Famous Quotes & Sayings

George Washington

Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains to bring it to light.

George Santayana

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

George Santayana

Truth is one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God. Awe very properly hangs about it, since it is the immovable standard and silent witness of all our memories and assertions; and the past and the future, which in our anxious life are so differently interesting and so differently dark, are one seamless garment for the truth, shining like the sun.

George Santayana

Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.

George Santayana

The truth properly means the sum of all true propositions, what omniscience would assert, the whole ideal system of qualities andrelations which the world has exemplified or will exemplify. The truth is all things seen under the form of eternity.

George McGovern

So, I think that's the centerpiece of morality: Don't lie. But to do that, you have to go a step further and find out what the truth is.

George Orwell

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

George Orwell

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

George Orwell

Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

George Orwell

The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies all this is indispensably necessary.

George Orwell

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

G. Stanley Hall

All possible truth is practical. To ask whether our conception of chair or table corresponds to the real chair or table apart from the uses to which they may be put, is as utterly meaningless and vain as to inquire whether a musical tone is red or yellow. No other conceivable relation than this between ideas and things can exist. The unknowable is what I cannot react upon. The active part of our nature is not only an essential part of cognition itself, but it always has a voice in determining what shall be believed and what rejected.

G. M. Trevelyan

The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that Once, on this earth, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all are gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghosts at cockcrow.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.

Friedrich Nietzsche

So long as the priest, that professional negator, slanderer and poisoner of life, is regarded as a superior type of human being, there cannot be any answer to the question: What is Truth?

Friedrich Nietzsche

In the mountains of truth, you never climb in vain.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The real question is: How much truth can I stand?

Friedrich Nietzsche

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you need to seduce the senses to it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

There is nothing more necessary than truth, and in comparison with it everything else has only secondary value. This absolute will to truth: what is it? Is it the will to not allow ourselves to be deceived? Is it the will not to deceive? One does not want to be deceived, under the supposition that it is injurious, dangerous, or fatal to be deceived.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of a spirit should be measured according to how much of the 'truth' one could still barely endure- or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Here the ways of men divide. If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.

Franz Grillparzer

Do old people always live in the past? What yesterday was firm and true, may not be so today.

Jeanette Winterson

I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.

George Eliot

The very truth hath a colour from the disposition of the utterer.

George Eliot

It is the way with half the truth amidst which we live, that it only haunts us and makes dull pulsations that are never born into sound.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Truth is the highest thing that man may keep.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The truth is I'm getting old, I said. We already are old, she said with a sigh. What happens is that you don't feel it on the inside, but from the outside everybody can see it.

Frank Knight

The truth seems . . . to be that in the ultimate and essential problem the economic factor is relatively superficial and unimportant.

Let truth be a banner big enough to hide the man who holds it up.