|
A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous. (Alfred Adler)
The whole is the false. (Theodor W. Adorno)
Truth has no finality to it. It is not something to be held on to. Truth is discovered minute to minute or not at all. (Adyashanti)
-b.1744 d.1796...
It's better to be hurt by the truth than to gain satisfaction from the lies. (David Allan)
Never let a sense of what is right blind you to what is true. (Scott Allen)
All that is true, by whomsoever it has been said has its origin in the Spirit. (St. Thomas Aquinas)
Respect for the truth is the basis for all morality. Something cannot emerge from nothing. (Duke Leto Atreides)
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth. (Marcus Aurelius)
Not being known doesn't stop the truth from being true. (Richard Bach)
The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth. (Gaston Bachelard)
Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion. (Sir Francis Bacon)
You never find yourself until you face the truth. (Pearl Bailey)
A platitude is simply a truth repeated until people get tired of hearing it. (Stanley Baldwin)
We learn to lie by believing words rather than experience. (Darby Bannard)
Most people find facts irritating. Facts interfere with their systems of denial. (Darby Bannard)
Truth is not always hard to find; it is often staring you in the face. The problem with truth is that it is hard to believe. It is even harder to get other people to believe. (Darby Bannard)
God stresses honesty in everything we do or say. In art and poetry it means not making a brush stroke or putting down a word which one does not know. There can be no faking, no thinking that one 'can get away with it' - the hated faking and posing. (Francis Barbazon)
The truth is far beyond what we can see. Therefore my art is an invitation to comprehend this fact. (Ala Bashir)
Truth is formless, unborn, timeless and invisible. There's no truth in anything we do, say, make or feel. They are simply pointers to the truth for a deeper understanding of who we are, and artistic integration between human and being: manifested and un-manifested. The infinite nature of truth is the being that I am. (Philippe Benichou)
Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true. (Arnold Bennett)
I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction. (Arthur Christopher Benson)
There is a tragic clash between Truth and the world. Pure undistorted truth burns up the world. (Nikolai Berdyaev)
Between truth and the search for truth, I choose the second. (Bernard Berenson)
I never said most of the things I said. (Yogi Berra)
Many lies lie between one truth. (Toba Beta)
Truth must be found in reality, not systems. (Joseph Beuys)
What you say should not just be truth now, but should be a proven truth tomorrow. (Yogi Bhajan)
Your truth should be so pure that if lifts a person's soul to the heights. (Yogi Bhajan)
story, n. A narrative, commonly untrue. The truth of the stories here following has, however, not been successfully impeached. (Ambrose Bierce)
-The Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, 1949
As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand. (Josh Billings)
There is no psychological truth unless it is particular, but on the other hand, there is no art unless it be general. The whole problem is that – how to express the general by the particular, how to make the particular express the general. (Charles Blackman)
When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do. (William Blake)
A truth that's told with bad intent / Beats all the lies you can invent. (William Blake)
There is neither painting, nor sculpture, nor music, nor poetry. The only truth is creation. (Umberto Boccioni)
Truth has not such an urgent air. (Nicolas Boileau)
There is no such thing as a true tale. Truth has many faces and the truth is like to the old road to Avalon; it depends on your own will, and your own thoughts, whither the road will take you. (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
Truth exists. Only lies are invented. (Georges Braque)
Whatever is in common is true; but likeness is false. (Georges Braque)
Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true. (Robert Brault)
I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naivety has no peer but my own. (Andre Breton)
- book title...
I Have Abandoned My Search for Truth and Am Now Looking for a Good Fantasy (Ashleigh Brilliant)
When the conspiracy of lies surrounding me demands of me to silence the one word of truth given to me, that word becomes the one word I wish to utter above all others. (Andre Brink)
No blame should attach to telling the truth. But it does, it does. (Anita Brookner)
There is a constant balance in working with what I am seeing in the moment and what I know to be true in absence of the evidence. Seeking truth in the sublime and painting in this realm is not about what I see in nature but more about how it feels when I am standing in it. (Gavin Brooks)
If a painting is to be honest, it must come largely from the subconscious. (Al Brouillette)
Best be yourself, imperial, plain and true! (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it. (Pearl S. Buck)
Above all, be true to yourself, and if you cannot put your heart in it, take yourself out of it. (Carl W. Buechner)
Those critics who, in modern times, have the most thoughtfully analyzed the laws of aesthetic beauty, concur and maintain that the real truthfulness of all works of imagination - sculpture, painting, and written fiction - is so purely in the imagination that the artist never seeks to represent positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
One of the sublimest things in the world is plain truth. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
When the world has got hold of a lie, it is astonishing how hard it is to kill it. You beat it over the head, till it seems to have given up the ghost, and behold! the next day it is as healthy as ever. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
How many of us have been attracted to reason; first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
Falsehood is a perennial spring. (Edmund Burke)
Nothing is true and everything is permitted. (William S. Burroughs)
Things omitted are often more deadly than errors committed. (Leo Buscaglia)
I care about truth, not for truth's sake but for my own. (Samuel Butler, novelist)
All truth is not to be told at all times. (Samuel Butler, novelist)
The course of true anything never does run smooth. (Samuel Butler, novelist)
Adversity is the first path to truth. (Lord Byron)
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth. (Albert Camus)
Someone who always has to lie discovers that every one of his lies is true. (Elias Canetti)
The search for truth has always taken me on perilous paths. (Vittorio Canta)
There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness. (Emily Carr)
You have to be what you are. Whatever you are, you gotta be it. (Johnny Cash)
Artistic growth is, more that anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the great artist knows how difficult it is. (Willa Cather)
Truth indeed rather alleviates than hurts, and will always bear up against falsehood, as oil does above water. (Miguel de Cervantes)
I owe you the truth in painting, and I will tell it to you. (Paul Cezanne)
One cannot be precise, and still be true. (Marc Chagall)
There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. (Raymond Chandler)
The deeper the truth in a creative work, the longer it will live. (Charlie Chaplin)
A vision of truth which does not call upon us to get out of our armchair - why, this is the desideratum of mankind. (John Jay Chapman)
You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it. (G. K. Chesterton)
Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction... For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it. (G. K. Chesterton)
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most times he will pick himself up and carry on... (Winston Churchill)
Alas! they had been friends in youth; but whispering tongues can poison truth. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
The object of the superior man is truth. (Confucius)
Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words. (Ananda Coomaraswamy)
Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne. (Quentin Crisp)
For me, painting is the endless quest to find the moment of truth. I'm still working on it. Aren't we all? (Cheryl Criss)
In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story. (Walter Cronkite)
Justice was born outside the home and a long way from it; and it has never been adopted there. (Walter Cronkite)
Fight for your opinions, but do not believe that they contain the whole truth or the only truth. (Charles Anderson Dana)
Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails. (Clarence Darrow)
For a true work of creativity, you must reach beyond yourself to bring correct draftsmanship together with strong composition and lifelike colors. (Doug Dawson)
Truth is never ugly when one can find in it what one needs. (Edgar Degas)
A man may possess remarkable qualities, may have grace, expression, charm, elegance, but they are all as nothing if he does not interpret truth. (Francois Delsarte)
A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true. (Demosthenes)
-Postmodernism and truth...
The point of asking questions is to find true answers; the point of measuring is to measure accurately; the point of making maps is to find your way to your destination... In short, the goal of truth goes without saying, in every human culture. (Daniel Dennett)
Truths are more likely to have been discovered by one man than by nation. (Rene Descartes)
It is easy to lie with words. But our actions and our art will always speak honestly about us, our soul, and where we are at that moment in our life... (Jack Dickerson)
The truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind. (Emily Dickinson)
I can be expected to look for truth but not to find it. (Denis Diderot)
What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth. (Benjamin Disraeli)
You can cram a truth into an epigram – the truth, never. (Norman Douglas)
It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
For truth has such a face and such a mien, as to be loved needs only to be seen. (John Dryden)
