Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Charles Fort

But Truth is that besides which there is nothing: nothing to modify it, nothing to question it, nothing to form an exception: the all-inclusive, the complete - By Truth, I mean the Universal.

Charles Bukowski

There is nothing as boring as the truth.

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.

Aristotle

The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.

Ben Kingsley

Sometimes it's right to do the wrong things and right now is one of those times.

Ben Jonson

Tell troth and shame the devil.

Ben Jonson

Truth is man's proper good, and the only immortal thing was given to our mortality to use.

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.

When the truth does not get printed, damage is done.

David Hewson

The truth about the Costa del Sol is that what endures, what is worthwhile, is what is Spanish.

Samuel Butler

There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth.

Samuel Butler

For truth is precious and divine, too rich a pearl for carnal swine.

Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.

We must never throw away a bushel of truth because it happens to contain a few grains of chaff.

I like to think I'm not a narcissist, but truth be told, we all have those sides to our character.

Noam Chomsky

The truth is, I have absolutely no professional credentials - literally, which is why I'm teaching at MIT.

The truth is, the 'Fortune' 500 prefer lobbying to campaigning.

Athol Fugard

The act of witnessing is important to me; somebody's got to tell the truth, you know what I mean?