The Quote File: Truth

There are only two mistakes one can make on the road to truth, not beginning and not finishing. -- Buddha

. . . when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Education is not merely a means for earning a living or an instrument for the acquisition of wealth. It is an initiation into a life of spirit, a training of the human soul in the pursuit of truth and the practice of virtue. -- Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit

There are 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

We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it. -— William Butler Yeats

You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes. -- Moses ben Maimon

Like many of the people I had read about, I set out on a long journey to find truth and beauty. As usual, the road led straight back to the beginning: home, country roads, the sun setting through the woods. –- Joyce Sutphen

A fact is not a truth until you love it. –- John Keats

Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself. -- Simone de Beauvoir

Love truth, but pardon error. -– Voltaire

It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry. -- Thomas Paine

Everyone wishes to have truth on his side, but not everyone wishes to be on the side of truth. -- Richard Whately

Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. -- Flannery O'Connor

The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think. -- Aristotle

How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in the truth. -- Sophocles

It does not require many words to speak the truth. -- Chief Joseph

Truth may be stretched but cannot be broken. It always gets above falsehood as oil does above water. -- Miguel de Cervantes

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. -- Andre Gide

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us. -- Paul Valery

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

One owes respect to the living. To the dead, one owes only the truth. -- Voltaire

What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup. -– Boris Pasternak