c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.
— W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
Never hide things from hardcore thinkers. They get more aggravated, more provoked by confusion than the most painful truths.
— Criss Jami
I’m not sure. But there’s something about the darkness, the stillness of this hour, I think, that creates a language of its own. There’s a strange kind of freedom in the dark; a terrifying vulnerability we allow ourselves at exactly the wrong moment, tricked by the darkness into thinking it will keep our secrets. We forget that the blackness is not a blanket; we forget that the sun will soon rise. But in the moment, at least, we feel brave enough to say things we’d never say in the light.
— Tahereh Mafi, Ignite Me
Muhammad has always been standing higher than the Christianity. He does not consider god as a human being and never makes himself equal to God. Muslims worship nothing except God and Muhammad is his Messenger. There is no any mystery and secret in it.
— Leo Tolstoy
If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
What's done cannot be undone.
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth
I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language."I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared" or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end.And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.
— Audre Lorde
Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can't ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.
— A.W. Tozer
Nothing is real.
— John Lennon, Beatles Lyrics
The truth is not for all men but only for those who seek it.
— Ayn Rand
A thing may happen and be a total lie
—  another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.
The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.
— Brent Weeks
Sometimes people think they know you. They know a few facts about you, and they piece you together in a way that makes sense to them. And if you don't know yourself very well, you might even believe that they are right. But the truth is, that isn't you. That isn't you at all.
— Leila Sales, This Song Will Save Your Life
In a room wherepeople unanimously maintaina conspiracy of silence,one word of truthsounds like a pistol shot.
— Czesław Miłosz
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
When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool you end up looking like a moron instead.
— Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice
Does truth have a moral?
— Rick Riordan, The Sea of Monsters
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
— Niels Bohr
You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.
— Flannery O'Connor, Collected Works: Wise Blood / A Good Man is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear it Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays and Letters
Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.
— Steve Jobs
You should never read just for "enjoyment." Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends' insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick "hard books." Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for god's sake, don't let me ever hear you say, "I can't read fiction. I only have time for the truth." Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of "literature"? That means fiction, too, stupid.
— John Waters, Role Models
How hurtful it can be to deny one's true self and live a life of lies just to appease others.
— June Ahern
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.
— Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
There is beauty in truth, even if it's painful. Those who lie, twist life so that it looks tasty to the lazy, brilliant to the ignorant, and powerful to the weak. But lies only strengthen our defects. They don't teach anything, help anything, fix anything or cure anything. Nor do they develop one's character, one's mind, one's heart or one's soul.
— José N. Harris
I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
This above all: to thine own self be true.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
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
We don't get to chose what is true. We only get to choose what we do about it.
— Kami Garcia, Beautiful Darkness
Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.
— Voltaire
The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.
— Aristotle
Real life's nasty. It's cruel. It doesn't care about heroes and happy endings and the way things should be. In real life, bad things happen. People die. Fights are lost. Evil often wins.
— Darren Shan
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
— René Descartes
Do you really believe ... that everything historians tell us about men – or about women – is actually true? You ought to consider the fact that these histories have been written by men, who never tell the truth except by accident.
— Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men
Every person must choose how much truth he can stand.
— Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't going away.
— Elvis Presley
Trust starts with truth and ends with truth.
— Santosh Kalwar, Quote Me Everyday
Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others ... Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth."(Journal entry, 14 October 1922)
— Katherine Mansfield, Journal of Katherine Mansfield
The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.
— H.G. Wells
You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.
— Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
I guess sometimes you have to lie to find the truth.
— Scott Westerfeld, Extras
There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.
— Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
Truth is on the side of the oppressed.
— Malcolm X
I love the stars.Because they can't say anything.I love the stars.Because they do not judge anyone.
— Natsuki Takaya
I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.
— Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
I have survived. I am here. Confused, screwed up, but here. So, how can I find my way? Is there a chain saw of the soul, an ax I can take to my memories or fears?
— Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
Don't assume, ask. Be kind. Tell the truth. Don't say anything you can't stand behind fully. Have integrity. Tell people how you feel.
— Warsan Shire
I no longer feel allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despise being one myself. I think that Peeta was onto something about us destroying one another and letting some decent species take over. Because something is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children’s lives to settle its differences. You can spin it any way you like. Snow thought the Hunger Games were an efficient means of control. Coin thought the parachutes would expedite the war. But in the end, who does it benefit? No one. The truth is, it benefits no one to live in a world where these things happen.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
— Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard
What I'm looking for is not out there, it is in me.
— Helen Keller
Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they're never weakness.
— Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead
Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time.
— Benjamin Disraeli
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know
— John Keats, The Complete Poems
Sometimes what we want isn't what we need.
— Gena Showalter, The Darkest Night
She has been to the compound before. She remembered this hallway. She knows about the initiation process. My mother was Dauntless.
— Veronica Roth, Divergent
Expectations make people miserable, so whatever yours are, lower them. You'll definitely be happier.
— Simone Elkeles, How to Ruin Your Boyfriend's Reputation
Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.
— Noam Chomsky
The truth is messy. It's raw and uncomfortable. You can't blame people for preferring lies.
— Holly Black, Red Glove
The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.
— Carl Sagan
There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.
— Harold Pinter, Old Times
Lies run sprints, but the truth runs marathons.
— Michael  Jackson
I examined the poets, and I look on them as people whose talent overawes both themselves and others, people who present themselves as wise men and are taken as such, when they are nothing of the sort.From poets, I moved to artists. No one was more ignorant about the arts than I; no one was more convinced that artists possessed really beautiful secrets. However, I noticed that their condition was no better than that of the poets and that both of them have the same misconceptions. Because the most skillful among them excel in their specialty, they look upon themselves as the wisest of men. In my eyes, this presumption completely tarnished their knowledge. As a result, putting myself in the place of the oracle and asking myself what I would prefer to be — what I was or what they were, to know what they have learned or to know that I know nothing — I replied to myself and to the god: I wish to remain who I am.We do not know — neither the sophists, nor the orators, nor the artists, nor I— what the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are. But there is this difference between us: although these people know nothing, they all believe they know something; whereas, I, if I know nothing, at least have no doubts about it. As a result, all this superiority in wisdom which the oracle has attributed to me reduces itself to the single point that I am strongly convinced that I am ignorant of what I do not know.
— Socrates
You're so easy to read but the book is boring me.
— Emilie Autumn
I believe in the fundamental truth of all great religions of the world.
— Mahatma Gandhi
On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
— Banksy
Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.
— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with joy are goodness, beauty, and truth.
— Albert Einstein
It's partly true, too, but it isn't all true. People always think something's all true.
— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.
— Philip Roth, American Pastoral
To be great, be whole;Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.Be whole in everything. Put all you areInto the smallest thing you do.So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendorBecause it blooms up above.
— Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa
That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.
— Al Pacino
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, Geek Love
An acquaintance merely enjoys your company, a fair-weather companion flatters when all is well, a true friend has your best interests at heart and the pluck to tell you what you need to hear.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
Most of what I say is complete truth. My edit button is broken.
— Myra McEntire, Hourglass
You should not honor men more than truth.
— Plato
I will no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins.
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
I found power in accepting the truth of who I am. It may not be a truth that others can accept, but I cannot live any other way. How would it be to live a lie every minute of your life.
— Alison Goodman, Eon: Dragoneye Reborn
My bullshit meter is reading that as 'false'.
— Charlaine Harris, Dead as a Doornail
Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they're used.
— Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject... And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.
— Seneca, Natural Questions
If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don't like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.
— Augustine of Hippo
You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.
— Joss Whedon
Words are like eggs dropped from great heights
—  you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall.
One lie has the power to tarnish a thousand truths.
