87 Insightful Quotes On Truth

In a world brimming with information, the quest for truth remains timeless and universal. Whether it's unearthing personal revelations or understanding the broader complexities of life, truth has an uncanny ability to enlighten, challenge, and inspire us. To celebrate this elusive yet empowering concept, we've curated a collection of 87 insightful quotes that delve into the nature of truth. These words of wisdom, drawn from the minds of philosophers, writers, and visionaries, invite reflection and offer guidance on navigating life's intricate paths. Join us on this journey of discovery as we explore the multifaceted dimensions of truth.

1. “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.” - Niels Bohr

2. “Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of naïve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn't seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects....” - Alfred North Whitehead

3. “That is all very senseless, but this senselessness has a pretty mouth, and it smiles.” - Robert Walser

4. “But suppose it was truth double strong, it were no truth to me if I couldna take it in. I daresay there's truth in yon Latin book on your shelves; but it's gibberish and no truth to me, unless I know the meaning o' the words.” - Elizabeth Gaskell

5. “It's only words... unless they're true.” - David Mamet

6. “The truth will make you odd.” - Judy Blume

7. “Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.” - Paul Fussell

8. “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” - Isaac Newton

9. “Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.” - William Faulkner

10. “Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.” - Albert Camus

11. “Because this is the way things are meant to be.(Press Tilton)” - D.J. MacHale

12. “All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE."Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES."So we can believe the big ones?"YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING."They're not the same at all!"YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED."Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"MY POINT EXACTLY.” - Terry Pratchett

13. “I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.” - J.D. Salinger

14. “Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

15. “There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.” - Doris May Lessing

16. “There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers. As {she} sat at the edge of {the lake}, memory blossoms floated unbounded, as though breathed, no words spoken. Like birds that fly across national borders, between countries at war at each other.” - Rebecca Wells

17. “The laughter of the world is merely loneliness pathetically trying to reassure itself.” - Neal A. Maxwell

18. “We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face. London is religions opportunity--not the decorous religion of theologians, but an anthropomorphic, crude. Yes, the continuous flow would be tolerable if a man of our own sort--not anyone pompous or tearful--were caring for us up in the sky.” - E.M. Forster

19. “He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four.” - G.K. Chesterton

20. “Some things aren't meant to be known. Only believed.” - Mary E. Pearson

21. “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

22. “I'm sure you think that I don't understand what you're going through, but I do. It's just that sometimes, our future is dictated by what we are, opposed to what we want.” - Nicholas Sparks

23. “Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art.” - Charles McCabe

24. “Deriving truth from joy may be far more easier than generating joy from the truth.” - Toba Beta

25. “Those who scorn you taunt only themselves -- I knew this without reading one word; because in reading one is reminded of the truth man is given at birth -- by man I mean man and woman.” - David Adams Richards

26. “Nature alone can lead to the understanding of art, just as art brings us back to nature with greater awarness. It is the source of all beauty, since it is the source of all life. ” - Eugene Carriere

27. “No human should mislead another by promising them something they know to be untrue.” - Santosh Kalwar

28. “I would rather die an individual than live my life as a clone.” - Cristina Marrero

29. “Basically all the religions,sciences and powers of the world boil down to a simple truth. The Best Story Teller will win in the end!” - Stanley Victor Paskavich

30. “Only after you've done the exorcism, thenyou'll understand that ghost's also a species.” - Toba Beta

31. “It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth.” - Margaret Atwood

32. “If I had a shiny gun I could have a world of fun Speeding bullets through the brains Of the folks that cause me pains :)” - Dorothy Parker

33. “My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular level.” - Michael H. Hart

34. “Like all of us sinners, General Betrishchev was endowed with many virtues and many defects. Both the one and the other were scattered through him in a sort of picturesque disorder. Self-sacrifice, magnanimity in decisive moments, courage, intelligence--and with all that, a generous mixture of self-love, ambition, vanity, petty personal ticklishness, and a good many of those things which a man simply cannot do without.” - Nikolai Gogol

35. “In all of knowable reality, God is unique. He is knowable not like the multiplication table or the table of elements; he alone is knowable as the one totally in control of being known. He is not at the disposal of the human mind. He is known when he wills to be known. Yet he is known in and through created reality, which is known naturally. Therefore the glory of God is exalted most not when we know God apart from observation and reading and study, but when we know God as a result of his free and gracious self-revelation in and through our earnest observation of and meditation on his work and Word in history.” - John Piper

