c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident. I hadn't learned that it can happen so gradually you don't lose your stomach or hurt yourself in the landing. You don't necessarily sense the motion. I've found it takes at least two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip around the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of the heap.
— Jane Hamilton, A Map of the World
Underneath, he was a good cat. Loyal and loving. But no one ever bothered to look past his rough exterior, because in reality, looks meant more than everyone wanted to admit.
— Cambria Hebert, #Nerd
Now I know what success is: living your truth, sharing it.
— Kamal Ravikant, Live Your Truth
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, Gaudy Night
If I am right, Thy grace impartStill in the right to stay;If I am wrong, O, teach my heartTo find that better way!
— Alexander Pope, Moral Essays
I would rather be a devil in alliance with truth, than an angel in alliance with falsehood.
— Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
For dear me, why abandon a beliefMerely because it ceases to be true
— Robert Frost
Just as heart is a fountain of unspoken words,the universe is a womb of wonder weird worlds.
— Toba Beta
Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.
— Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation
Scepticism is the first step towards truth.
— Denis Diderot, Pensées philosophiques
Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated
— Alan W. Watts
Always try to be joyful and proactively benign to the people. By doing so everyday, people have no control at all over my mood.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
The moment you make someone promise anything is the same moment you ask them to lie to you.
— Molly Ringwald, When it Happens to You
I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
It's easier to fake it. When you fake it for sixteen years, it becomes part of you, something you don't think about.
— Alex Flinn, Breathing Underwater
Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start- the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
This, the language of deception, we both understand. We were born to it, along with the curses.
— Holly Black, Red Glove
Of course, I quiet agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable discomfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the dismay and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is one thing you cannot get looking for it. If you look for the truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth-only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and the in the end, despair.
— C.S. Lewis
Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him ... These things I know, Ubertino; I also have belonged to those groups of men who believe they can produce the truth with white-hot iron. Well, let me tell you, the white heat of truth comes from another flame.
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
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, North and South
Tolerance! The virtue that makes one bite his tongue so that he can tear out his hair.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
At times there's something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism.Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers?
— Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living
REFLECTIONS OF TRUTHWhere you find TruthIs where you find your reflectionAnd where you find your reflectionIs where you find loveAnd where you find loveIs where you find lightAnd where you find lightIs where you find faithAnd where you find faithIs where you find purposeAnd where you find purposeIs where you find happinessAnd where you find happinessIs where you find TruthAnd when you find TruthTruth will set you free.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night
Man keeps looking for a truth that fits his reality. Given our reality, the truth doesn't fit.
— Werner Erhard
I play with the fire of my own truth," she told me, "I will burn for the things I love.
— Mia Hollow
I shot up,now as angry and frusterated as him.I had a feeling if i stayed, we'd both snap. In and undertone, I murmured,"this isnt over.i won't give up on you."" I've given up on you,"he said back,voice also soft. "Love fades. Mine has.
— Richelle Mead, Spirit Bound
A man who tells you to follow him will turn his followers into his company, while a true leader who does not tell you to follow him, will sit in the company of his followers.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
And having once chosen, never to seek to return to the crossroads of that decision-for even if one chooses wrongly, the choice cannot be unmade.
— Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Chosen
Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. You don't need anything else.
— Malcolm X
She’s a manner of speaking.Even the flowers don’t come back, or the green leaves.There are new flowers, new green leaves.There are other beautiful days.Nothing comes back, nothing repeats itself, because everything is real.
— Alberto Caeiro, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro
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, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Oh darling, don't be bitter. It's the first instinct of the weak.
— Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride
If we act like prey, they’ll act like predators
— Alyxandra Harvey, My Love Lies Bleeding
Everything in life has some good in it. And when something awful happens, the goodness stands out even more--it's sad, but that's the truth.
— Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake
It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful
—  they are found because it was possible to find them.
And the truth must finally lie in that which every oppressed individual feels within himself but hasn't the courage to express
— Wilhelm Reich, Beyond Psychology: Letters and Journals, 1934-1939
The right to search for the truth implies also a duty
—  one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be the truth.
