truth
Quotations
Quotations on the topic of ‘truth’ from all listed authors (click on the ‘click to view listing’ links to view each quote in full).
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“The Dharma is the truth that all natures are pure.” -Bodhidharma
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“I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.” -Audre Lorde
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“Everybody now admits that apartheid was wrong, and all I did was tell the people who wanted to know where I come from how we lived in South Africa. I just told the world the truth. And if my truth then becomes political, I can’t do anything about that.” -Miriam Makeba
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“Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.” -Louis Kahn
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“I believe in God, family, truth between people, the power of love.” -Michael Landon
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“Any person seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections of natural reason, will fly to revealed truth with the greatest avidity.” -David Hume
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“Always tell the truth – it’s the easiest thing to remember.” -David Mamet
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“The truth is really an ambition which is beyond us.” -Peter Ustinov
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“Because you’re not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.” -Madeleine L’Engle
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“God help us from those who believe that they are the sole possessors of truth. How we manage at times to agree willingly to become prisoners within our own minds and souls of beliefs and ideas on which we can never be flexible.” -King Hussein I
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“Because no matter what you say in life, the truth will always be the truth. You know when someone is telling the truth, you look in the eyes. I have a tendency to believe people.” -Jean Claude Van Damme
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“I’m one of those people you hate because of genetics. It is the truth.” -Brad Pitt
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“To become properly acquainted with a truth, we must first have disbelieved it, and disputed against it.” -Novalis
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“Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.” -Sid Caesar
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“For truth has such a face and such a mien, as to be loved needs only to be seen.” -John Dryden
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“To tell the truth is revolutionary.” -Antonio Gramsci
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“No matter how difficult and painful it may be, nothing sounds as good to the soul as the truth.” -Martha Beck
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“Argument is conclusive, but it does not remove doubt, so that the mind may rest in the sure knowledge of the truth, unless it finds it by the method of experiment.” -Roger Bacon
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“I have followed holiness, I have taught truth, and I have been most in the main things not that I thought the things concerning our times little, but that I thought none could do anything to purpose in God’s great and public matters, till they were right in their conditions.” -Donald Cargill
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“Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.” -Katherine Mansfield
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“Let us be a little humble let us think that the truth may not perhaps be entirely with us.” -Jawaharlal Nehru
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“I was not out to paint beautiful pictures even painting good pictures was not important to me. I wanted only to help the truth burst forth.” -Alice Miller
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“The time has come to tell the truth about the corruption of the government employee unions in this country.” -Newt Gingrich
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“Don’t try to tear down other people’s religion about their ears, Build up your own perfect structure of truth, and invite your listeners to enter in and enjoy it’s glories.” -Brigham Young
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“People say they love truth, but in reality they want to believe that which they love is true.” -Robert J. Ringer
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“Somewhere between the intellectual idea of why we’re attracted to certain things and the pragmatic reality is some form of ever-evolving truth.” -Billy Corgan
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“To me, horror is when I see somebody lying. I mean a person I know. A friend. And he’s telling me something that I accept. And then suddenly, as he or she is telling it, there’s something that gives them away. They’re not telling me the truth.” -Jonathan Frid
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“Wallow too much in sensitivity and you can’t deal with life, or the truth.” -Neal Boortz
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“It is a simple but sometimes forgotten truth that the greatest enemy to present joy and high hopes is the cultivation of retrospective bitterness.” -Robert Menzies
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“Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.” -Marquis de Sade
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“If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.” -Billy Wilder
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“This is the way of peace: Overcome evil with good, falsehood with truth, and hatred with love.” -Peace Pilgrim
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“Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility.” -Hu Shih
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“Death comes in a flash, and that’s the truth of it, the person’s gone in less than 24 frames of film.” -Martin Scorsese
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“Happiness is spiritual, born of truth and love. It is unselfish therefore it cannot exist alone, but requires all mankind to share it.” -Mary Baker Eddy
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“I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.” -Brian Eno
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“If we bring not the good courage of minds covetous of truth, and truth only, prepared to hear all things, and decide upon all things, according to evidence, we should do more wisely to sit down contented in ignorance, than to bestir ourselves only to reap disappointment.” -Frances Wright
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“Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.” -Umberto Eco
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“There is little more powerful than when truth joins action.” -Bryant H. McGill
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“The truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I’m looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling.” -Robert M. Pirsig
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“Be calm in arguing for fierceness makes error a fault, and truth discourtesy.” -George Herbert
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“If you tell the truth about how you’re feeling, it becomes funny.” -Larry David
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“The said truth is that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” -Jeremy Bentham
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“The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense, the third good humor, and the fourth wit.” -William Temple
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“If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you more open to my ideas. And if I can persuade you to laugh at the particular point I make, by laughing at it you acknowledge its truth.” -John Cleese
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“The truth doesn’t hurt unless it ought to.” -B. C. Forbes
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“The truth is that our way of celebrating the Christmas season does spring from myriad cultures and sources, from St. Nicholas to Coca-Cola advertising campaigns.” -Richard Roeper
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“The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.” -Emile M. Cioran
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“The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.” -Edmond de Goncourt
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“You can hate me. You can go out there and say anything you want about me, But you will love me later because I told you the truth.” -Mary J. Blige
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“Words can be said in bitterness and anger, and often there seems to be an element of truth in the nastiness. And words don’t go away, they just echo around.” -Jane Goodall
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“A judgment about life has no meaning except the truth of the one who speaks last, and the mind is at ease only at the moment when everyone is shouting at once and no one can hear a thing.” -Georges Bataille
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“It is unfortunate, considering that enthusiasm moves the world, that so few enthusiasts can be trusted to speak the truth.” -Arthur Balfour
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“Our job is to represent the truth of human nature, whether you’re playing a tender love story that’s set in a coffee shop or whether you’re in ‘The Avengers,’ which is set in a Manhattan which is exploding.” -Tom Hiddleston
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“I see that the path of progress has never taken a straight line, but has always been a zigzag course amid the conflicting forces of right and wrong, truth and error, justice and injustice, cruelty and mercy.” -Kelly Miller
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“Truth is in things, and not in words.” -Herman Melville
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“To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth.” -Auguste Rodin
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“I don’t want to tell President Obama how to make a speech. He’s a much better speech maker than I am. But I think always to tell the truth in a sometimes blatant way, even though it might be temporarily unpopular, is the best approach.” -Jimmy Carter
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“Truth should not be forced it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.” -John Updike
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“For above all things Love means sweetness, and truth, and measure yea, loyalty to the loved one and to your word. And because of this I dare not meddle with so high a matter.” -Marie de France
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“Remember, as long as you live, that nothing but strict truth can carry you through the world, with either your conscience or your honor unwounded.” -Lord Chesterfield
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“The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.” -Norman Schwarzkopf
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“It shows the truth – that the real meaning of a word is only as powerful or harmless as the emotion behind it.” -Sarah Silverman
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“I want everyone to tell me the truth, even if it costs him his job.” -Samuel Goldwyn
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“The first casualty when war comes is truth.” -Hiram Johnson
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“By means of microscopic observation and astronomical projection the lotus flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the universe and an agent whereby we may perceive Truth.” -Yukio Mishima
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“I believe that the people, instead of pretty lies, should be told the truth, no matter how ugly it may be. What can we do, destiny hasn’t been kind to us but, with the help of God, we will prevail.” -Alija Izetbegovic
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“Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.” -Will Durant
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“Listen friends, you have to face the truth: You are never going to be rich… The system is rigged in favor of the few, and your name is not among them, not now and not ever.” -Michael Moore
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“Logic is the technique by which we add conviction to truth.” -Jean de la Bruyere
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“Do the things you know, and you shall learn the truth you need to know.” -Louisa May Alcott
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“One of the sublimest things in the world is plain truth.” -Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
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“Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it.” -Franz Kafka
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“Philosophy is a kind of journey, ever learning yet never arriving at the ideal perfection of truth.” -Albert Pike
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“Fame – a few words upon a tombstone, and the truth of those not to be depended on.” -Christian Nestell Bovee
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“It is difficult to discriminate the voice of truth from amid the clamor raised by heated partisans.” -Friedrich Schiller
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“The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.” -Jorge Luis Borges
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“Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.” -Wallace Stevens
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“Humor is always based on a modicum of truth. Have you ever heard a joke about a father-in-law?” -Dick Clark
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“Telling the truth, and confronting the challenge, is what politics is about.” -Johann Lamont
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“The Bible must be considered as the great source of all the truth by which men are to be guided in government as well as in all social transactions.” -Noah Webster
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“Scientific truth is marvelous, but moral truth is divine and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light has found the lost paradise.” -Horace Mann
