Famous Quotes & Sayings

C. S. Lewis

There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one.

Elizabeth Bowen

Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

Elizabeth Bowen

What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.

Elizabeth Bowen

... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Reformers who are always compromising, have not yet grasped the idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Truth is the only safe ground to stand on.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Every truth we see is one to give to the world, not to keep to ourselves alone.

Abraham Lincoln

I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him.

Abraham Lincoln

I am nothing, truth is everything.

Antisthenes

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.

Barbara Kingsolver

Gilbert has established herself as a straight-up storyteller who dares us into adventures of worldly discovery, and this novel stands as a winning next act. THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS is a bracing homage to the many natures of genius and the inevitable progress of ideas, in a world that reveals its best truths to the uncommonly patient minds.

Barbara Kingsolver

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

Babe Paley

I have seldom known a person who deserted the truth in trifles and then could be trusted in matters of importance.

Baruch Spinoza

Many errors, of a truth, consist merely in the application of the wrong names of things. For if a man says that the lines which are drawn from the centre of the circle to the circumference are not equal, he understands by the circle, at all events for the time, something else than mathematicians understand by it.

Baruch Spinoza

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

Arthur Koestler

The ultimate truth is penultimately a falsehood.

Arthur Koestler

The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.

Deng Xiaoping

Seek truth from facts.

Democritus

Nature . . . has buried truth deep in the bottom of the sea.

Denis Diderot

I can be expected to look for truth but not to find it.

Edgar Allan Poe

The greater amount of truth is impulsively uttered; thus the greater amount is spoken, not written.

Edgar Allan Poe

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

Edgar Allan Poe

Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear.

Elbert Hubbard

When we really live truth, we will cease to talk about it.

Elbert Hubbard

Life is a paradox. Every truth has its counterpart which contradicts it; and every philosopher supplies the logic his own undoing.

Elbert Hubbard

Live truth instead of professing it.

Edward Abbey

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.

Aristotle

It would be wrong to put friendship before the truth.

Aristotle

We do not know a truth without knowing its cause.

Aristotle

A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.

Aristotle

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

Aristotle

It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible.

Aristotle

Liars when they speak the truth are not believed.