36. “Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.” - Philip K. Dick

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

38. “A bitter reality of truth can be wisely told in a sweet tale of lullaby.” - Toba Beta

39. “God and Destiny are not against us, rather they are for us, they are the ones who never forget the things we have long forgotten, the ones who hear the desires of our heart that our own heads can't hear, and they are the ones who never forget who we really are, long after our minds have forgotten the images of who we are. We come from God and we belong to Destiny, yet for some reason of ignorance we think that to be the master of our own fates and the captain of our own souls means to write everything down on a paper and plan everything out on a grid! Such great things to be done, and we think they are accomplished by our primitive ways! No. We must only know what we want. And want what we want. And then fly high enough to see all that which we want that we couldn't yet see.” - C. JoyBell C.

40. “What doesn't quicken dies. That's an indisputable truth of life.” - Dean Koontz

41. “But it is not only the difficulty and labor which men take in finding out of truth, nor again that when it is found it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor; but a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself.” - Francis Bacon

42. “He was in that mostly empty-headed state of grace which is sometimes such fertile soil ; it's the ground from which our brightest dreams and biggest ideas (both good and spectacularly bad) suddenly burst forth, often full-blown.” - Stephen King

43. “Sing and rejoice ye children of the day and the light; for the Lord is at work in this thick night of darkness that may be felt: and the Truth doth flourish as the rose, and lilies do grow among the thorns and the plants atop the hills, and upon them the lambs doth skip and play.” - George Fox

44. “No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

45. “The answers are what they are. Just because you don't like them doesn't mean they aren't true.” - Megan Chance

46. “Tension, in the long run, is a more dangerous force than any feud known to man.” - Criss Jami

47. “Reading all the quotes in the world won’t make you or me into Plato, Gandhi Or Einstein, just like watching hundreds games of soccer won’t make you a soccer player or taking a yoga class will make u a yogini, or reading a golf book will make you a golfer. We need to put the Knowledge to practice and that is the challenge. Put it to work for you, make the effort to Follow Through” - Pablo

48. “Beware: open-mindedness will often say, 'Everything is permissible except a sharp opinion.” - Criss Jami

49. “WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEART OF MEN?The Death of Rats looked up from the feast of the potato. SQUEAK, he said.Death waved a hand dismissively. WELL, YES, OBVIOUSLY ME, he said. I JUST WONDERED IF THERE WAS ANYONE ELSE.” - Terry Pratchett

50. “The truth is revealed when you are ready to receive it when you need it in order to move forward to take the next step in your journey. to move on toward your destiny.” - Alyson Noel

51. “Sister - if all this is true, what could I do or undo?” - Sophocles

52. “Humor is the whole truth.” - Frigyes Karinthy

53. “If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war's perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war's consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining…The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war's refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myths of glory, honor, patriotism, and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless.” - Chris Hedges

54. “...inability to lie is still far from being love to truth. Be on your guard! ... He who cannot lie, doth not know what truth is.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

55. “The day drags along, you make thousands of plans, you imagine every possible conversation, you promise to change your behavior in certain ways–and you feel more and more anxious until your loved one arrives. But by then, you don't know what to say. The hours of waiting have been transformed into tension, the tension has become fear, and the fear makes you embarrassed about showing affection.” - Paulo Coelho

56. “She didn't understand, I hope to God she never understands what I do, what I am. To be dammed by the darkness that lives inside me.To be saved by her love.No more half-truths. No more omissions.” - Linnea Sinclair

57. “What is truth? Truth is ever-changing law. We both have truths. Are mine the same as yours? (Crucify him! Crucify him!)” - Ponctious Pilate

58. “There are many forms of magic in this world, High Lord. Some come in large packages, some in small. Some work with fire and strength of body and heard ... and some work with revelation.” - Terry Brooks

59. “When you can no longer differentiate between the insanity spewed onto the blank page, and the madness evident in the all-but shattered mirror...that's when you know you're doing it right.” - Dave Matthes