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“Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you.” -Anne Lamott
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“Everything you add to the truth subtracts from the truth.” -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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“Even if I accepted that Jesus – like almost every other prophet on record – was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected.” -Christopher Hitchens
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“A rusty nail placed near a faithful compass, will sway it from the truth, and wreck the argosy.” -Walter Scott
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“Sometimes I dread the truth of the lines I say. But the dread must never show.” -Vivien Leigh
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“They whom truth and wisdom lead, can gather honey from a weed.” -William Cowper
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“While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the real truth is that in the presence of his large financial contributors, he is a moral coward.” -Al Gore
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“In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.” -Walter Cronkite
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“The truth is, I had always wanted to be a comedian, but I really didn’t have that kind of personality, and it’s a terrifying thing to say.” -Jerry Seinfeld
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“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.” -Jean-Luc Godard
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“You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.” -Maimonides
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“Most people live in a myth and grow violently angry if anyone dares to tell them the truth about themselves.” -Robert Anton Wilson
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“The pursuit of truth will set you free even if you never catch up with it.” -Clarence Darrow
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“All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.” -David Herbert Lawrence
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“Man’s mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth.” -Desiderius Erasmus
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“A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.” -Theodor Adorno
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“Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.” -John Stuart Mill
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“There are sadistic scientists who hurry to hunt down errors instead of establishing the truth.” -Marie Curie
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“A lot of people in the media, and some everyday people, really aren’t in search of the truth. They’re in search of something worse than that. Money, yeah. I think the media’s the kind of a thing where the truth doesn’t win, because it’s no fun. The truth’s no fun.” -Jack White
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“I pefer an ugly truth to a pretty lie. If someone is telling me the truth that is when I will give my heart.” -Shakira
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“But if you want to know the truth, the weirdest thing that has happened has been my discovery that people who attend the conventions are filled with love.” -William Shatner
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“The price of being close to the President is delivering bad news. You fail him if you don’t tell him the truth. Others won’t do it.” -Donald Rumsfeld
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“We all have a social mask, right? We put it on, we go out, put our best foot forward, our best image. But behind that social mask is a personal truth, what we really, really believe about who we are and what we’re capable of.” -Phil McGraw
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“I’ll continue to try and balance like a circus act. And I will just fight to always tell the truth. Even if it’s difficult.” -Katy Perry
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“The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.” -Susan Sontag
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“Truth is confirmed by inspection and delay falsehood by haste and uncertainty.” -Tacitus
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“Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes
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“Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.” -Hypatia
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“Many speak the truth when they say that they despise riches, but they mean the riches possessed by others.” -Charles Caleb Colton
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“The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.” -Terry Pratchett
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“From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.” -Tom Stoppard
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“When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.” -Otto von Bismarck
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“You never find yourself until you face the truth.” -Pearl Bailey
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“In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress.” -Leonard Cohen
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“The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth.” -Charles Lamb
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“Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.” -Publilius Syrus
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“Without the way, there is no going without the truth, there is no knowing without the life, there is no living.” -Thomas a Kempis
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“Nothing does reason more right, than the coolness of those that offer it: For Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders, than from the arguments of its opposers.” -William Penn
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“A priest is he who lives solely in the realm of the invisible, for whom all that is visible has only the truth of an allegory.” -Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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“Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.” -Arthur Conan Doyle
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“So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.” -Nicolaus Copernicus
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“What is man’s ultimate direction in life? It is to look for love, truth, virtue, and beauty.” -Shinichi Suzuki
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“Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth to see it like it is, and tell it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth.” -Richard M. Nixon
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“I’m actually a very honest person, and sometimes I end up like, ‘Man, I said too much.’ It’s hard for me not to tell the truth when you ask me.” -Drake
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“I guess rumors are more exciting than the truth.” -Venus Williams
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“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.” -Henry A. Wallace