What my parents kept failing to understand was how happy I was when I was alone with my books. There was no pressure to perform or be cute, and books never disappoint-- unless, of course, you've chosen a bad one. But then, you can always put it down and pick up another one without any repercussions.
— Lisa Yee, Millicent Min, Girl Genius
One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
In the course of my intellectual life I experienced very acutely the problem of whether it isn't actually presumptuous to say that we can know the truth - in the face of all our limitations. I also asked myself to what extent it might not be better to suppress this category. In pursuing this question, however, I was able to observe and also to grasp that relinquishing truth doesn't solve anything but, on the contrary, leads to the tyranny of caprice. In that case, the only thing that can remain is really what we decide on and can replace at will. Man is degraded if he can't know truth, if everything, in the final analysis, is just the product of an individual or collective decision.In this way it became clear to me how important it is that we don't lose the concept of truth, in spite of the menaces and perils that it doubtless carries with it. It has to remain as a central category. As a demand on us that doesn't give us rights but requires, on the contrary, our humility and our obedience and can lead us to the common path.
— Pope Benedict XVI
The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.
— George Orwell, 1984
The Dimwit's Guide to the Female Mind might assist your efforts in understanding human females. But it must be pointed out that this subject can be a dangerous adventure and should be undertaken with extreme caution. After all, human males have been trying to understand their females for generations, and most of the time they come away from these encounters looking like someone stuck their tails into an electric socket.
— Anne Bishop, Marked in Flesh
For to speak the truth, there are but few that care thus to spend their time, but choose rather to be speaking of things to no profit.
— John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress
Ask a deeply religious Christian if he’d rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don’t seem so bad lately.
— Scott Adams
Not one of the orthodox ministers dare preach what he thinks if he knows a majority of his congregation think otherwise. He knows that every member of his church stands guard over his brain with a creed, like a club, in his hand. He knows that he is not expected to search after the truth, but that he is employed to defend the creed. Every pulpit is a pillory, in which stands a hired culprit, defending the justice of his own imprisonment.
— Robert G. Ingersoll, Individuality From 'The Gods and Other Lectures'
Speak up, stand up, and keep correcting the false perceptions. Stay true to your heart's views and keep chanting for peace and justice.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Knowledge planted in truth grows in truth.Strength born of peace loses nothing to hate.
— Aberjhani, Elemental: The Power of Illuminated Love
the squeeky wheel gets the grease.
— Josh Billings
Lady, I do not make up things. That is lies. Lies are not true. But the truth could be made up if yo know how. And that's the truth.
— Lily Tomlin
Where we fall are the stepping-stones for our journey.
— Lolly Daskal, Thoughts Spoken From The Heart
Whether your pleasing or pissing everybody off, your doing something wrong.
— David Cook
The truth was stranger than the official fiction.
— Dean Koontz
We have to know the truth about the past to discover out future.
— Patti Callahan Henry, Between The Tides
Some fish love to swim upstream. Some people love to overcome challenges.
— Amit Ray, Walking the Path of Compassion
When you procrastinate you become a slave to yesterday.
— Stephen McCranie
You believe what your eyes want to believe!
— Santosh Kalwar
A good leader leads with compassion and love, not fear and blood. A country that harms its people because they are not happy with the leader - is not a country that belongs to the people, but to the leader.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
After that day, I discovered one indelible truth. I discovered that love wasn’t everything that mattered in life. It was an emotion that not many had the luxury of feeling without any pain attached to it. Many say that love will set you free, but I disagree. Love is a cage, a very painful one; its gilded bars made with yearning, heartache, and unfulfilled dreams. And the moment I realized that love wasn’t necessary to one’s survival I became free. No one would have the power to hurt me again.
— Mia Asher, Easy Virtue
People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
In a meat-eating world, wearing leather for shoes and even clothes, the discussion of fur is childish.
— Karl Lagerfeld
Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
— Honoré de Balzac
I hear my silence talked of in every lane
— The suppression of a cry is itself a cry of pain.
Do you really believe in destiny?" "How can I not believe in destiny, when there is no difference between my memories and my dreams at night? There's no difference between their reality. And if I dream something first, I remember it later when I am actually walking in the place or looking at the person I first dreamed of. Days later. Or years later. Destiny~ she walks with me.