60. “Truth can prevail only in virtue of truth itself.” - Pope John Paul II

61. “We can't be friends. That never works. I'd have to be all careful and brave and pathetic, you'd feel guilty all the time and you'd start being nice in weird fake ways to make up for it.' She was starting to cry, but she felt free, she felt relieved as you can only feel when you have wrecked yourself on the rocks and don't have to worry about navigating anymore.” - Susan Gilbert-Collins

62. “Could mankind declare it was truly wise? Did man know everything on earth, or would he ever? Certainly not!” - E.A. Bucchianeri

63. “Perhaps we have been guilty of some terminological inexactitudes.” - Winston S. Churchill

64. “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

65. “There's a traditional Kenyan prayer: "From the cowardice that dares not deal with new truth, from the laziness that is content with half-truth, from the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth, Good Lord, deliver me.” - Joni Rodgers

66. “Too many kings can ruin an army” - Homer

67. “That’s the problem with any ‘simple truth’—it always takes a gaggle of complete idiots or a team of all-knowing geniuses to miss it.” - Ali Sheikh

68. “Personal experience is the basis of all real literature.” - George Henry Lewis

69. “That's what we do: tell made-up stories to fend off the night, to put off telling the truth.” - Bernie Mcgill

70. “ I knew then that I would devote every minute we had left together to making her happy, to repairing the pain I had caused her and returning to her what I never known how to give her. These pages will be our memory until she drows her last breath in my arms and I take her forever and escape at last to a place where neither heaven nor hell will ever be able to find us. ” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

71. “Lying is easy. But it's lonely.""What do you mean?""When you lie to everyone about everything, what's left? What's true?""Nothing," I say."Exactly.” - Victoria Schwab

72. “Emotions can get in the way of truth-seeking. People do not process information in a neutral way.” - Cass R. Sunstein

73. “It’s as simple as that. Simple and complicated, as most true things are.” - David Levithan

74. “A liar only uses the truth when they want their lies to sound truthful.” - Al David

75. “Becoming hurts.” - Kat Howard

76. “It is assumed that the skeptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of skepticism.” - G.K. Chesterton

77. “Truth is sometimes more important than the facts.” - Gary Copeland Lilley

78. “Lies are convenient when the truth is unfathomable.” - Courtney M. Privett

79. “What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history - the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact. With this creeps in the tacit assumption that other nations have not equally their heroes; perhaps even the belief - surely it is very bad biology - that we can literally 'inherit' tradition.” - C.S. Lewis

80. “I never truckled. I never took off the hat to Fashion and held it out for pennies. I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn't like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the truth.” - Frank Norris

81. “[...] this particular, as in many others, blustering assertion goes for proof, half over the world.” - Charles Dickens

82. “There are no secrets.' The thing smiled, showing a row of even, childlike teeth. 'None worth keeping. Only the ones you hide from yourself, which are the most damaging and hurtful of all. Truth is truth, and lie is lie. Tell yourself one's the other and all the world turns kilter.” - A.J. Hartley and David Hewson

83. “I saw this cartoon in the paper, once. That Viking, Hagar the Horrible? He’s standing on the mountaintop, holding his hands to the heavens, shouting “Why me?” And down from the heavens comes the answer: “Why not?” Maybe that’s the ultimate truth; what right to do I have to expect a smooth ride?” - Jonathan Kellerman

84. “…If one who slays one is a murderer then he who slays a thousand is not a hero,' said Lalu.” - Mulk Raj Anand

85. “Sometimes it didn't matter how much gumption you had. What mattered were the cards you'd been dealt.” - Jeannette Walls

86. “Sit on the train tracks and really believe a train won’t come; lie in your house when it is inflamed and tell yourself that it really isn’t burning; go ahead, neglect all sort of reason and continue to tell yourself that what you believe is the irrefutable truth and the day will come when you are wakened by a piercing whistle and scorching flames.” - Dave Guerrero

87. “A rumor is a social cancer: it is difficult to contain and it rots the brains of the masses. However, the real danger is that so many people find rumors enjoyable. That part causes the infection. And in such cases when a rumor is only partially made of truth, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where the information may have gone wrong. It is passed on and on until some brave soul questions its validity; that brave soul refuses to bite the apple and let the apple eat him. Forced to start from scratch for the sake of purity and truth, that brave soul, figuratively speaking, fully amputates the information in order to protect his personal judgment. In other words, his ignorance is to be valued more than the lie believed to be true.” - Criss Jami