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“A bad manner spoils everything, even reason and justice a good one supplies everything, gilds a No, sweetens a truth, and adds a touch of beauty to old age itself.” -Baltasar Gracian
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“It is a great mystery that though the human heart longs for Truth, in which alone it finds liberation and delight, the first reaction of human beings to Truth is one of hostility and fear!” -Anthony de Mello
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“Where all is but dream, reasoning and arguments are of no use, truth and knowledge nothing.” -John Locke
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“I read less and less. I have not forgiven books for their failure to tell me the truth and make me happy.” -Mason Cooley
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“Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.” -Simone Weil
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“How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there’s no help in the truth.” -Sophocles
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“But one of the things I learned is that when you fight for something you believe in and you tell the truth and you do your best, you can always hold your head up high and no one can take that away from you.” -Vanessa Kerry
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“Enhance and intensify one’s vision of that synthesis of truth and beauty which is the highest and deepest reality.” -Ovid
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“To have the truth in your possession you can be found guilty, sentenced to death.” -Peter Tosh
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“The greatest truth is honesty, and the greatest falsehood is dishonesty.” -Abu Bakr
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“My illness has taught me something about the nature of humanity, love, brotherhood and relationships that I never understood, and probably never would have. So, from that standpoint, there is some truth and good in everything.” -Lee Atwater
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“Clouds and darkness surround us, yet Heaven is just, and the day of triumph will surely come, when justice and truth will be vindicated.” -Mary Todd Lincoln
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“Rumi, who is one of the greatest Persian poets, said that the truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.” -Mohsen Makhmalbaf
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“The truth is in nature, and I shall prove it.” -Paul Cezanne
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“Heresies are experiments in man’s unsatisfied search for truth.” -H. G. Wells
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“The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.” -Virginia Woolf
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“The chief ingredients in the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding.” -Joseph Addison
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“No one should ever say that it was my ignorance if I did or showed forth anything however small according to God’s good pleasure but let this be your conclusion and let it so be thought, that – as is the perfect truth – it was the gift of God.” -Saint Patrick
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“It’s essential to tell the truth at all times. This will reduce life’s pain. Lying distorts reality. All forms of distorted thinking must be corrected.” -John Bradshaw
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“The truth is the Super Bowl long ago became more than just a football game. It’s part of our culture like turkey at Thanksgiving and lights at Christmas, and like those holidays beyond their meaning, a factor in our economy.” -Bob Schieffer
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“Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.” -Laurence J. Peter
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“To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.” -Milan Kundera
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“Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said.” -Mel Brooks
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“Justice is rather the activity of truth, than a virtue in itself. Truth tells us what is due to others, and justice renders that due. Injustice is acting a lie.” -Horace Walpole
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“I want to be distinguished from the rest to tell the truth, a friend to all mankind is not a friend for me.” -Moliere
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“I cringe at backstory. Because it never quite explains or gets into some psychological thing that is never quite right and never quite the truth and who knows why someone is some way.” -Steve Martin
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“My dad raised me with some good advice: ‘Always tell the truth. Always shoot from the hip. You might not have many friends, but you’ll never have enemies, because people will always know where you’re coming from.’” -Pink
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“As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.” -Josh Billings
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“If we are to take for the criterion of truth the majority of suffrages, they ought to be gotten from those philosophic and patriotic citizens who cultivate their reason.” -James Madison
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“Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams.” -W. Somerset Maugham
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“All religion seems to need to prove that it’s the only truth. And that’s where it turns demonic. Because that’s when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.” -John Shelby Spong
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“Myths and creeds are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth in the world.” -Ansel Adams
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“Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.” -George Saunders
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“There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.” -John Kenneth Galbraith
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“There are certain persons for whom pure Truth is a poison.” -Andre Maurois
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“What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.” -John Keats
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“If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.” -E. O. Wilson
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“Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth.” -Thomas Huxley
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“The truth doesn’t have to do with cruelty, the truth has to do with mercy.” -Ken Kesey
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“You cannot do anything without God.It’s a profound and elemental truth. Not, you cannot do most things without God. You will not be able to do anything that you want, truly, in fulfillment, without God.” -Marco Rubio
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“Humor is something that thrives between man’s aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth.” -Victor Borge
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