— C. JoyBell C.
The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. IT is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by Friendship God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing. At this feast it is he who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.
— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
The line between the public life and the private life has been erased, due to the rapid decline of manners and courtesy. There is a certain crudeness and crassness that has suddenly become accepted behavior, even desirable.
— Fannie Flagg, Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!
Many lies lie between one truth.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.
— Richard Wright
He caught a glimpse of that extraordinary faculty in man, that strange, altruistic, rare, and obstinate decency which will make writers or scientists maintain their truths at the risk of death. Eppur si muove, Galileo was to say; it moves all the same. They were to be in a position to burn him if he would go on with it, with his preposterous nonsense about the earth moving round the sun, but he was to continue with the sublime assertion because there was something which he valued more than himself. The Truth. To recognize and to acknowledge What Is. That was the thing which man could do, which his English could do, his beloved, his sleeping, his now defenceless English. They might be stupid, ferocious, unpolitical, almost hopeless. But here and there, oh so seldome, oh so rare, oh so glorious, there were those all the same who would face the rack, the executioner, and even utter extinction, in the cause of something greater than themselves. Truth, that strange thing, the jest of Pilate's. Many stupid young men had thought they were dying for it, and many would continue to die for it, perhaps for a thousand years. They did not have to be right about their truth, as Galileo was to be. It was enough that they, the few and martyred, should establish a greatness, a thing above the sum of all they ignorantly had.
— T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once & Future King
The human person finds his perfection "in seeking and loving what is true and good.
— Pope Benedict XVI
Not all can believe anything they want to, because not all have the ability to believe.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
To love is to think.And I almost forget to feel only from thinking about her.I don’t know what I want at all, even from her, and I don’t think about anything but her.I have a great animated distraction.When I want to meet her,I almost feel like not meeting her,So I don’t have to leave her afterwards.And I prefer thinking about her, because it’s like I’m afraid of her.I don’t know what I want at all, and I don’t want to know what I want. All I want to do is think about her.I’m asking nothing of nobody, not even her, except to think.
— Alberto Caeiro, O Pastor Amoroso
Technology to wipe out truth is now available. Not everybody can afford it but it's available. When the cost comes down, look out!
— Bob Dylan
The perfect killer has no identity.
— Brent Weeks, Shadow's Edge
May be its mine bad-luck Or yours not to get me But I still have hope Of being yours
— Hasil Paudyal, Blended Words
No human being will ever know the truth, for even if they happened to say it by chance, they would not know they had done so.
— Xenophon
Despite his money and his looks and all the good-on-paper attributes he possessed, he was not a reader, and, well, let's just say that is the sort of nonsense up with which we will not put.
— Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters
Mika: Were you happy?Hiro: I was so happy.
— Ibuki Haneda, Koizora (Love Sky), Volume 3
They have money and position and Ann has none.It's amazing how often you can be right as long as you have those two things working in your favor.
— Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty
Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
If I could make it better I would,” he says. In some ways it’s a stupid, obvious thing to say, but the way he said it, so honest and simple like it’s the truest thing there is, makes the tears prick in my eyes. (Before I Fall)
— Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall
What people never understand is that depression isn't about the outside; it's about the inside. Something inside me is wrong. Sure, there are things in my life that make me feel alone, but nothing makes me feel more isolated and terrified than my own voice inside my head.
— Jasmine Warga
A lot of young girls think that the opposite of fake is rudeness. And just as ugly as fake is, so is saying whatever is on your mind because it's the truth.
— Tyra Banks
I am powerful in my love for myself. The truth of my being is I love myself exactly as I am. I honor my empowered heart.
— Amy Leigh Mercree, The Spiritual Girl's Guide to Dating: Your Enlightened Path to Love, Sex, & Soul Mates
A man craves ultimate truths. Every mortal mind, I think, is that way. But what is ultimate truth? It's the end of the road, where there is no more mystery, no more hope. And no more questions to ask, since all the answers have been given. But there is no such place.The Universe is a labyrinth made of labyrinths. Each leads to another. And wherever we cannot go ourselves, we reach with mathematics. Out of mathematics we build wagons to carry us into the nonhuman realms of the world.