Ah, lips that say one thing, while the heart thinks another. (Alexandre Dumas)
All falsehood is a mask; and however well made the mask may be, with a little attention we may always succeed in distinguishing it from the true face. (Alexandre Dumas)
Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent. (Will Durant)
Truth disappears with the telling of it. (Lawrence Durrell)
Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside from it, I could keep the truth and let God go. (Meister Johann Eckhart)
If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor. (Albert Einstein)
Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right; decide on what you think is right and stick to it. (George Eliot)
Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult. (George Eliot)
All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords. (T. S. Eliot)
The greatest homage to truth is to use it. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Do your thing and I shall know you. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists – talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it's done so I would recognise when I was being lied to. (Brian Eno)
I read in the hope of discovering the truth, or at least some truths. I look for truth in what some might deem strange places: novels and poems, histories and diaries...In reading for truth, you understand, I am not seeking a full game plan; some large system that will explain the world to me, or a patent for bliss. Instead I seek clues that might explain life's oddities, that might light up the dark corners of existence a little, that might correct foolish ideas I have come to hold too dearly, that might, finally, make my own stay here on earth more interesting, if not necessarily more pleasant. (Joseph Epstein)
What is the difference between the idea of truth and actual truth? Wouldn't actual truth be larger than our own pre-conceived notions? Does it originate in a place beyond our own concept of right and wrong, good and bad? (Ian Factor)
When lying, be emphatic and indignant, thus behaving like your children. (William Feather)
Anyone who lives, as I do, in a world of imagination must make an enormous and unnatural effort to be factual in the ordinary sense. I confess I would be a terrible witness in court because of this - and a terrible journalist. I feel compelled to a story the way I see it and this is seldom the way it happened, in all its documentary detail. (Federico Fellini)
People often think I'm a faker, but I'm usually honest, in a certain way - in such a way that often nobody believes me! (Richard Feynman)
I think that the truth is a really stern taskmistress. (Carrie Fisher)
There is no truth. There is only perception. (Gustave Flaubert)
The truth doesn't hurt unless it ought to. (B. C. Forbes)
One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions. (E. M. Forster)
Without lies, humanity would perish of despair and boredom. (Anatole France)
The greatest and noblest pleasure we have in this world is to discover new truths, and the next is to shake off old prejudices... A man who seeks truth and loves it must be reckoned precious to any human society. (Frederick II)
There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so. (Lucian Freud)
Truth is a tendency. (Buckminster Fuller)
Craft must have clothes, but truth loves to go naked. (Thomas Fuller)
Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot. (Neil Gaiman)
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. (Neil Gaiman)
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them. (Galileo)
The different religions are beautiful flowers from the same garden... they are equally true, though being received and interpreted through human instruments equally imperfect. (Mahatma Gandhi)
Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth. (Mahatma Gandhi)
Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear. (Mahatma Gandhi)
I am entering into the truth, into nature. (Paul Gauguin)
He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it. (Henry George)
I propose to beg no question, to shrink from no conclusion, but to follow truth wherever it may lead. (Henry George)
Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.' (Kahlil Gibran)
If now isn't a good time for the truth I don't see when we'll get to it. (Nikki Giovanni)
My great longing is to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes in reality, so that they may become, yes, untruth if you like - but more true than the literal truth. (Vincent van Gogh)
I have played hell somewhat with the truthfulness of the colours. (Vincent van Gogh)
We are men of action; lies do not become us. (William Goldman)
The paintings in our galleries are seen one day in bright sunshine and another day in the dim light of a rainy afternoon, yet they remain the same paintings, ever faithful, ever convincing. To a marvelous extent they carry their own light within. For their truth is not that of a perfect replica, it is the truth of art. (Ernst Gombrich)
Truth cannot be defined or tested by agreement with 'the world'; for not only do truths differ for different worlds but the nature of agreement between a world apart from it is notoriously nebulous. (Nelson Goodman)
The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is. (Nadine Gordimer)
Complete honesty has nothing to do with 'purity' or naivety. The full truth is unattainable to naivety, and the completely honest artist is not pure in heart. (Clement Greenberg)
You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty. (Sacha Guitry)
Somewhere within all of us we long for a certain truth, each searching in our own way, possibly to know and feel who we are and why we are here on earth. At times there is a yearning to express that. Perhaps that is why I paint. (Nancy Guzik)
Not knowing how near the truth is, we seek it far away. (Hakuin)
Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with truth. (Thich Nhat Hanh)
Forget all about the brush and the ink. Then you shall learn the truth about landscapes. (Jing Hao)
