quotations about truth
Trump's relationship to the truth seems novel, if only because he doesn't try to hide his relativism. For Trump, truth is always more about how people feel than what may be empirically verifiable. Trump admits as much in The Art of the Deal, where he describes his sales strategy as "truthful hyperbole." For Trump, facts are fragile, and truth is flexible. Trump probably doesn't spend evenings poring over Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge -- but the parallels between Trump's attacks on accepted knowledge and critical philosophy's insistence that we interrogate truth claims suggest that not all assaults on the authority of facts are revolutionary.
CASEY WILLIAMS
"Creating Truth is Assertion of Power", Asharq Al-Awsat, April 19, 2017
They frequently find the truth who do not seek it, they who do, frequently lose it.
FANNY KEMBLE
Further Records, February 8, 1875
There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.
WILLIAM JAMES
Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness", The Varieties of Religious Experience
The semblance of absolute truth is nothing but absolute conformism.
PAUL FEYERABEND
Against Method
The demands of Truth are severe; she has no sympathy with the myrtles. All that which is so indispensable in Song is precisely all that with which she has nothing whatever to do. It is but making her a flaunting paradox to wreathe her in gems and flowers. In enforcing a truth we need severity rather than efflorescence of language. We must be simple, precise, terse. We must be cool, calm, unimpassioned. In a word, we must be in that mood, which, as nearly as possible, is the exact converse of the poetical. He must be blind, indeed, who does not perceive the radical and chasmal differences between the truthful and the poetical modes of inculcation. He must be theory-mad beyond redemption who, in spite of these differences, shall still persist in attempting to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Poetic Principle"
The cold passion for truth hunts in no pack.
ROBINSON JEFFERS
"Be Angry at the Sun"
It is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man who conforms, who follows some tradition. It is only when you are constantly inquiring, constantly observing, constantly learning, that you find truth, God, or love.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
Think on These Things
If the whole world should agree to speak nothing but truth, what an abridgment it would make of speech! And what an unravelling there would be of the invisible webs which men, like so many spiders, now weave about each other!
WASHINGTON ALLSTON
Lectures on Art and Poems
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth -- and truth rewarded me.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
All Said and Done
Half truths were a wonderful way to inspire credibility.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Winner
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World
Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Ideas and Opinions: Based on Mein Weltbild
Who make up the really great men of any age? It is those who have truth woven into every fiber of their being.
HENRY F. KLETZING
"Truth"
When all is said and done, how do we know but that our own unreason may be better than another's truth? for it has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is ready for the wild bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Celtic Twilight
Truth is the secret of eloquence and of virtue, the basis of moral authority; it is the highest summit of art and of life.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Truth is more deceptive than falsehood, for it is more frequently presented by those from whom we do not expect it, and so has against it a numerical presumption.
AMBROSE BIERCE
"Epigrams of a Cynic"
Truth -- there's no such thing.
TANKRED DORST
Freedom for Clemens
The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
ADRIENNE RICH
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence
The strict conservative says that truth is in danger. It is the idlest fear in the world. It plainly indicates no intimacy with the truth. He who has communed with great principles knows that they are everlasting, and that nothing can shake them from their orbits. He is willing to trust truth in every encounter, knowing it to be eternal and omnipotent.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Spurn not at seeming error, but dig below its surface for the truth;
And beware of seeming truths that grow on the roots of error.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy