65 Quotes About Truth

In a world overflowing with information and opinions, the pursuit of truth remains one of the most crucial endeavors we can undertake. Whether we seek personal enlightenment, strive for honesty in our relationships, or aspire to understand the broader intricacies of life, truth is a guiding light. To celebrate this timeless quest, we've curated a collection of 65 thought-provoking quotes that delve into various facets of truth. These words from philosophers, writers, and thinkers aim to inspire, challenge, and awaken your own understanding of what it means to live authentically and seek truth in all its forms.

1. “If you're not gonna tell the truth, then why start talking?” - Gene Wilder

2. “The truth is always an insult or a joke, lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone's comfort” - Katherine Dunn

3. “I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.” - Marilyn Monroe

4. “All sacrifice and suffering is redemptive. It is used to either teach the individual or to help others. Nothing is by chance.” - A.J. RUSSELL

5. “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” - James Joyce

6. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” - Anonymous

7. “Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.” - Walt Whitman

8. “Does truth have a moral?” - Rick Riordan

9. “Words can be twisted into any shape. Promises can be made to lull the heart and seduce the soul. In the final analysis, words mean nothing. They are labels we give things in an effort to wrap our puny little brains around their underlying natures, when ninety-nine percent of the time the totality of the reality is an entirely different beast. The wisest man is the silent one. Examine his actions. Judge him by them.” - Karen Marie Moning

10. “Why did adults have to be so thick? They always say “tell the truth,” and when you do, they don’t believe you. What’s the point?” - Rick Riordan

11. “Nin knew how much humans loved money, riches, and material things—though he never really could understand why. The more technologically advanced the human species got, the more isolated they seemed to become, at the same time. It was alarming, how humans could spend entire lifetimes engaged in all kinds of activities, without getting any closer to knowing who they really were, inside.” - Jess C. Scott

12. “How sad it was, Carmen thought, that you acted awful when you were desperately sad and hurt and wanted to be loved. How tragic then, the way everyone avoided you and tiptoed around you when you really needed them. Carmen knew this vicious predicament as well as anyone in the world. How bitter it felt when you acted badly to everyone and ended up hating yourself the most.” - Ann Brashares

13. “Speak the truth do not become angered and give when asked, even be it a little. By these three conditions one goes to the presence of the gods.” - Buddha Siddhartha Guatama Shakyamuni

14. “Simple the life, simpler will be your instincts, the laws that govern universe will obey your simplicity.” - Santosh Kalwar

15. “We speak the truth because we live in truth.” - don Jose Ruiz

16. “You always know the truth, because when you cut yourself or someone else with it, there’s always a bloody show.” - Stephen King

17. “On one hand the eternal attraction of man towards femininity (cf. Gn. 2:23) frees in him-or perhaps it should free-a gamut of spiritual-corporal desires of an especially personal and "sharing" nature (cf. analysis of the "beginning"), to which a proportionate pyramid of values corresponds. On the other hand, "lust" limits this gamut, obscuring the pyramid of values that marks the perennial attraction of male and female.” - Pope John Paul II

18. “I’ve come to the conclusion that people who wear headphones while they walk, are much happier, more confident, and more beautiful individuals than someone making the solitary drudge to work without acknowledging their own interests and power.” - Jason Mraz

19. “Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

20. “It's who you is when folks knocks at the door of your heart what counts. Hide the past and it gives them what's jealous of you the power to bring you undone.” - Bryce Courtenay

21. “I hate when people say 'I see'. It doesn't mean anything and I think it's hostile. Whenever anyone tells me 'I see' I think they're really saying 'Fuck you'.” - Peter Cameron

22. “It's written, 'seek and ye shall find'. But first, 'imagine what you seek'.Otherwise, you will end up searching everything everywhere forever.” - Toba Beta

23. “After all, a homeless man has reason to cry, everything in the world is pointed against him.” - Jack Kerouac

24. “Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

25. “Most of what I say is complete truth. My edit button is broken.” - Myra McEntire