It is not realistic, maybe ... but art doesn't have to be realistic. Romeo and Juliet is not realistic, but it is true... it shows the essence of falling in love. (Jan Harlan)
Many of us are impersonations of what we know we ought to be. (Henry S. Haskins)
Some live lies who won't tell them; some tell lies who won't live them. (Henry S. Haskins)
A pure hand needs no glove to cover it. (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth. (Robert A. Heinlein)
Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth. (Lillian Hellman)
Truth is a torch that gleams through the fog without dispelling it. (Claude Adrien Helvetius)
That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best – make it all up – but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way. (Ernest Hemingway)
There's no one thing that is true. They're all true. (Ernest Hemingway)
Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie: a fault which needs it most, grows two thereby. (George Herbert)
Fact creates norms, and truth illumination. (Werner Herzog)
The truth is lived, not taught. (Hermann Hesse)
I step naked into the shower of truth – whole-hearted, bloody-minded, utterly selfish, no longer even pretending to enjoy or understand anything. (Selima Hill)
All my thinking about art is haunted by a mystical belief that in its practice one is tapping sources of truth. If it were not that one caught, in this practice, glimpses of some certainties, one would not continue it. (Roger Hilton)
True and False are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood. (Thomas Hobbes)
The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist. (David Hockney)
Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth. (Sherlock Holmes)
The arts have sculpted the modern world from past to future, broken barriers, evoked change and has been defined insurmountably, but ultimately art is truth. Art is when the truth of one man is presented and becomes relevant to another. (Sam Householder)
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. (Aldous Huxley)
All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified. (Thomas H. Huxley)
Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth. (Charles Ives)
O that our souls could scale a height like this, / A mighty mountain swept o'er by the bleak / Keen winds of heaven... Would we could see all truly as it is; / The calm eternal truth would keep us meek. (Robinson Jeffers)
Honesty is the best part of any art form. If you don't have that, you're kidding yourself and your listener. (Billy Joel)
Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me. (Jasper Johns)
-on sceptics...
Truth, Sir, is a cow, which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull. (Samuel Johnson)
Round numbers are always false. (Samuel Johnson)
You arrive at truth through poetry; I arrive at poetry through truth. (Joseph Joubert)
Paradoxically, we fail to disclose ourselves to other people because we want so much to be loved. Because we feel that way, we present ourselves as someone we think can be loved and accepted, and we conceal whatever would mar that image. (Sidney Jourard)
Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it. (Franz Kafka)
There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie. (Franz Kafka)
People assign much higher probability to the truth of their opinions than is warranted. (Daniel Kahneman)
By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man. (Immanuel Kant)
There is nothing that isn't true if you believe it, and nothing that is true, believe it or not. (Byron Katie)
I can never feel certain of any truth but from a clear perception of its beauty. (John Keats)
The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you. (Soren Kierkegaard)
It's not that there is no such thing as truth. But we come to like and trust a certain story, not because it's necessarily the most absolutely truthful, but because it's a thing that we tell ourselves makes sense of the world, at least at this moment. (Michael Kimmelman)
Fiction is the truth inside the lie. (Stephen King)
A lie cannot live. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier. (Barbara Kingsolver)
The truth needs so little rehearsal. (Barbara Kingsolver)
Truth is like fire; to tell the truth means to glow and burn. (Gustav Klimt)
The ultimate truth is penultimately a falsehood. (Arthur Koestler)
Whatever you say about something, it is not. (Alfred Korzybski)
An aphorism never coincides with the truth: it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths. (Karl Kraus)
Truth is not a matter of argumentation and conviction; it is not the outcome of opinion. (Jiddu Krishnamurti)
The truth of a thing is the feel of it, not the think of it. (Stanley Kubrick)
Truth is eternal, knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them. (Madeleine L'Engle)
Truth, like the juice of the poppy, in small quantities, calms men; in larger, heats and irritates them, and is attended by fatal consequences in excess. (Walter Savage Landor)
The rhythm of your voice is the wave your inner truth surfs on. (Beth Lapides)
Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is what matters. (D. H. Lawrence)
A half truth, like half a brick, is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries better. (Stephen Leacock)
Don't try to please everybody. If you stay true to what you are doing, there will be some people who will relate. (Robert Levers)
Go to the truth beyond the mind. Love is the bridge. (Stephen Levine)
The news and truth are not the same thing. (Walter Lippmann)
The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth. (Walter Lippmann)
Let us then be what we are, and speak what we think, and in all things keep ourselves loyal to truth. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it. (James Russell Lowell)
If nothing will finally survive of life besides what artists report of it, we have no right to report what we know to be lies. (Alison Lurie)
Peace if possible, but truth at any rate. (Martin Luther)
-on Tom Thomson...