— Al David
A man will never love you or treat you as well as a store. If a man doesn’t fit, you can’t exchange him seven days later for a gorgeous cashmere sweater. And a store always smells good. A store can awaken a lust for things you never even knew you needed. And when your fingers first grasp those shiny, new bags…
— Sophie Kinsella, Confessions of a Shopaholic
The truth may not set you free, but used carefully, it can confuse the hell out of your enemies.
— Laurell K. Hamilton, Micah
Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
The color of truth is grey.
— André Gide
...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.
— Richard Dawkins
In the end, Leck should have stuck to his lies. For it was the truth he almost told that killed him.
— Kristin Cashore, Graceling
I was in my bed trying to figure out why sometimes you can wake up and go back to sleep and other times you can't
— Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Nothing is yet in its true form.
— C.S. Lewis
The single best thing about coming out of the closet is that nobody can insult you by telling you what you've just told them.
— Rachel Maddow
[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.
— Clive Barker
In the calculus of feelings, you never really know how one person's absence will affect you more than another's.
— Gayle Forman, Where She Went
What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is – I repeat it – a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
— George Orwell
Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
— Khaled Hosseini
Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.
— Meister Eckhart
The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.
— Franz Kafka
Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.
— Erica Jong
I believe in God but people are liars. It's those people who say they are appointed by God who I don't believe in.
— Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer
Before you enbark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.
— Sara Shepard, Perfect
Some things aren't meant to be known. Only believed.
— Mary E. Pearson, The Adoration of Jenna Fox
A boy may be as disagreeable as he pleases, but when a girl refuses to crap sunshine on command, the world mutters darkly about her moods.
— Scott Lynch, The Republic of Thieves
The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising; a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps most remarkable because it moves as if it always hears music.
— Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
In darkness God's truth shines most clear.
— Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom
I'm telling you a lie in a vicious effort that you will repeat my lie over and over until it becomes true
— Lady Gaga
At first, they'll only dislike what you say, but the more correct you start sounding the more they'll dislike you.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie.
— Victor Hugo
Never apologize for showing your feelings. When you do, you are apologizing for the truth.
— José N. Harris, MI VIDA: A Story of Faith, Hope and Love
If you never tell anyone the truth about yourself, eventually you start to forget. The love, the heartbreak, the joy, the despair, the things I did that were good, the things I did that were shameful--if I kept them all inside, my memories of them would start to disappear. And then I would disappear.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire
Hypocrites get offended by the truth.
— Jess C. Scott, Bad Romance: Seven Deadly Sins Anthology
Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
— Albert Camus, The Fall
Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
— Winston S. Churchill
Macy: “In Truth,” I said, “there are no rules other than you have to tell the truth.”Wes: “How do you win?” he askedMacy: “That,” I said, “is such a boy question.
— Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever
Death is unstoppable. One must face it as a fact of life
— D. Aswini, Saffron - The Blood Swan
I am a lover of truth, a worshiper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.
— Stephen Fry
Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.
— Orson Scott Card, Alvin Journeyman
Say not, “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth.”Say not, “I have found the path of the soul.” Say rather, “I have met the soul walking upon my path.”For the soul walks upon all paths.The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
Knowing the truth is not always a kindness.
— Rosamund Hodge, Cruel Beauty
The truth is like salt. Men want to taste a little, but too much makes everyone sick.
— Joe Abercrombie, The Heroes
Only yesterday I was no different than them, yet I was saved. I am explaining to you the way of life of a people who say every sort of wicked thing about me because I sacrificed their friendship to gain my own soul. I left the dark paths of their duplicity and turned my eyes toward the light where there is salvation, truth, and justice. They have exiled me now from their society, yet I am content. Mankind only exiles the one whose large spirit rebels against injustice and tyranny. He who does not prefer exile to servility is not free in the true and necessary sense of freedom.
— Kahlil Gibran
It has been said, 'the truth will make men free.' The truth alone has never made anyone free. It is only doubt which will bring mental emancipation.
— Anton Szandor LaVey
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.
— Pablo Picasso
What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.
— Jacques Derrida
The truth will make you odd.
— Judy Blume
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?The world would split open.