26. “The truth may not set you free, but used carefully, it can confuse the hell out of your enemies.” - Laurell K. Hamilton

27. “Smartass Disciple: Why we shouldn’t judge others? Master of Stupidity: Don’t! Unless you are paid for it.” - Toba Beta

28. “Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.” - Mark Twain

29. “If it ever occurs to people to value the honour of the mind equally with the honour of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

30. “The truth was stranger than the official fiction.” - Dean Koontz

31. “But the truth is the highest consideration.” - Dorothea Dix

32. “We too, must shatter the mirrors. We must look in to ourselves and root out the distortions until that thing which we know in our hearts is perfect and true, stands before us.” - Garth Stein

33. “But I know just what it feels like to have a voice in the back of my head, like a face that I hold inside, face that awakes when I close my eyes, face that watches everytime I lie, face that laughs everytime I fall. (It watches EVERYTHING) ... But the face inside is hearing me, right beneath my skin.” - Linkin Park

34. “Now that physics is proving the intelligence of the universe what are we to do about the stupidity of mankind? I include myself. I know that the earth is not flat but my feet are. I know that space is curved but my brain has been condoned by habit to grow in a straight line. What I call light is my own blend of darkness. What I call a view is my hand-painted trompe-l'oeil. I run after knowledge like a ferret down a ferret hole. My limitations, I call the boundaries of what can be known. I interpret the world by confusing other people's psychology with my own.” - Jeanette Winterson

35. “I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard, and shows the bare bones beneath.” - Wilkie Collins

36. “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” - George Orwell

37. “Truth has nothing to do with words. Truth can be likened to the bright moon in the sky. Words, in this case, can be likened to a finger. The finger can point to the moon’s location. However, the finger is not the moon. To look at the moon, it is necessary to gaze beyond the finger.” - Huineng

38. “You don't fall in love with someone because it's convenient.” - Harriet Evans

39. “What would I look like if everything that I am, no secrets, was put on paper? Would I be horrifying?” - Jackie Blue

40. “One could argue that it's romantic to die for love. Of course, then you're dead and unable to take that honeymoon trip to the Alps with all the other fashionable young couples, which is a shame.” - Libba Bray

41. “مواجهة الحقيقة هي من اصعب المصاعب في هذه الدنيا أولا : لاننا ف الغالب لا نعرف ما هي الحقيقة ثانيا : لاننا ف الغالب لا نحب أن نعرفها الا مضطرين .. حين نيأس من قدرتنا علي تجاهلها ونشك ثم نشك ثم نري آخر الامر أن الشك أصعب و أقسي من مواجهة الحقيقة والصبر عليها ثالثا لاننا اذا عرفناها ففي الغالب - أيضا انها تجعلنا نغير عاده من العادات وليس أصعب علي النفس من تغيير ما اعتادت . فالموت نفسه لا صعوبة فيه لولا أنه يغير ما تعودناه وفراق الموتي لا يحزننا لولا انه تغير عاده او عادات كثيرة” - فتحي غانم

42. “From this point of view, science - the real game in town - is rhetoric, a series of efforts to persuade relevant social actors that one's manufactured knowledge is a route to a desired form of very objective power.” - Donna Haraway

43. “Do not dilute the truth of your potential. We often convince ourselves that we cannot change, that we cannot overcome the circumstances of our lives. That is simply not true. You have been blessed with immeasurable power to make positive changes in your life. But you can't just wish it, you can't just hope it, you can't just want it... you have to LIVE it, BE it, DO it.” - Steve Maraboli

44. “Today is a new day. Don't let your history interfere with your destiny! Let today be the day you stop being a victim of your circumstances and start taking action towards the life you want. You have the power and the time to shape your life. Break free from the poisonous victim mentality and embrace the truth of your greatness. You were not meant for a mundane or mediocre life!” - Steve Maraboli

45. “Knowing belongs to man's intellect or reason; loving belongs to his will. The object of the intellect is truth; the object of the will is goodness or love.” - Fulton J. Sheen

46. “A desire for privacy does not imply shameful secrets; Moglen argues, again and again, that without anonymity in discourse, free speech is impossible, and hence also democracy. The right to speak the truth to power does not shield the speaker from the consequences of doing so; only comparable power or anonymity can do that.” - Nick Harkaway

47. “Man keeps looking for a truth that fits his reality. Given our reality, the truth doesn't fit.” - Werner Erhard

48. “The truth will form and fall apart again.” - Sarah Slean

49. “When God grabs you by the scruff of the neck then although theoretically you have a freedom to say 'no', in another sense, actually, you can't say no because it's like Jeremiah. 'God, you have cheated me. You called me to be a prophet against the people that I love, and all that I proclaim is words of doom and judgement.' And yet if I say "I will shut up", I can't.” - Desmond Tutu

50. “Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.” - Baruch de Spinoza

51. “La verité est triste, comme vous le savez. Elle déçoit parce qu'elle restreint. Elle tient dans un poing fermé, puis dans le geste d'une main qui se délace et rejette. Elle est pauvre, elle démeuble et démunit.” - Julien Gracq

52. “Which is more real, when you face reality, or when reality faces you?” - Anthony Liccione

53. “The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use; it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion; and as the boat sets off again, we return to our normal activity: scurrying from one telescope to another, seeing the sharpness fade in one, waiting for the blur to clear in another. And when the blur does clear, we imagine that we have made it do so all by ourselves.” - Julian Barnes

54. “Truth doesn't run on time like a commuter train, though time may run on truth. And the Scenes Gone By and the Scenes to Come flow blending together in the sea-green deep while Now spreads in circles on the surface.” - Ken Kesey

55. “Nothing lasts. Everything changes. But the changes are the same. Winter will always turn to spring.” - Susan Trott

56. “Perhaps it was that I wanted to see what I had learned, what I had read, what I had imagined, that I would never be able to see the city of London without seeing it through the overarching scrim of every description of it I had read before. When I turn the corner into a small, quiet, leafy square, am I really seeing it fresh, or am I both looking and remembering? [...]This is both the beauty and excitement of London, and its cross to bear, too. There is a tendency for visitors to turn the place into a theme park, the Disney World of social class, innate dignity, crooked streets, and grand houses, with a cavalcade of monarchs as varied and cartoony as Mickey Mouse, Snow White, and, at least in the opinion of various Briths broadhseets, Goofy.They come, not to see what London is, or even what it was, but to confirm a kind of picture-postcard view of both, all red telephone kiosks and fog-wreathed alleyways.” - Anna Quindlen

57. “He [Jesus] speaks in parables, and though we have approached these parables reverentially all these many years and have heard them expounded as grave and reverent vehicles of holy truth, I suspect that many if not all of them were originally not grave at all but were antic, comic, often more than just a little shocking.” - Frederick Buechner

58. “The sad truth about bigotry is that most bigots either don't realize that they are bigots, or they convince themselves that their bigotry is perfectly justified.” - Wayne Gerard Trotman

59. “Daddy used to say that calling a person a romantic was just another way of saying he or she acted without regard for conseqences.” - Gabrielle Zevin

60. “People sometimes talk about the power of first impressions, and believe me, there is truth to it.” - Ann Brashares

61. “Your exercise of faith builds character. Fortified character expands your capacity to exercise greater faith. Thus, your confidence in making correct decisions is enhanced. And the strengthening cycle continues. The more your character is fortified, the more enabled you are to exercise the power of faith for yet stronger character.” - Richard G. Scott

62. “Unlikely things are often true . . .” - Sheridan Hay

63. “Nature is our salvation, not technology or the intellect. Technology can neither save us nor destroy us. Technology can only aid the will, thus it is the will and our choices which determine everything.” - Bryant McGill

64. “It's true all the time everywhere or it's not true! And that one truth is always Mystery.” - Richard Rohr

65. “The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Often, love is a tangled web of lies that only a broken heart would weave. Seldom is dishonesty the whole person, rather it's the pain.” - Shannon L. Alder