His aims were truthfulness and beauty - beauty of colour, of feeling, and of emotion. He never painted anything that he had not seen. (James M. MacCallum)
A truth that disheartens because it is true is of more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods. (Maurice Maeterlinck)
Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen. (Norman Mailer)
I think truth is a layered phenomenon. There are many truths that accumulate and build up. I am trying to peel back and explore these rich layers of truth. All truths are difficult to reach. (Sally Mann)
Like everything genuine, its inner life guarantees its truth. All works of art created by truthful minds without regard for the work's conventional exterior remain genuine for all times. (Franz Marc)
OK, so truth hurts - but what else does truth do? (Teena Marie)
In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That's the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it. (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
Beatrice and Virgil...
Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. (Yann Martel)
Beatrice and Virgil...
As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian. (Yann Martel)
If you seek just a little truth, as most, you should not ignore abstract forms, the basis from which all short-lived experiences we call reality springs. (Eugene J. Martin)
If you love the truth, you'll trust it - that is, you will expect it to be good, beautiful, perfect, orderly, etc., in the long run, not necessarily in the short run. (Abraham Maslow)
All maxims have their antagonistic maxims; proverbs should be sold in pairs, a single one being but a half-truth. (William Mathews)
Truth and reality in art begin at the point where the artist ceases to understand what he is doing and capable of doing – yet feels in himself a force that becomes steadily stronger... and more concentrated. (Henri Matisse)
Never ruin a good painting with the truth. (Henri Matisse)
There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing. (Mary McCarthy)
It's so much easier to tell people what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear. (Phil McGraw)
It is a great mystery that, though the human heart longs for truth, in which it alone finds liberation and delight, the first reaction of human beings to truth is one of hostility and fear. (Anthony de Mello)
What plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion. (Herman Melville)
Truth uttered before its time is always dangerous. (Mencius)
Legend: a lie that has attained the dignity of age. (H. L. Mencken)
But O the truth, the truth. The / many eyes / That look on it! The diverse things / they see. (George Meredith)
We are betrayed by what is false within. (George Meredith)
Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man; man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
Whenever a great painter... does a work which appears to be false and lying, that falsity is very true. (Michelangelo)
I never know how much of what I say is true. (Bette Midler)
I speak the truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more, as I grow older. (Michel de Montaigne)
Truth is the strong compost in which beauty may sometime germinate. (Christopher Morley)
When we are not honest, we are cut off from a significant resource of ourselves, a vital dimension that is necessary for unity and wholeness. (Clark Moustakas)
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth. (Iris Murdoch)
So sophisticated and smart, but our eyes tell us lies, or at best the truth in part. (Chris Murphy)
Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit. (Edward R. Murrow)
The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths. (Bruce Nauman)
In the mountains of truth you never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic. (Anais Nin)
Making art is about finding the true self – not who everyone has told you that you are, but the person you are truly. (Birgit O'Connor)
I decided to accept as true my own thinking. (Georgia O'Keeffe)
To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober. (Eugene O'Neill)
It's not even interesting to tell the truth because to some extent it's false. (Charles Olson)
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. (George Orwell)
Myths believed tend to become true. (George Orwell)
The truth of the subject is often very pared down, made up of a few essentials that tell the story and don't shoot you in the foot with distracting details. (Sheila Parsons)
Analogies are like lies. (Roman Payne)
How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded... (M. Scott Peck)
Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than the arguments of its opposers. (William Penn)
Truth can be tolerated only if you discover it yourself, because then the pride of discovery makes the truth palatable. (Fritz Perls)
Art is a lie that helps us to realize the truth. (Pablo Picasso)
We now know that Art is not the truth... but rather a way of approaching the truth. (Pablo Picasso)
We all know that art is not truth. Art is the lie that makes us realize truth – at least the truth that is given us to understand. (Pablo Picasso)
A man's duty is to find out where the truth is, or if he cannot, at least to take the best possible human doctrine and the hardest to disprove, and to ride on this like a raft over the waters of life. (Plato)
Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurled: / The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! (Alexander Pope)
And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too. (Alexander Pope)
And, after all, what is a lie? 'Tis but the truth in a masquerade. (Alexander Pope)
Just because things are obvious doesn't mean they're true. (Terry Pratchett)
Nothing has to be true forever. Just for long enough, to tell you the truth. (Terry Pratchett)
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. (Elvis Presley)
Beautiful beautiful beautiful truth / Don't leave because I can't see you (The Proclaimers)
A liar should have a good memory. (Latin proverb)
Truth gives a short answer; lies go round about. (Latin proverb)
Be true to yourself! Otherwise we are simply prostituting ourselves to please the public. (Sheila Psaledas)
Truth is so great a perfection, that if God would render himself visible to men, he would choose light for his body and truth for his soul. (Pythagoras)
The world is indeed a mixture of truth and make-believe. Discard the make-believe and take the truth. (Ramakrishna)
The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it. (Ayn Rand)
If error is corrected whenever it is recognized as such, the path of error is the path of truth. (Hans Rechenbach)
-b.1917 d.2004...
