friendship is rarer.

The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you allure the senses to it.

From the senses originate all trustworthiness, all good conscience, all evidence of truth.

There is an innocence in lying which is the sign of good faith in a cause.

Wisdom lies only in truth.

When I err, every one can see it; but not when I lie.

Snow is false purity.

I can promise to be sincere, but not to be impartial.

Love is a true renovator.

School itself is the only true preparation for it.

The greatest difficulties lie where we do not look for them.

The first and last thing that is required of genius is love of truth.

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.

It is often the case that the man who can’t tell a lie thinks he is the best judge of one.

When in doubt, tell the truth.

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

Truth is stranger than fiction—to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it.

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

The old saw says, “Let a sleeping dog lie.” Right.... Still, when there is much at stake it is better to get a newspaper to do it.

True irreverence is disrespect for another man’s god.

There are 869 different forms of lying, but only one of them has been squarely forbidden. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.

The principal difference between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only nine lives.

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.

If one tells the truth one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.

Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not to be believed.

ACKNOWLEDGE, v.t. To confess. Acknowledgement of one another’s faults is the highest duty imposed by our love of truth.

AUSTRALIA, n. A country lying in the South Sea, whose industrial and commercial development has been unspeakably retarded by an unfortunate dispute among geographers as to whether it is a continent or an island.

DEFAME, v.t. To lie about another. To tell the truth about another.

DIPLOMACY, n. The patriotic art of lying for one’s country.

ENCOMIAST, n. A special (but not particular) kind of liar.

FIB, n. A lie that has not cut its teeth. An habitual liar’s nearest approach to truth: the perigee of his eccentric orbit.

FRIENDLESS, adj. Having no favors to bestow. Destitute of fortune. Addicted to utterance of truth and common sense.

FUTURE, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.

HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

IMAGINATION, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.

IMPOSITION, n. The act of blessing or consecrating by the laying on of hands—a ceremony common to many ecclesiastical systems, but performed with the frankest sincerity by the sect known as Thieves.

INFANCY, n. The period of our lives when, according to Wordsworth, “Heaven lies about us.” The world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.

LIAR, n. A lawyer with a roving commission.

MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people’s beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.

OBSTINATE, adj. Inaccessible to the truth as it is manifest in the splendor and stress of our advocacy.

PREHISTORIC, adj. Belonging to an early period and a museum. Antedating the art and practice of perpetuating falsehood.

PREVARICATOR, n. A liar in the caterpillar state.

RACK, n. An argumentative implement formerly much used in persuading devotees of a false faith to embrace the living truth. As a call to the unconverted the rack never had any particular efficacy, and is now held in light popular esteem.

REPORTER, n. A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words.

RITE, n. A religious or semi-religious ceremony fixed by law, precept or custom, with the essential oil of sincerity carefully squeezed out of it.

RUBBISH, n. Worthless matter, such as the religions, philosophies, literatures, arts and sciences of the tribes infesting the regions lying due south from Boreaplas.

SCRIPTURES, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

TRUTH, n. An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance. Discovery of truth is the sole purpose of philosophy, which is the most ancient occupation of the human mind and has a fair prospect of existing with increasing activity to the end of time.

Sincerity is an openness of heart; we find it in very few people; what we usually see is only an artful dissimulation to win the confidence of others.

The aversion to lying is often a hidden ambition to render our words credible and weighty, and to attach a religious aspect to our conversation.

Truth does not do as much good in the world, as its counterfeits do evil.

We can love nothing but what agrees with us, and we can only follow our taste or our pleasure when we prefer our friends to ourselves; nevertheless it is only by that preference that friendship can be true and perfect.

The true way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowing than others.

Too great cleverness is but deceptive delicacy, true delicacy is the most substantial cleverness.

If one acts rightly and honestly, it is difficult to decide whether it is the effect of integrity or skill.

We admit our faults to repair by our sincerity the evil we have done in the opinion of others.

Falsely honest men are those who disguise their faults both to themselves and others; truly honest men are those who know them perfectly and confess them.

What makes false reckoning, as regards gratitude, is that the pride of the giver and the receiver cannot agree as to the value of the benefit.

True eloquence consists in saying all that should be, not all that could be said.

Some disguised lies so resemble truth, that we should judge badly were we not deceived.

There are matters and maladies which at certain times remedies only serve to make worse; true skill consists in knowing when it is dangerous to use them.

Humility is the true proof of Christian virtues; without it we retain all our faults, and they are only covered by pride to hide them from others, and often from ourselves.

However we distrust the sincerity of those whom we talk with, we always believe them more sincere with us than with others.

The desire of talking about ourselves, and of putting our faults in the light we wish them to be seen, forms a great part of our sincerity.

It appears that nature has hid at the bottom of our hearts talents and abilities unknown to us. It is only the passions that have the power of bringing them to light, and sometimes give us views more true and more perfect than art could possibly do.

However disposed the world may be to judge wrongly, it far oftener favours false merit than does justice to true.

Our enemies come nearer the truth in the opinions they form of us than we do in our opinion of ourselves.

It is only people who possess firmness who can possess true gentleness. In those who appear gentle it is generally only weakness, which is readily converted into harshness.

Nothing is rarer than true good nature, those who think they have it are generally only pliant or weak.