— Stanisław Lem, Fiasco
A truth is what it is. A lie, a thought out deception more brutal than a truth could ever be.
— Charlotte Armstrong
Never hold resentments for the person who tells you what you need to hear; count them among your truest, most caring, and valuable friends.
— Mike  Norton, Just Another War Story
From the mouths of the innocents flows truth.
— Rae Carson, The Girl of Fire and Thorns
Words have weight.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
I should have learned this, she thought. I wanted to learn fire, and pain, but I should have learned people.
— Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight
Because sometimes people who seem goodend up being not as good as you might have hoped.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
But I do know we’re deficient in some way. We are too involved in materialistic things, and they don’t satisfy us. The loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
News told, rumors heard, truth implied, facts buried.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody — including me — has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace.
— Ken Wilber
Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions
We modern human beings are looking at life, trying to make some sense of it; observing a 'reality' that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue--only we've all been issued the wrong librettos. For a text, we're given the Bible. Or the Talmud or the Koran. We're given Time magazine, and Reader's Digest, daily papers, and the six o'clock news; we're given schoolbooks, sitcoms, and revisionist histories; we're given psychological counseling, cults, workshops, advertisements, sales pitches, and authoritative pronouncements by pundits, sold-out scientists, political activists, and heads of state. Unfortunately, none of these translations bears more than a faint resemblance to what is transpiring in the true theater of existence, and most of them are dangerously misleading. We're attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of a magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe the barrom melodramas or kindergarten skits. And when's the last time you heard anybody bitch about it to the management?
— Tom Robbins, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does the truth become error because nobody will see it. 1924-1926)
— Mahatma Gandhi
We are motivated more by aversion to the unpleasant than by a will toward truth, freedom, or healing. We are constantly attempting to escape our life, to avoid rather than enter our pain we, and we wonder why it is so difficult to be fully alive. (43)
— Stephen Levine, A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last
No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.
— Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
Everything in life is speaking in spite of its apparent silence.
— Hazrat Inayat Khan
Women talk when they want to. Or don't.
— Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Go slowly, so that you do not bite your tail by accident.
— Christopher Paolini, Inheritance
Smartass Disciple: Why do arrogant people like to say complex words ?Master of Stupidity: Ask them straight! You'll get a simple scary version.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.
— G.K. Chesterton
So, the world is fine. We don’t have to save the world—the world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about, is whether or not the world we live in, will be capable of sustaining us in it. That’s what we need to think about.
— Douglas Adams
Maybe it was wrong, or maybe impossible, but I wanted the truth to be one thing. One solid thing.
— Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming
The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas – complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.
— George F. Kennan
The truths that matter most to us come always half spoken.
— Baltasar Gracián
He can heal me. I believe He will. I believe I'm going to be an old surely Baptist preacher. And even if He doesn't...that's the thing: I've read Philippians 1. I know what Paul says. I'm here let's work, if I go home? That's better. I understand that.
— Matt      Chandler
The purpose of empowerment is to urge you towards freedom, to help each of you to break free of all limitations. It is that freedom that will give you eternal happiness and finally connect you with the unconditional realization of TRUTH.
— Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
I've managed to stay alive out here in the Ruin because I'm a realist. I allow the truth to be the truth, no matter how much I might want it to be something else.
— Jonathan Maberry, Dust & Decay
To say that the first casualty of war is truth is to miss the rather more important point that a principal weapon of war is lies.
— Harry M. Collins, The Golem at Large: What You Should Know about Technology
The idea that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods, which most experience refutes. History is teeming with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not put down forever, it may be set back for centuries.
— John Stuart Mill
I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!