— Muriel Rukeyser
Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: The requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world -- "No, YOU move.
— J. Michael Straczynski, Civil War: The Amazing Spider-Man
Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.
— Frank Herbert
When the time comes to die, make sure that all you have to do is die!
— Jim Elliot, The Journals of Jim Elliot
Truth is a matter of the imagination.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
There are many things in your heart you can never tell to another person. They are you, your private joys and sorrows, and you can never tell them. You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself, when you tell them.
— Greta Garbo
The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you'll get action.
— Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements
The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. "One word of truth outweighs the world.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.
— Leo Tolstoy
We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.
— H.P. Lovecraft, Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft
Knowledge is a destination. Truth, the journey.
— Terry Goodkind
The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Everything is created twice, first in the mind and then in reality.
— Robin S. Sharma, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Fable About Fulfilling Your Dreams  Reaching Your Destiny
People are always complaining that life's not fair, but that simply isn't true. Life is extraordinarily fair. It's just not centered on you.
— Lynn Marie Sager, A River Worth Riding
It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.
— Neil Gaiman
Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to realize it's going to be along process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
How many people long for that "past, simpler, and better world," I wonder, without ever recognizing the truth that perhaps it was they who were simpler and better, and not the world about them?
— R.A. Salvatore, Streams of Silver
It's not about going around trying to stir up trouble. As long as you're honest and you articulate what you believe to be true, somebody somewhere will become your enemy whether you like it or not.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
El que lee mucho y anda mucho, ve mucho y sabe mucho.
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha
And thus, the actions of life often not allowing any delay, it is a truth very certain that, when it is not in our power to determine the most true opinions we ought to follow the most probable.
— René Descartes, Discourse on Method
Don’t talk like that, Dill,” said Aunt Alexandra. “It’s not becoming to a child. It’s – cynical.”“I ain’t cynical, Miss Alexandra. Tellin’ the truth’s not cynical, is it?”“The way you tell it, it is.
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
When everything gets answered, it's fake.
— Sean Penn
The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.
— William Faulkner
The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies.
— Franz Kafka
But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths.
— Edmund Burke
A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years.
— Byron Katie, Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
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, Killosophy
All should be laid open to you without reserve, for there is not a truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.
— Thomas Jefferson, Writings: Autobiography/Notes on the State of Virginia/Public & Private Papers/Addresses/Letters
Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. 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
If you have no intention of loving or being loved, the whole journey is pointless.
— Kate DiCamillo
There is no truth," Stephanie said mysterously. "Only perspectives.
— Michelle Hodkin, The Evolution of Mara Dyer
The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
— John F. Kennedy
When no one you know tells the truth, you learn to see under the surface.
— Cassandra Clare, Lady Midnight
It’s as simple as that. Simple and complicated, as most true things are.
— David Levithan, Every Day
Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.
— Blaise Pascal
A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. 
— Richard Avedon
Apparently people don't like the truth, but I do like it; I like it because it upsets a lot of people. If you show them enough times that their arguments are bullshit, then maybe just once, one of them will say, 'Oh! Wait a minute - I was wrong.' I live for that happening. Rare, I assure you
— Lemmy Kilmister
For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right
— Miguel de Unamuno
A good man is as strong as the right woman needs him to be.
— Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram
I cannot love a man who cannot protect me.
— Anne Brontë
Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true.
— Jodi Picoult, Between the Lines
Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
— Isaac Newton
My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.
— Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals
That is the curse of lying, Sister. Once you place that crown of the liar upon your head, you can take it off again, but it leaves a stain for all time.
— Terry Goodkind, Soul of the Fire
There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one.
— C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
When one realises one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake.
— P.D. Ouspensky
It was queer how sometimes a child's innocent eyes can see things that grown men are blind to.
— George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
All around the dining hall, you can feel the rejuvenating effect that a good meal can bring on. The way it can make people kinder, funnier, more optimistic, and remind them it's not a mistake to go on living. It's better than any medicine.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
In the cherry blossom's shadethere's no such thingas a stranger.