Just because a lot of shit's been put in the way of truth doesn't mean that truth is not in that way of seeing. The trouble is that every time there's something good in this world, the shit comes first. It gets there right away. (Milton Resnick)
The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth. (Adrienne Rich)
Truth is reality. (M. C. Richards)
Since there is no such thing as absolute rightness and truth, we always pursue the artificial, leading, human truth. We judge and make a truth that excludes other truths. Art plays a formative part in this manufacture of truth. (Gerhard Richter)
I want to unfold, / I don't want to stay folded anywhere, / Because where I am folded, / There I am a lie... (Rainer Maria Rilke)
Our enemies come nearer the truth in the opinions they form of us than we do in our opinion of ourselves. (Francois de La Rochefoucauld)
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)
The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas and none of my own ideas are as authoritative as my experience. (Carl Rogers)
It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so. (Will Rogers)
The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution. (J. K. Rowling)
The difference between the artist and other people is that the artist is more inclined to say the truth. (Yaroslaw Rozputnyak)
Also, go inside and listen to your body, because your body will never lie to you. Your mind will play tricks, but the way you feel in your heart, in your guts, is the truth. (Don Miguel Ruiz)
What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same. (Salman Rushdie)
There is only one truth and if you can't or won't look inside, you can see your truth in everyone you meet. (Gary Rutz)
Never assume the obvious is true. (William Safire)
Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth. (George Sand)
It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard. (May Sarton)
It is wise to disclose what cannot be concealed. (Johann Friedrich von Schiller)
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now – always. (Albert Schweitzer)
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, / When first we practice to deceive! (Sir Walter Scott)
The facts, if they are there, speak for themselves. (David Seabury)
I said anything I wanted because I don't believe in children, I don't believe in childhood. I don't believe that there's a demarcation. 'Oh you mustn't tell them that. You mustn't tell them that.' You tell them anything you want. Just tell them if it's true. If it's true you tell them. (Maurice Sendak)
Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel. (Ben Shahn)
All great truths begin as blasphemies. (George Bernard Shaw)
A liar begins with making falsehood appear like truth, and ends with making truth itself appear like falsehood. (William Shenstone)
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)
When truth is divided, errors multiply. (Eli Siegel)
-Falling Up...
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. (Shel Silverstein)
Boiled down to its core, the truth is always a simple, solid thing. (David Simon)
When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer. (Isaac Bashevis Singer)
No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world. (Isaac Bashevis Singer)
My work is about giving voice to the unheard, and reiterating the voice of the heard in such a way that you question, or re-examine, what is the truth. (Anna Deavere Smith)
We are never further from the truth than when we are certain. (Rodney Smith)
Death offers mankind a full view of truth. (Socrates)
Nothing is truer than truth. All the mistakes committed by great artists are due to their having separated themselves from truth, believing that their imagination is stronger... Nothing is stronger than nature. With nature in front of us we can do everything well. (Joaquin Sorolla)
No artist is bound by the truth. (Monroe Spears)
We must take care not to admit as true anything, which is only probable. For when one falsity has been let in, infinite others follow. (Baruch Spinoza)
Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty. (Madame de Stael)
Truth is something we discover by carrying it out. It is not a list of statements, but a direction of life. (David Steindl-Rast)
Truth is a free creation of the human spirit, that never would exist at all if we did not generate it ourselves. (Rudolf Steiner)
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake. (Wallace Stevens)
-The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination...