— Roman Payne
Neel cuts in: "Where'd you grow up?""Palo Alto," she says. From there to Stanford to Google: for a girl obsessed with the outer limits of human potential, Kat has stayed pretty close to home. Neel nods knowingly. "The suburban mind cannot comprehend the emergent complexity of a New York sidewalk.""I don't know about that," Kat says, narrowing her eyes. "I'm pretty good with complexity.""See, I know what you're thinking," Neel says, shaking his head."You're thinking it's just an agent-based simulation, and everybody out here follows a pretty simple set of rules"-- Kat is nodding--"and if you can figure out those rules, you can model it. You can simulate the street, then the neighborhood, then the whole city. Right?""Exactly. I mean, sure, I don't know what the rules are yet, but I could experiment and figure them out, and then it would be trivial--" "Wrong," Neel says, honking like a game-show buzzer. "You can't do it. Even if you know the rules-- and by the way, there are no rules--but even if there were, you can't model it. You know why?"My best friend and my girlfriend are sparring over simulations. I can only sit back and listen. Kat frowns. "Why?""You don't have enough memory.""Oh, come on--""Nope. You could never hold it all in memory. No computer's big enough. Not even your what's-it-called--""The Big Box.""That's the one. It's not big enough. This box--" Neel stretches out his hands, encompasses the sidewalk, the park, the streets beyond--"is bigger."The snaking crowd surges forward.
— Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
Being a good mother, it seemed to me, meant you ran the risk of losing your child.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
The truth is like a lion
—  you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose
Hell is truth known too late.
— J.C. Ryle, Practical Religion
Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be. 
— Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
Talking to a therapist, I thought, was like taking your clothes off and then taking your skin off, and then having the other person say, "Would you mind opening up your rib cage so that we can start?
— Julie Schumacher, Black Box
Is it too much to expect from the schools that they train their students not only to interpret but to criticize; that is, to discriminate what is sound from error and falsehood, to suspend judgement if they are not convinced, or to judge with reason if they agree or disagree?
— Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Bestselling Guide to Reading Books and Accessing Information
Truth is a hard master, and costly to serve, but it simplifies all problems.
— Ellis Peters
We are all insects. Groping towards something terrible or divine.
— Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
Nothing is generous. New knowledge is a valuable commodity. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we are.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat's Cradle
The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.
— Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
There is no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or sadism.
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night
Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn't give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn't court disapproval, reproach, and general wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.
— Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands
We are not sheep or cows. God didn’t create fences for us or boundaries to contain our nationalities. Man did. God didn’t draw up religious barriers to separate us from each other. Man did. And on top of that, no father would like to see his children fighting or killing each other. The Creator favors the man who spreads loves over the man who spreads hate. A religious title does not make anyone more superior over another. If a kind man stands by his conscience and exhibits truth in his words and actions, he will stand by God regardless of his faith. If mankind wants to evolve, we must learn from our past mistakes. If not, our technology will evolve without us.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.
— Samuel Johnson, The Rambler
If a cat sits on a hot stove, that cat won't sit on a hot stove again. That cat won't sit on a cold stove either. That cat just don't like stoves.
— Mark Twain
The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood.
— Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays
I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.
— Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination
lies, truth, loveI have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of it's charms.
— Giacomo Casanova
If I don't eat junk, I don't gain weight.
— Paulina Christensen
Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.
— Marisha Pessl, Night Film
Hope is for people who can't see the Truth.
— Jeff Lindsay, Dexter Is Dead
Personal perception of perfection is like that. You see what you want to see. After awhile you just see what you need to.
— Matthew Good, At Last There Is Nothing Left to Say
Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals.
— Albert Schweitzer
Sand lines my soul which is filled with the breath of the ocean.
— A.D. Posey
When something ought to be true then it proves to be a very powerful truth.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Never trust the translation or interpretation of something without first trusting its interpreter.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Guidance counselors always love to say, 'Just think positively,' but that's impossible when you have this thing inside of you, strangling every ounce of happiness you can muster. My body is an efficient happy-though-killing machine.
— Jasmine Warga
Take any emotion—love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions—if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them—you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. “But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, ‘All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment’.
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Crying can bring relief, as long as you don't cry alone.
— Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
I offer my opponents a bargain: if they will stop telling lies about us, I will stop telling the truth about them
— Adlai E. Stevenson II
There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and posthumously.
— Thomas Sowell
You just sit there and tolerate it, the same way everything in this country is tolerated. Every deception, every lie, every bullet in the brains. Just as you are already tolerating bullets in the brains that will be implemented only after the bullet is put in your brains.
