Quotes on Truth

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The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don't like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they're 95 percent dead wood.
 
To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.
 
Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.
 
Is this true or only clever? 
 
Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.
 
To compare is the very nature of a mind that is not awake to discover what is true.
 
When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
 
The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
 
Truth is a pathless land.
 
What a picture represents it represents independently of its truth or falsity, by means of its pictorial form.
 
We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
 
The sad truth is the truth is sad.
 
Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.
 
Trivers, pursuing his theory of the emotions to its logical conclusion, notes that in a world of walking lie detectors the best strategy is to believe your own lies. You can’t leak your hidden intentions if you don’t think they are your intentions. According to his theory of self-deception, the conscious mind sometimes hides the truth from itself the better to hide it from others. But the truth is useful, so it should be registered somewhere in the mind, walled off from the parts that interact with other people.
 
Since we can never know anything for sure, it is simply not worth searching for certainty; but it is well worth searching for truth; and we do this chiefly by searching for mistakes, so that we have to correct them.
 
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
 
Every man is fully satisfied that there is such a thing as truth, or he would not ask any question.
 
The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
 
There is no false sensation.
 
Truth is not something that can be followed; it has to be discovered. You cannot find truth through any book or through any accumulation of experience.
 
The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.
 
The essential thing is not that there be many truths in a work, but that no truth be abused.
 
A lie told often enough becomes the truth.
 
Our aim as scientists is objective truth; more truth, more interesting truth, more intelligible truth. We cannot reasonably aim at certainty. Once we realize that human knowledge is fallible, we realize also that we can never be completely certain that we have not made a mistake.
 
If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.
 
The truth is so precious that it must be guarded by a vast bodyguard of lies.
 
Believe nothing you hear, and only half of what you see.
 
Truth is what works.
 
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
 
Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.
 
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
 
Only what you hide is profound, is true.
 
Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.
 
Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.
 
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
 
There is no such thing as truth. People who really know what happened aren't talking. And the people who don't have a clue, you can't shut them up.
 
36 quotes