I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me. (Wallace Stevens)
There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art. (Alfred Stieglitz)
I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful. (Mark Strand)
Wherever you are, you are one with the clouds and one with the sun and the stars you see. You are one with everything. That is more true than I can say, and more true than you can hear. (Shunryu Suzuki)
Being true to oneself more often leads one toward success rather than away from it. (Mike Svob)
-b.AD 56 d.AD 117...
Fear is not in the habit of speaking truth; when perfect sincerity is expected, perfect freedom must be allowed; nor has anyone who is apt to be angry when he hears the truth any cause to wonder that he does not hear it. (Tacitus)
Facts are many, but the truth is one. (Rabindranath Tagore)
An image means nothing. It is just a door, leading to the next door. It will never happen that we will find the truth we are looking for just in an image; it will happen behind the last door that the spectator discovers the truth, because of his own efforts. (Antoni Tapies)
I like to tell myself that truth is in the irregularity and the unexpected, and I try to look for both. (Catherine Taylor)
Truth is always paradoxical. (Henry David Thoreau)
It takes two to speak the truth – one to speak and another to hear. (Henry David Thoreau)
No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow. (Henry David Thoreau)
The distinction between true and false appears to become increasingly blurred by... the pollution of the language. (Arne Tiselius)
Most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions in which they have delighted... (Leo Tolstoy)
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold. (Leo Tolstoy)
Truth in love for the subject will produce superior results. (Robert R. Toth)
I have tried to do what is true and not ideal. (Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec)
Truthfulness is the main element of character. (Brian Tracy)
It is an enduring truth, which can never be altered, that every infraction of the Law of nature must carry its punitive consequences with it. We can never get beyond that range of cause and effect. (Thomas Troward)
Intense feeling too often obscures the truth. (Harry S. Truman)
I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell. (Harry S. Truman)
When you put relative and absolute truth together and they become one unit, it becomes possible to make things workable. You are not too much on the side of absolute truth, or you would become too theoretical. You are not too much on the side of relative truth, or you would become too precise. When you put them together, you realize that there is no problem. (Chogyam Trungpa)
It is necessary to mark the greater from the lesser truth: namely the larger and more liberal idea of nature from the comparatively narrow and confined; namely that which addresses itself to the imagination from that which is solely addressed to the eye. (J. M. W. Turner)
We must be ready to learn from one another, not claiming that we alone possess all truth and that somehow we have a corner on God. (Desmond Tutu)
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't. (Mark Twain)
If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. (Mark Twain)
-from notebook, 1898...
Familiarity breeds contempt. How accurate that is. The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it. (Mark Twain)
A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. (Mark Twain)
Listening to both sides of a story will convince you that there is more to a story than both sides. (Frank Tyger)
The words of truth are always paradoxical. (Lao Tzu)
Above all, be true to yourself, and if you cannot put your heart into it, take yourself out of it. (Author unknown)
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)
Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh. (Paul Valery)
There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times. (Voltaire)
Wise are they who have learned these truths: Trouble is temporary. Time is tonic. Tribulation is a test tube. (William Arthur Ward)
In order to be effective, truth must penetrate like an arrow - and that is likely to hurt. (Wei Wu Wei)
I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai. (Orson Welles)
There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil. (Alfred North Whitehead)
Whatever satisfies the soul is truth. (Walt Whitman)
Create the beautiful lie. (Edgar A. Whitney)
Some stories are true that never happened. (Elie Wiesel)
The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. (Oscar Wilde)
Unless devotion is given to the thing which must prove false in the end, the thing that is true in the end cannot enter. (Charles Williams)
The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. (Edward O. Wilson)
The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
-The Bonfire of the Vanities...
Bullshit reigns. (Tom Wolfe)
One goes down into the well and nothing protects one from the assault of the truth. (Virginia Woolf)
The truth is more important than the facts. (Frank Lloyd Wright)
If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance. (Orville Wright)
I can't work completely out of my imagination. I must put my foot in a bit of truth; and then I can fly free. (Andrew Wyeth)
We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it. (William Butler Yeats)
Wine comes in at the mouth / And love comes in at the eye; / That's all we shall know for truth / Before we grow old and die. (William Butler Yeats)
Truth is exact correspondence with reality. (Paramahansa Yogananda)
Truth never was indebted to a lie. (Edward Young)
If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow. (Emile Zola)
| 