However wicked men may be, they do not dare openly to appear the enemies of virtue, and when they desire to persecute her they either pretend to believe her false or attribute crimes to her.

It is terrible to die of thirst at sea. Is it necessary that you should so salt your truth that it will no longer—quench thirst?

One may indeed lie with the mouth; but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.

Every man must think after his own fashion; for on his own path he finds a truth, or a kind of truth, which helps him through life. But he must not give himself the rein; he must control himself; mere naked instinct does not become him.

Our plans and designs should be so perfect in truth and beauty, that in touching them the world could only mar. We should thus have the advantage of setting right what is wrong, and restoring what is destroyed.

It is a very hard and troublesome thing to dispose of whole, half-, and quarter-mistakes; to sift them and assign the portion of truth to its proper place.

It is not always needful for truth to take a definite shape; it is enough if it hovers about us like a spirit and produces harmony; if it is wafted through the air like the sound of a bell, grave and kindly.

Love of truth shows itself in this, that a man knows how to find and value the good in everything.

Whoso is content with pure experience and acts upon it has enough of truth. The growing child is wise in this sense.

It is much easier to put yourself in the position of a mind taken up with the most absolute error, than of one which mirrors to itself half-truths.

What I have tried to do in my life through false tendencies, I have at last learned to understand.

Those who oppose intellectual truths do but stir up the fire, and the cinders fly about and burn what they had else not touched.

It is as certain as it is strange that truth and error come from one and the same source. Thus it is that we are often not at liberty to do violence to error, because at the same time we do violence to truth.

Truth belongs to the man, error to his age. This is why it has been said that, while the misfortune of the age caused his error, the force of his soul made him emerge from the error with glory.

Real obscurantism is not to hinder the spread of what is true, clear, and useful, but to bring into vogue what is false.

Truth is a torch, but a huge one, and so it is only with blinking eyes that we all of us try to get past it, in actual terror of being burnt.

The most foolish of all errors is for clever young men to believe that they forfeit their originality in recognising a truth which has already been recognised by others.

It is much easier to recognise error than to find truth; for error lies on the surface and may be overcome; but truth lies in the depths, and to search for it is not given to every one.

Confidences are strange things. If you listen only to one man, it is possible that he is deceived or mistaken; if you listen to many, they are in a like case; and, generally, you cannot get at the truth at all.

If I know my relation to myself and the outer world, I call it truth. Every man can have his own peculiar truth; and yet it is always the same.

I should like to be honest with you, without our falling out; but it will not do. You act wrongly, and fall between two stools; you win no adherents and lose your friends. What is to be the end of it?

Error is continually repeating itself in action, and we must unweariedly repeat the truth in word.

Truth is at variance with our natures, but not so error; and for a very simple reason. Truth requires us to recognise ourselves as limited, but error flatters us with the belief that in one way or another we are subject to no bounds at all.

That is true Symbolism, where the more particular represents the more general, not as a dream or shade, but as a vivid, instantaneous revelation of the Inscrutable.

Error is related to truth as sleep to waking. I have observed that on awakening from error a man turns again to truth as with new vigour.

The most privileged position, in life as in society, is that of an educated soldier. Rough warriors, at any rate, remain true to their character, and as great strength is usually the cover for good nature, we get on with them at need.

Our passions are, in truth, like the phoenix. When the old one burns away, the new one rises out of its ashes at once.

The true is Godlike: we do not see it itself; we must guess at it through its manifestations.

Of true religions there are only two: one of them recognises and worships the Holy that without form or shape dwells in and around us; and the other recognises and worships it in its fairest form. Everything that lies between these two is idolatry.

Even men of insight do not see that they try to explain things which lie at the foundation of our experience, and in which we must simply acquiesce.

If a man lives long in a high position, he does not, it is true, experience all that a man can experience; but he experiences things like them, and perhaps some things that have no parallel elsewhere.

To be and remain true to oneself and others, is to possess the noblest attribute of the greatest talents.

The action of genius is in a way ubiquitous: towards general truths before experience, and towards particular truths after it.

The mind endowed with active powers and keeping with a practical object to the task that lies nearest, is the worthiest there is on earth.

Credo Deum! That is a fine, a worthy thing to say; but to recognise God where and as he reveals himself, is the only true bliss on earth.

Thus the best sign of originality lies in taking up a subject and then developing it so fully as to make every one confess that he would hardly have found so much in it.

The historian’s duty is to separate the true from the false, the certain from the uncertain, and the doubtful from that which cannot be accepted.

False tendencies of the senses are a kind of desire after realism, always better than that false tendency which expresses itself as idealistic longing.

In the sphere of true Art there is no preparatory school, but there is a way of preparation; and the best preparation is the interest of the most insignificant pupil in the work of the master. Colour-grinders have often made excellent painters.

In studying the human form, let the painter reject what is exaggerated, false, and mechanical; but let him learn to grasp of what infinite grace the human body is capable.

In courts, bashfulness and timidity are as prejudicial on one hand, as impudence and rashness are on the other. A steady assurance, and a cool intrepidity, with an exterior modesty, are the true and necessary medium.

It is hard to say which is the greatest fool; he who tells the whole truth, or he who tells no truth at all. Character is as necessary in business as in trade. No man can deceive often in either.