— Kobayashi Issa
The laughter of the world is merely loneliness pathetically trying to reassure itself.
— Neal A. Maxwell, The Neal A. Maxwell Quote Book
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.
— Anaïs Nin, Journals Of Anais Nin Volume 3
The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.
— Terry Pratchett
Proof is boring. Proof is tiresome. Proof is an irrelevance. People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.
— Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings
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, The Archived
The tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes never! You're asked an unexpected question, you don't even flinch, it takes just a second to get yourself under control, you know just what you have to say to hide the truth, and you speak very convincingly, and nothing in your face twitches to give you away. But the truth, alas, has been disturbed by the question, and it rises up from the depths of your soul to flicker in your eyes and all is lost.
— Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Gossip, as usual, was one-third right and two-thirds wrong.
— L.M. Montgomery, Chronicles of Avonlea
My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for who I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions of people who hate you for what you are and you're likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks.
— David Sedaris
I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk throught the rain.
— Audre Lorde
I was very afraid at the beginning, until Master told me that pain isn't the truth; it's what you have to get through in order to find the truth.
— Deepak Chopra, The Return of Merlin
You speak from your heart, young Firepaw. This will make you a stronger warrior one day." said LionheartTigerclaw growled. "Or it might make him give in to kittypet weakness right at the moment of attack
— Erin Hunter, Into the Wild
[I]t is the wine that leads me on,the wild winethat sets the wisest man to singat the top of his lungs,laugh like a fool – it drives theman to dancing... it eventempts him to blurt out storiesbetter never told.
— Homer, The Odyssey
Falsehood is never in words
—  it is in things.
It was odd, (Tessa thought), what brought out tenderness in people.
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel
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, The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History
Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.
— Albert Schweitzer
Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.
— Albert Einstein
I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.
— Stephen King, Bag of Bones
Some of us walk around with a necklace of hope, an armour of sanity, but at the end of the day, they always come off. We reveal our naked, vulnerable, real selves.
— Karen Quan, Write like no one is reading 2
All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
There hadn’t been one specific moment. It was like gradualy waking up. You go from being asleep to the space between dreaming and awake and then into consciousness. It’s a slow process, but when you’re awake, there’s no mistaking it. There was no mistaking that it had been love.
— Jenny Han, We'll Always Have Summer
Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.
— Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives
— John Lennon
A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to.
— Tom Bissell
the worst part about being lied to is knowing you werent worth the truth
— Jean-Paul Sartre
It was so strange, the way that life moved forward: the twists and the dead ends, the sudden opportunities. She supposed if you could predict or foresee everything that was going to happen, you’d lose the motivation to go through it all. The promise was always in the possibility.
— Lauren Oliver, Panic
Night is a time of rigor, but also of mercy. There are truths which one can see only when it’s dark
— Isaac Bashevis Singer, Teibele And Her Demon
Actors in any capacity, artists of any stripe, are inspired by their curiosity, by their desire to explore all quarters of life, in light and in dark, and reflect what they find in their work. Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.
— Tom Hiddleston
The only tyrant I accept in this world is the 'still small voice' within me. And even though I have to face the prospect of being a minority of one, I humbly believe I have the courage to be in such a hopeless minority.
— Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.
— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
True love is not a hide and seek game: in true love, both lovers seek each other.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
You are the Truth from foot to brow. Now, what else would you like to know?
— Jalaluddin Rumi
Kumikirot ang tyan? Kumikirot ang ulo? Correlation? I therefore conclude na ang utak ay parang tyan, sumasakit kapag walang laman.
— Eros S. Atalia, Ligo Na U, Lapit Na Me
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, Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory
What would you think if I told you that I wasn’t an Allomancer?” Sazed asked.“I’d think that you were lying,” Vin said.“Have you known me to lie before?”“The best liars are those who tell the truth most of the time.
— Brandon Sanderson, The Final Empire
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
— P.C. Hodgell, Seeker's Mask