Famous Quotes & Sayings

Iain Banks

Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place - and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all - so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.

Hugh Miller

No true geologist holds by the development hypothesis;-it has been resigned to sciolists and smatterers;-and there is but one other alternative. They began to be, through the miracle of creation. From the evidence furnished by these rocks we are shut down either to belief in miracle, or to something else infinitely harder of reception, and as thoroughly unsupported by testimony as it is contrary to experience. Hume is at length answered by the severe truths of the stony science.

Hugh Walpole

In all science, error precedes the truth, and it is better it should go first than last.

Hosea Ballou

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

Hosea Ballou

Falsehood is cowardice, the truth courage....

Horace

Receive, dear friend, the truths I teach, So shalt thou live beyond the reach Of adverse Fortune's pow'r; Not always tempt the distant deep, Nor always timorously creep Along the treach'rous shore.

Horace

My cares and my inquiries are for decency and truth, and in this I am wholly occupied.

Hannah Arendt

the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed.

Hannah Arendt

... whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about. There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Absolute truth belongs to Thee alone.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Pure truth is for God alone.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Did the Almighty, holding in his right hand truth, and in his left hand search after truth, deign to proffer me the one I might prefer, in all humility, but without hesitation, I should request search after truth.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

The search for truth is more precious than its possession.

Gore Vidal

There are certain truths so true that they are practically unbelievable.

Giambattista Vico

Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Perhaps no one as yet has been truthful enough about what "truthfulness" is.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The mouth may lie, alright, but the face it makes nonetheless tells the truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Antithesis is the narrow gateway through which error most prefers to worm its way towards truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

On every parable you ride to every truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The unselective knowledge drive resembles the indiscriminate sexual drive--signs of vulgarity!

Friedrich Nietzsche

The drive toward knowledge has a moral origin.

Friedrich Nietzsche

What the philosopher is seeking is not truth, but rather the metamorphosis of the world into man.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Look not into the sun! Even the moon is too bright for your nocturnal eyes!

Friedrich Nietzsche

Probability but no truth, facility but no freedom--it is owing to these two fruits that the tree of knowledge cannot be confused with the tree of life.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Could truth perhaps be a woman who has reasons for not permitting her reasons to be seen? Could her name perhaps be--to speak Greek--Baubo?... Oh, those Greeks! They understood how to live: to do that it is necessary to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore the appearance, to believe in forms, in tones, in words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial--out of profundity!

Friedrich Nietzsche

Few serve truth in truth because only few have the pure will to be just, and of those again very few have the strength to be just.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Women are constituted in such a way that all truth (regarding men, love, children, society, the purpose of life) disgusts them, and in such a way that they try to revenge themselves on anyone who opens their eyes.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It is not when it is dangerous to tell the truth that its advocates are hardest to find, but when it is boring.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Error has made animals into men; is truth in a position to make men into animals again?

Friedrich Nietzsche

We are all afraid of the truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The will to truth is merely the longing for a stable world.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith... include the following: that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself.