truth Quotes

“He came in to demand an answer and I told him the truth. That I have fought with myself over that night, one half of me swearing blind that I tied a simple slipknot, the other half convinced that I tied the Langford double. I can never know for sure.”

“I overcame my fear and questioned the Glorious One and said, Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook ... and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him, for I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name of Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, Child? I said, Lord, Thou knowest how much I understand. But I said also (for the truth constrained me), Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.”

“We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from true, we had suddenly learned to see.”

“The concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression.”

“It’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.”

“My father would say to me, ‘Any organization which works for peace, I will join. If you want to resolve a dispute or come out from conflict, the very first thing is to speak the truth. If you have a headache and tell the doctor you have a stomachache, how can the doctor help? You must speak the truth. The truth will abolish fear.‘”

“I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”

“The face of Truth is hidden by a golden disk. O Pushan (Effulgent Being)! Uncover (Thy face) that I, the worshipper of Truth, may behold Thee.”

“I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.”

“Ask no questions, and you’ll be told no lies.”

“Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation.”

“‘The only true law is that which leads to freedom,’ Jonathan said. ‘There is no other.’”

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

“For in spite of his lonely past, Jonathan Seagull was born to be an instructor, and his own way of demonstrating love was to give something of the truth that he had seen to a gull who asked only a chance to see truth for himself.”

“My answer is simply, that it is because I am not an adversary of democracy, that I have sought to speak of democracy in all sincerity. Men will not accept truth at the hands of their enemies, and truth is seldom offered to them by their friends: for this reason I have spoken it.”

“I wish someone had told me this simple but confusing truth: Even when everything’s going your way you can still be sad. Or anxious. Or uncomfortably numb. Because you can’t always control your brain or your emotions even when things are perfect.”

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”

“Mom pointed her chopsticks at me. ‘You see?’ she said. ‘Right there. That’s exactly what I’m saying. You’re way too easily embarrassed. Your father and I are who we are. Accept it.’ ‘And what am I supposed to tell people about my parents?’ ‘Just tell the truth,’ Mom said. ‘That’s simple enough.‘”

″‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit. ‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.‘”

“Oh, how hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth!”

“I lifted up my hands and called upon eternal truth, not with words but with tears.”

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

“I have seen the truth; I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the power of living on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind.”

“All the things he had said to make himself believe that she was good and kind and that her side was really the right side sounded to him silly now.”

“The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”

“If once one has recognised the truth and seen it, you know that it is the truth and that there is no other and there cannot be, whether you are asleep or awake.”

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”

“If he is old enough to ask the question he is old enough to receive true answers. I am not putting the thoughts into his head, but helping him unfold those already there. These children are wiser than we are...”

“So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand.”

“And if you can’t pick what you do or think about, then maybe you aren’t really real, you know? Maybe I’m just a lie that I’m whispering to myself.”

“We are wired for connection. But the key is that, in any given moment of it, it has to be real.”

“Stop walking through the world looking for confirmation that you don’t belong. You will always find it because you’ve made that your mission. Stop scouring people’s faces for evidence that you’re not enough. You will always find it because you’ve made that your goal. True belonging and self-worth are not goods; we don’t negotiate their value with the world. The truth about who we are lives in our hearts. Our call to courage is to protect our wild heart against constant evaluation, especially your own. No one belongs here more than you.”

“This, O men of Athens, is the truth and the whole truth; I have concealed nothing, I have dissembled nothing.”

″‘That is my right. I am your grandfather. And this is my property.’ ‘I am your grandson. You should tell me the truth. You’re not setting a very good example.‘”

“I never spoke more plainly in my life. Try believing the evidence instead of insisting that the cameras must be at fault because what they saw was not what you expected.”

“You’d think solving mysteries would bring you closure, that closing the loop would comfort and quiet your mind. But it never does. The truth always disappoints.”

“Adults think they’re wielding power, but really power is wielding them”

“God only is wise; and by his answer he intends to show that the wisdom of men is worth little or nothing; he is not speaking of Socrates, he is only using my name by way of illustration, as if he said, He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.”

“They ring true and that is all that matters the truth.”

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

“I know that my plainness of speech makes them hate me, and what is their hatred but a proof that I am speaking the truth?”

“The truth can’t be stated in English any more than Beethoven’s Fifth can be.”

“He doesn’t know what the truth means, so he does not even know how he lies. ”

“Do you know that it cost us less to recruit and use up a real snuff whore than it does to set up and run a virtual equivalent format? Real human flesh is cheaper than a machine. It’s the axiomatic truth of our times.”

“His Grace has been a secret since he was a child, Kat. His mother knew he’d only be used as a tool, if the truth came out.”

“Even if you kill an enemy, if it is not based on what you have learned it is not the true Way.”

“Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.”

“This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

“If we are true to ourselves, we can not be false to anyone.”

“This above all: to thine own self be true.”

“I don’t want to be cool. I want to grab her by the neck and shake her and scream at her to stop treating me like dirt. She didn’t even bother to find out the truth – what kind of friend is that?”

“By innocence I swear, and by my youth, I have one heart, one bosom and one truth, And that no woman has, nor never none Shall mistress be of it, save I alone.”

“A sudden light burst in on me; these hints alone gave me the first glimpse of truth; I had discovered the key to the cipher.”

“Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love.”

“You can’t handle the truth. You can’t handle the sad but historic reality.”

“—Corpus Domini nostri. Could it be? He knelt there sinless and timid: and he would hold upon his tongue the host and God would enter his purified body.—In vitam eternam. Amen. Another life! A life of grace and virtue and happiness! It was true. It was not a dream from which he would wake. The past was past.—Corpus Domini nostri. The ciborium had come to him.”

“The world can show you the truth, but no one can force you to accept it.”

“Romeo: I dreamt a dream tonight. Mercutio: And so did I. Romeo: Well, what was yours? Mercutio: That dreamers often lie. Romeo: In bed asleep while they do dream things true.”

“The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others.”

“The truth is that the universe has been answering you all of your life, but you cannot receive the answers unless you are awake.”

“There is a truth deep down inside of you that has been waiting for you to discover it, and that truth is this: you deserve all good things life has to offer.”

“He felt that he should say it one last time and really mean it. ‘I’m very sorry, Shmuel,’ he said in a clear voice. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t tell him the truth. I’ve never let a friend down like that before. Shmuel, I’m ashamed of myself.‘”

″‘What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.’ I didn’t think that this was true, […] but it was like every other thought and belief of Finny’s: it should have been true. So I didn’t argue.”

“Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak . . . ”

“Don’t ever get angry at a man for stating the truth.”

“Just in proportion as the desire grows, our fear lest it should be a mercenary desire will die away and finally be recognized as an absurdity. But probably this will not, for most of us, happen in a day; poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience, as gradually as the tide lifts a grounded ship.”

“Now, if we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us, but not yet attached to the true object, and will even appear as the rival of that object.”

“By the time you figured it out it would be too late”

“If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened?”

“If we worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true really is true, then there would be little hope for advance.”

“His mind reeled. Now, empowered to ask questions of utmost rudeness-and promised answers-he could, conceivably (though it was almost unimaginable), ask someone, some adult, his father perhaps: “Do you lie?” But he would have no way of knowing if the answer he received was true.”

“Let us never forget that such a truth as this cannot be learned by rote as one would learn the facts of physical science. They must be experienced before we can really know them.”

“The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are.”

“The way we live ought to manifest the truth of what we believe. A messy life speaks of a messy and incoherent faith.”

Where the Jedi courted power, the Sith lusted after it; where the Jedi believed they knew the truth, the Sith possessed it. Owned by the dark side, they ultimately became their knowledge.

“Truth. It feels cool, like water washing over my sticky-hot body. Cooling a heat that’s been burning me up all my life. Truth, I say inside my head again, just for that feeling.”

“Happy is he who has the pure truth in him. He will regret no sacrifice that keeps it.”

“Lesson learned? When people say, ‘You really, really must’ do something, it means you don’t really have to. No one ever says, ‘You really, really must deliver the baby during labor.’ When it’s true, it doesn’t need to be said.”

“It is my mind which thinks, and the judgment of my mind is the only searchlight that can find the truth.”

“By living a life based on wisdom and truth, one can discover the divinity of the soul, its union to the universe, the supreme peace and contentment which comes from satisfying the inner drive for self discovery.”

“True knowledge comes from the upward path which leads to the eternal fire; error, defeat and death result from following the lower path of worldly attachment.”

“I was speaking loudly, I realized, and I sounded almost angry, certainly righteous, but it was such a relief. I’d started with a lie—the cat box—and turned that into a surprising burst of pure truth, and I realized why criminals talked too much, because it feels so good to tell your story to a stranger.”

“Suffering in search of truth gives true meaning to the truth.”

Tell me I’m clever, Tell me I’m kind, Tell me I’m talented, Tell me I’m cute, Tell me I’m sensitive, Graceful and Wise Tell me I’m perfect. But tell me the TRUTH.

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

“I am not so infatuate as to grasp The shadow when I hold the substance fast.”

“You get to tell the truth about what you love and who you are and what you dream about.”

“It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times.”

“The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”

“Yea, I am free, strong in the strength of truth.”

“I used to believe, in the deepest part of me, that there was something irreparably wrong with me. And love was a lie. Now I’m beginning to see that love is the truth, and the darkness is a lie.”

“Knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge—broad, deep knowledge—is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low.”

“But I opened my mind and came to appreciate that even in fiction there can be morsels of truth.”

“By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the...field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.”

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”

“When you love yourself enough to stand in your truth no matter what the cost, everyone benefits.”

“Jo had absorbed many of her parents’ philosophies, and one of them was the belief that children deserved to be told the truth as much as possible.”

“He gave me the only answer he could—that history proved time and again it was difficult to change what people believed as truth.”

“HOW COULD anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error?

“Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?”

“Whatever truth we feel compelled to withhold, no matter how unthinkable it is to imagine ourselves telling it, not to is a way of spiritually holding our breath. You can only do it for so long.”

“I had build up false pictures in my mind and sat before them. I had never had the courage to demand the truth.”

“All shine, and no substance! (Turning to Cates) Bert, whenever you see something bright, shining, perfect-seeming—all gold, with purple spots—look behind the paint! And if it’s a lie—show it up for what it really is!”

″ ‘Son,’ his father said, leaning forward. ‘Stories don’t always have happy endings.’ ”

“I make no manner of doubt that you threw a very diamond of truth at me, though you see it hit me so directly in the face that it wasn’t exactly appreciated, at first.”

“There’s no one thing that’s true. It’s all true.”

“It is so difficult—at least, I find it difficult—to understand people who speak the truth.”

“What a challenge it is, to fit on the old armor again! To test the steel of our Truth against the blasphemies of Science!”

“Reason is man’s instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man’s instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.”

″ ‘You know that is not true,’ the monster said. ‘You know that your truth, the one that you hide, Conor O’Malley, is the thing you are most afraid of.’ ”

“Imagination can’t create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions. So when we think we’ve escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it’s really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable.”

“When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her though I know she lies, That she might think me some untutor’d youth, Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.”

“Watch your thoughts. Every thought accepted as true is sent by your brain to your solar plexus – your abdominal brain – and is brought into your world as a reality.”

“Sometimes, Miss Jarmond, it’s not easy to bring back the past. There are unpleasant surprises. The truth is harder than ignorance.”

“The truth is you can acquire any quality you want by acting as though you already have it.”

“Even in the vast and mysterious reaches of the sea we are brought back to the fundamental truth that nothing lives to itself.”

“Before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable.”

“All stories are true.”

“The elections were faked and they believe the results.”

“Martha: Truth and illusion, George; you don’t know the difference. George: No, but we must carry on as though we did. Martha: Amen.”

“I made it the mantra of those days; when I paused before yet another series of switchbacks or skidded down knee-jarring slopes, when patches of flesh peeled off my feet along with my socks, when I lay alone and lonely in my tent at night I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth that it was true, I said it anyway: No one.”

“Honey: Oh, isn’t this lovely. Nick: Yes indeed…very handsome. ”

“George: Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf,… Martha: I...am...George...I...am...”

“And so tonight we’re going to make the lie true. ”

“Call Me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.”

“Those who truly love us will never knowingly ask us to be other than we are”

“But compassion is a deeper thing that waits beyond the tension of choosing sides. Compassion, in practice, does not require us to give up the truth of what we feel or the truth of our reality. Nor does it allow us to minimize the humanity of those who hurt us. Rather, we are asked to know ourselves enough that we can stay open to the truth of others, even when their truth or their inability to live up to their truth has hurt us.”

“We need to stop giving people excuses not to believe in God. You’ve probably heard the expression ‘I believe in God, just not organized religion’. I don’t think people would say that if the church truly lived like we are called to live.”

“In actuality, misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything. So, when feeling miserable, we must look wider than what hurts. When feeling a splinter, we must, while trying to remove it, remember there is a body that is not splinter, and a spirit that is not splinter, and a world that is not splinter.”

“Anything or anyone that asks you to be other than yourself is not holy, but is trying only to fill its own need.”

“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…”

″ African-Americans themselves in certain parts join with Euro-Americans, to keep out of school, teachers who may be bold enough to teach the truth as it is. They usually say the races here are getting along amicably now, and we do not want these peaceful relationships disturbed by teaching of new political thought. What they mean to say with respect to the peaceful relation of the races, then, is that the African-Americans have been terrorized to the extent that they are afraid even to discuss political matters publicly.”

″‘(Dr. Breed) said science was going to discover the basic secret of life someday,’ the bartender put in.”

“I am not in the humor for it.”

″‘That may be true,’ said Reason gravely, ‘but you had the courage to try.‘”

“Soul to heaven, body to earth”

“Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about-quite apart from what I would like it to be about-or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.”

The truth is the light and the light is the truth.

“Self knowledge is the basis of true knowledge.”

“You find that the injustice that created a wound is no longer true, right now, in this moment.”

If you confront anyone who has lied with the truth, he will usually admit it - often out of sheer surprise. It is only necessary to guess right to produce your effect.

“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue.

“Basic truths cannot change and once a man of insight expresses one of them it is never necessary, no matter how much the world changes, to reformulate them. This is immutable, true everywhere, throughout all time, for all men and all nations.”

“Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is youer than you.”

“I intend to keep writing stories that piss people off, that tell the particular kind of truth I think is valid, that will make me feel more and more like a Writer of Stature, Which I honestly think I am, really, I mean it, I don’t doubt it for a second dammit, so stop giggling!”

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!”

“It should have been you two. I’m not pretending I didn’t always see that. Of course I did, as far back as I can remember. But I kept you apart. I’m not asking you to forgive me for that. That’s not what I’m after just now. What I want is for you to put it right. Put right what I messed up for you.”

“I could handle the truth. I would listen to its heartbreaks and I would mourn the world as I knew it because that’s the kind of girl I was, and then I would pick my pretty self off the floor and do what I was supposed to do. Just like I always did.”

“I would have been a Bokononist then, if there had been anyone to teach me the bittersweet lies of Bokonon.”

“My trouble was I took everything Buddy Willard told me as the honest-to-God truth.”

“The foundational truth is that work is good. If God does it, it must be all right. Work has dignity: there can be nothing degrading about work if God works. Work has purpose: there can be nothing futile about work if God works.”

The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.

“I became good at pretending. I became so good that after a while the lines blurred between my truth and fiction. And sometimes, when I did a really good job of pretending, I even fooled myself.”

“I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos – in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever – was infinitely more comforting than the truth.”

Truth is singular. Its ‘versions’ are mistruths.

“For the last few minutes Jill had been feeling that there was something she must remember at all costs. And now she did. But it was dreadfully hard to say it. She felt as if huge weights were laid on her lips. At last, with an effort that seemed to take all the good out of her, she said: ‘There’s Aslan.‘”

“Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.”

“But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.”

“I bow down to and take refuge in the sacred teachings, including the doctrines of the ultimate truth, quiescent and desireless, the irreversible path of the three vehicles, and the transmissions, esoteric instructions, and treatises of the transmitted precepts and treasures.”

“Not that it mattered though. The truth seldom ever did in the face of a juicy lie.”

“You were thinking how nice it would have been if Aslan hadn’t put the instructions on the stones of the ruined city till after we’d passed it. And then it would have been his fault, not ours. So likely, isn’t it? No. We must own up to it. We’ve only four signs to go by, and we’ve muffed the first three.”

“I remember a text that hung in my nursery as a child. ‘Be sure thy sin will find thee out.’ It’s very true, that.”

“If it were a trick, I’d promise you safety. I’d offer you happiness. I don’t know if that exists in the Barrel, but you’ll find none of it with me.” For some reason, those words had comforted her. Better terrible truths than kind lies.”

“Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies.”

″‘I’ll think you’ll find,’ said Dr. Breed, ‘that everybody does about the same amount of thinking. Scientists simply think about things in one way, and other people think about things in others.‘”

“Slaves, when inquired of as to their condition and the character of their masters, almost universally say they are contented, and that their masters are kind. The slaveholders have been known to send in spies among their slaves, to ascertain their views and feelings in regard to their condition. The frequency of this has had the effect to establish among the slaves the maxim, that a still tongue makes a wise head. They suppress the truth rather than take the consequences of telling it.”

“Better terrible truths than kind lies.”

“Such is the irresistible nature of truth that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.”

“If Grandpa Portman wasn’t honorable and good, I wasn’t sure anyone could be.”

Do not expect people to tell you the truth because they also lie to themselves.

″‘Nothing generous about it. New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.’ Had I been a Bokononist then, that statement would have made me howl.”

“Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.”

“They who know truth in truth, and untruth in untruth, arrive at truth, and follow true desires.”

Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth.

“to make a thing true all you’ve got to do is believe.”

“The fool tries to adjust the truth so he does not have to adjust to it.”

“You need to hear the truth about yourself as frequently as possible, because your mind is so preoccupied with false self-images.”

“Black and white and grey, all the shades of truth.”

“Where did truth stop? Where did error begin? I was all adrift among a thousand contradictory hypotheses, but I could not lay hold of one.”

“Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth.”

Jesters do oft prove prophets.

“But where were the Brahmans, where the priests, where the wise men or penitents, who had succeeded in not just knowing this deepest of all knowledge but also to live it?”

“I’m not saying it because I’m sweet. I’m saying it because I love you now and I always have. More than you can imagine.”

“To the ground I fall. I can never stay aloft too long. Not when there’s an ugly and heavy truth always dragging me back down.”

″‘I don’t hate it here,’ she said automatically. Surprising herself, she realized that as much as she’d been trying to convince herself otherwise, she was telling the truth. ‘It’s just that I don’t belong here.‘”

“You don’t have any feeling for what makes a chump a chump. A real magician can make the marks open their mouths by picking a quarter out of the air. That levitation you do—I’ve never seen it done before, but the marks don’t warm to it. No psychology. Now take me, I can’t even pick a quarter out of the air. I got no act—except the one that counts. I know marks. I know what he hungers for, even if he don’t. That’s showmanship, son, whether you’re a politician, a preacher pounding a pulpit—or a magician. Find out what the chumps want and you can leave half your props in your trunk.”

Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as equals? There is an offer you will get rarely, Roland.

“All who know the truth know this Light, and all who know this Light know eternity.”

“Faith is universal. Our specific methods for understanding it are arbitrary. Some of us pray to Jesus, some of us go to Mecca, some of us study subatomic particles. In the end we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves.”

“But we did not relinquish out worldly aims, because we could not see the light of any truth that we might grasp in place of them.”

“Let’s tell the truth to people. When people ask, ‘How are you?’ have the nerve sometimes to answer truthfully. You must know, however, that people will start avoiding you because, they, too, have knees that pain them and heads that hurt and they don’t want to know about yours. But think of it this way: If people avoid you, you will have more time to meditate and do fine research on a cure for whatever truly afflicts you.”

“They have no knowledge of the thoughts in his mind, but they are in love with their own opinions, not because they are true, but because they are their own […] If, on the other hand, they love them because they are true, they are both theirs and mine, for they are the common property of all lovers of the truth.”

“All my empty dreams suddenly lost their charm and my heart began to throb with a bewildering passion for the wisdom of eternal truth.”

“True happiness is to rejoice in the truth, for to rejoice in the truth is to rejoice in you, O God, who are the Truth, you, my God, my true Light, to whom I look for salvation.”