— Imre Kertész, Liquidation
I want you to embark on the truth of loving yourself because when you love yourself and when you appreciate yourself, you will make healthy changes in your life for healthy reasons.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
But I still feel like I lost.We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in the sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet. probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you'll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there's still one more tier to all this; there is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it always happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of those lovable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. You will remember having conversations with this person that never actually happened. You will recall sexual trysts with this person that never technically occurred. This is because the individual who embodies your personal definition of love does not really exist. The person is real, and the feelings are real-but you create the context. And context is everything. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they're often just the person you happen to meet first time you really, really want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else.
— Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
The number of people who believe a thing has no bearing upon its truth.
— Marie Sexton, Promises
Build your house on granite. By granite I mean your nature that you are torturing to death, the love in your child's body, your wife's dream of love, your own dream of life when you were sixteen. Exchange your illusions for a bit of truth. Throw out your politicians and diplomats! Take your destiny into your own hands and build your life on rock. Forget about your neighbor and look inside yourself! Your neighbor, too, will be grateful. Tell you're fellow workers all over the world that you're no longer willing to work for death but only for life. 	Instead of flocking to executions and shouting hurrah, hurrah, make a law for the protection of human life and its blessings. Such a law will be part of the granite foundation your house rests on. Protect your small children's love against the assaults of lascivious, frustrated men and women. Stop the mouth of the malignant old maid; expose her publicly or send her to a reform school instead of young people who are longing for love. Don;t try to outdo your exploiter in exploitation if you have a chance to become a boss. Throw away your swallowtails and top hat, and stop applying for a license to embrace your woman. Join forces with your kind in all countries; they are like you, for better or worse. Let your child grow up as nature (or 'God') intended. Don't try to improve on nature. Learn to understand it and protect it. Go to the library instead of the prize fight, go to foreign countries rather than to Coney Island. And first and foremost, think straight, trust the quiet inner voice inside you that tells you what to do. You hold your life in your hands, don't entrust it to anyone else, least of all to your chosen leaders. BE YOURSELF! Any number of great men have told you that.
— Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!
You cannot believe everything you hear
— Jude Morgan, Indiscretion
I think that fame removes true happiness. Because when you are famous, people know you for who they think you are and when you are happy, it's because people have met you and see you for who you really are. Of course, if you are not a great person, it's better to be famous. But if you have greatness, it's better to not be famous.
— C. JoyBell C.
She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
It is only possible to live happily ever after on a daily basis.
— Margaret Wander Bonanno
I stared at her. "But she drugged us.""That is no longer news, dumbass. Are you going to ask why she drugged you?""Allright," I said, narrowing my eyes. "Why?""Because, dear October, you're the most passively suicidal person I've ever met, and that's saying something. You'll never open your wrists, but you'll run headfirst into hell. You'll have good reasons. You'll have great reasons, even. And a part of you will be praying that you won't come out again.
— Seanan McGuire, An Artificial Night
There's no God higher than truth.
— Mahatma Gandhi
There has to be new words to explain new worlds.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
What's even more messed up than funerals, is the way people treat you after the funeral. Like you're diseased or something.
— Denise Jaden, Losing Faith
The idea of celibate vampires is ridiculous. To me, vampires are sex. I don't get a vampire story about abstinence. I don't care about high school students. I find them irritating and uninformed.
— Alan Ball
It wasn't until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's, and then everything followed from there.
— William Golding
I was saying the right things, but not the really true things.
— Katherine Hannigan, Ida B. . . and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World
How you approach birth is intimately connected with how you approach life
— William Sears, The Pregnancy Book: A Month-By-Month Guide Tag: Everythg. You Need to Know from America'S..
