Famous Quotes & Sayings

Thomas Carlyle

A lie should be trampled on and extinguished wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that falsehood, like pestilence, breathes around me.

Thomas Carlyle

But deepest of all illusory Appearances, for hiding Wonder, as for many other ends, are your two grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances, SPACE and TIME. These, as spun and woven for us from before Birth itself, to clothe our celestial ME for dwelling here, and yet to blind it, lie all-embracing, as the universal canvas, or warp and woof, whereby all minor Illusions, in this Phantasm Existence, weave and paint themselves. In vain, while here on Earth, shall you endeavor to strip them off; you can, at best, but rend them asunder for moments, and look through.

Thomas Carlyle

In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.

Thomas Carlyle

A background of wrath, which can be stirred up to the murderous infernal pitch, does lie in every man.

Thomas Carlyle

What unknown seas of feeling lie in man, and will from time to time break through!

Thomas Carlyle

Lies exist only to be extinguished.

Thomas Carlyle

Alas! we know that ideals can never be completely embodied in practice. Ideals must ever lie a great way off--and we will thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable approximation thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously "measure by a scale of perfection the meager product of reality" in this poor world of ours.

Thomas Carlyle

Venerable to me is the hard hand,--crooked, coarse,--wherein, notwithstanding, lies a cunning virtue, indispensably royal as of the sceptre of the planet.

Thomas Carlyle

Dishonesty is the raw material not of quacks only, but also in great part dupes.

Thomas Carlyle

Let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this precept well to heart: "Do the duty which lies nearest to thee," which thou know to be a duty! Thy second duty will already have become clearer.

Thomas Carlyle

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

Thomas Carlyle

Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought; underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation.

Thomas Carlyle

Is not cant the materia prima of the devil, from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations, body themselves, from which no true thing can come? For cant is itself the properly a double-distilled lie, the second power of a lie.

Thomas Carlyle

Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.

Thomas Carlyle

In books lies the soul fo the whole past time.

Thomas Carlyle

The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.

Tony Kushner

Trying every day to tell the truth is hard. There are harder things, of course-arguably, living with lies and meaninglessness, living in despair is harder, but it's hardship disguised as luxury and easier perhaps to grow accustomed to, since truth is usually the enemy of custom. There are harder things than writing, being President Obama, for instance, and having to deal with House Republicans, or trying to fix the leak at the Fukushima reactor, these are harder, but writing is hard.

Tony Kushner

If you know that life is basically going to be horrendously difficult, at best, and all but unlivable at worst, or possibly even unlivable, do you go on? And the choice to go on is the only thing that I think can be called hope. Because if hope isn't forced to encounter the worst possibility, then it's a lie.

Tony Kushner

Love is the world's infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood.

Tony Dorsett

You can turn the negative around and use it as a motivating force in your lie. One of my biggest desires has always been to prove certain people wrong - to prove to them I can do it despite what they think or say.

Tony Campolo

Lies and distortions can be spread, via the Internet, in an inexpensive way, and the effects are astounding.

Tom Wolfe

A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you're weak.

Tom Waits

i never told the truth so i can never tell a lie...

Tom Waits

I always liked the idea that America is a big facade. We are all insects crawling across on the shiny hood of a Cadillac. We're all looking at the wrapping. But we won't tear the wrapping to see what lies beneath.

Tom Waits

I'll tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past…

Tom Waits

Most people don't care if you're telling them the truth or if you're telling them a lie, as long as they're entertained by it.

Steven Biko

Tradition has it that whenever a group of people has tasted the lovely fruits of wealth, security and prestige it begins to find it more comfortable to believe in the obvious lie and accept that it alone is entitled to privilege.

Steven Erikson

Destiny is a lie. Destiny is justification for atrocity. It is the means by which murderers armour themselves against reprimand. It is a word intended to stand in place of ethics, denying all moral context.

Steve Martin

I would assign every lie a color: yellow when they were innocent, pale blue when they sailed over you like the sky, red because I knew they drew blood. And then there was the black lie. That's the worst of all. A black lie was when I told you the truth.

Steve Martin

I've heard lots of people lie to themselves but they never fool anyone.

Stephen King

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen

Stephen King

Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.

Stephen King

We lie best when we lie to ourselves.