“The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself.”

“I would to God that I had been able to tell the truth . . . to live the truth. Ah! that is the great thing in life, to live the truth.”

“But eventually, as they always will, the rumors reached me. And everybody knows you can’t disprove a rumor.”

“Nobody has proved to my friends that the Nazis were wrong about the Jews. Nobody can. The truth or falsity of what the Nazis said, and of what my extremist friends believed, was immaterial, marvelously so. There simply was no way to reach it, no way, at least, that employed the procedures of logic and evidence. The bill-collector told me that Jews were filthy, that the home of a Jewish woman in his boyhood town was a pigsty; and the baker told me that the Jews’ fanaticism about cleanliness was a standing affront to the “Germans,” who were clean enough. What difference did the truth, if there were truth, make?”

″ ‘I never let the truth break me before, and I’m not about to start now.’ As awful as it was, as difficult to swallow as it might be, knowing was always better than not knowing.”

“Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All.”

“Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.”

“I should’ve told you the truth from the beginning.” His voice trembled. “I thought if you knew what a failure I was, you wouldn’t want me along.”

“Pestilence, disease, and war haunt this sorry place. And nothing lasts forever; that’s a truth we have to face.”

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible.”

“It is my belief…that the truth is generally preferable to lies.”

“The truth… It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.”

“It is one of life’s bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting.

“It is one of the peculiar truths of life that people often say things that they know full well are ridiculous.”

“When in doubt, tell the truth.”

“What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.”

“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”

“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.”

“The life of truth is cold.”

“The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know the truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose.”

“Do not consider me now as an elegant female, intending to play you, but as a rational creature, speaking the truth from her heart.”

“Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.”

“Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.”

“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

“I don’t care about truth. I want some happiness.”

“What’s done cannot be undone.”

“But I should be false in the earliest sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence.”

[You] do not care for the cruder aspect of truth. Christ cared. He drove the money-lenders from the temple. His scourge was a great teller of truths.

“[I]t was better to know the worst than to wonder.”

“If I said I was madly in love with you, I’d be lying and what’s more, you’d know it.”

“Denial is an ugly thing.”

“There’s more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.”

“For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that its not affecting me, that was its effect.”

“A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”

“Every rumor carries a seed of truth,”

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.

“Why should you think that I should woo in scorn? Scorn and derision never come in tears: Look, when I vow, I weep; and vows so born, In their nativity all truth appears. How can these things in me seem scorn to you, Bearing the badge of faith to prove them true?”

“... and yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days.”

“With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.”

“Look here, if you’re telling the truth you needn’t be afraid--nobody’ll hurt you.”

“I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth.”

“But I will gladly advise him -- I’ll hide nothing--”

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”

“And you can’t always please yourself; you must sometimes please other people. That, I admit, you’re very ready to do; but there’s another thing that’s still more important--you must often displease others. You must always be ready for that--you must never shrink from it. That doesn’t suit you at all--you’re too fond of admiration, you like to be thought well of. You think we can escape disagreeable duties by taking romantic views--that’s your great illusion, my dear. But we can’t. You must be prepared on many occasions in life to please no one at all--not even yourself.”

“Now I understand that one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you’ve believed in all your life aren’t true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.”

I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not “true” because we’re hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself.

“Oft in lies truth is hidden.”

“Men have to have heroes, but no man can ever be as big as the need, and so a legend grows around a grain of truth, like a pearl.”

“To crooked eyes truth may wear a wry face.”

Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.

“Then I started reading this timetable I had in my pocket. Just to stop lying. Once I get started, I can go on for hours if I feel like it. No kidding. Hours.”

“We are beginning to comprehend a basic truth hitherto neglected, that our physical condition is determined very largely by our emotional condition, and our emotional life is profoundly regulated by our thought life.”

“Truth, truth.” Like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold. You push it, stretch it, but it’ll never be enough. You kick at it, beat it, it’ll never cover any of us. From the moment we enter crying, to the moment we leave dying, it’ll just cover your face, as you wail and cry and scream.

Truth telling and medicine just didn’t go together except in dire emergencies, if then.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.