Each of us is shaped by the truth of our natures.Von to Silver
— Adrian Phoenix, Etched in Bone
What you see is what you see
— Frank Stella
The knowledge of secrets is a very enticing ship, a very tempting voyage, and one thinks that the highest attainment in life is to find out hidden truths, to seek out what is truth, to know what are all lies; to uncover, to discover and to rediscover, to dig up, to expose, to reveal... But secrets can go on forever, for an eternity! For as vast as the universe is, so are the secrets therein! And one can lose, because of that thought that in the secrets, everything is to be gained! But I can see, that all the knowledge of hidden things, all the knowledge in the universe, is not nearly as valuable and as worthy as the innocence of one's soul. And we are not directed unto good things through our ability to scavenge or to hunt or to decipher or to sail! Or to fly! But we are directed unto good things, through sovereign providence! He is more worthy- the innocent soul who has a simple faith in what he believes in- than the one who has found out all the dark secrets about what the other man has put his faith in! And it is far more profitable for a man to be healthy, to have a long, long life, loved ones that are blessed with these blessings all the same, much love and happiness and safety! It is far more profitable for a man to be able to remain innocent and have love and be healthy and to be able to watch his loved ones in good health and in good love, than for a man to uncover all the secrets of the universe! A single love, a single faith, a single trust, and one hope- these are far, far better things to aspire to have! And this– this is the biggest secret!
— C. JoyBell C.
The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.
— Rémy de Gourmont
I don't like the word 'allegorical', I don't like the word 'symbolic' - the word I really like is 'mythic', and people always think that means 'full of lies', whereas of course what it really means is 'full of truth which cannot be told in any other way but a story'.
— William Golding
It is the tragedy of a distinguished mind and a generous nature that have gone unappreciated in a conventional, unimaginative world. A victim of men's incomprehension of women, a symptom of women's mistrust of men.
— Francis Wyndham, Wide Sargasso Sea
Better the comfort of a lie than the absurdity of the truth.
— Tanya Huff, Smoke and Shadows
The truth doesn't mind being told every once in a while.
— Alysha Speer
In a way, the world−view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.
— George Orwell, 1984
I will never compromise Truth for the sake of getting along with people who can only get along when we agree.
— D.R. Silva
I'm planning, you see, to try to confine myself to the truth. That's hard for an old, inveterate fantasy martyr and liar who has never hesitated to give truth the form he felt the occasion demanded. 
— Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern
Questers of the truth, that’s who dogs are; seekers after the invisible scent of another being’s authentic core.
— Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Cleverness isn't always true nor is the truth always clever.
— Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality
The great question that will be with us throughout this entire book: What did Jesus actually bring, if not world peace, universal prosperity, and a better world? What has he brought?The answer is very simple: God.... He has brought God, and now we know his face, now we can call upon him. Now we know the path that we human beings have to take in this world. Jesus has brought God and with God the truth about our origin and destiny: faith, hope and love. It is only because of our hardness of heart that we think this is too little. Yes indeed, God's power works quietly in this world, but it is the true and the lasting power. Again and again, God's cause seems to be in its death throes. Yet over and over again it proves to be the thing that truly endures and saves.
— Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth
A strange thing, words. Once they're said, it's hard to imagine they're untrue.
— Lauren DeStefano, Perfect Ruin
Truth cannot be constructed. To live in ideology is, as Havel so eloquently reminds us, inevitably to live in a lie. Truth can only be revealed. We cannot be creators, only receptors.
— James W. Sire
It has sunk him, I cannot say how much it has sunk him in my opinion. So unlike what a man should be!-None of that upright integrity, that strict adherence to truth and principle, that distain of trick and littleness, which a man should display in every transaction of his life.
— Jane Austen, Emma
I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.
— Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
If you were lucky, very lucky indeed, there were one or two people in your life who you could tell the unvarnished truth too, shell and egg. And that these people held the essence of you inside them. The rest would be conversations that ended when night fell, or the dinner part ended.
— Julia Gregson, East of the Sun
Who you are in public is a test of your conviction; who you are in private, integrity.
— Criss Jami, Healology
History was a series of decisions about what to tell and a series of accidents about what survived after telling. Not truth, but a historian could search for truth, and the search was as worthy as any other human activity.
— David Drake, Patriots
the worst thing about being lied to is knowing you weren't worth the truth.
— Turcois Ominek
I am right. I`m always right. One time I thought I was wrong, I found out I was right. 
— Jerry Lee Lewis
I am not cruel —only truthful.
— Sylvia Plath
I've often mused over the idea that madness is actually a sane reaction to an insane world.
— Stephanie Ericsson
Of course, in our train of thought, we would all like to think we're on the right track, or at least the same railroad company as the right track.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Always stand up for Truth regardless of who steps on it.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem