Top 100 Quotes About Falsehood
#1. Is to attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing Darkness. It cannot be.
Frank Herbert
#2. That character in conversation which commonly passes for agreeable is made up of civility and falsehood.
Alexander Pope
#4. Anxious to know, yet only too happy to ignore, we seek in what is, a remedy for what is not; and in what is not a relief from what is. Now the real, now illusion is our refuge; and the soul has finally no other resource but the true, which is her weapon
and falsehood, which is her armor.
Paul Valery
#5. Like mythology, Greek philosophy has a tendency to personify ideas. And the Sophist is not merely a teacher of rhetoric for a fee of one or fifty drachmae (Crat.), but an ideal of Plato's in which the falsehood of all mankind is reflected.
Plato
#6. The opposite of a plain truth, Neils Bohr liked to repeat, is a plain falsehood. But the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth.
Rebecca Goldstein
#7. None of us is fully able to perceive the truth that shines through another person's window, nor the falsehood that we may perceive as truth. Thus, we can easily mistake another's good for evil, and our own evil for good.
Forrest Church
#8. Theological error is the most pernicious of errors; it strikes at man's center and separates him from his Creator and Redeemer. God insisted not only that Israelites should judge their own hearts and cast aside falsehood about Him but that they should also confront it wherever it emerged.
Max Anders
#9. Cottages have them (falsehood and dissimulation) as well as courts, only with worse manners.
Lord Chesterfield
#10. The dust of controversy is merely the falsehood flying off.
Thomas Carlyle
#11. Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth. Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality. Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.
Czeslaw Milosz
#12. Through True Love, she merges with Him. She who does not know her Husband Lord, the Architect of karma, is deluded by falsehood she herself is false.
Guru Nanak
#14. On the road to nowhere there are many people who lack the vision to get you anywhere.
Johnnie Dent Jr.
#15. How simple and natural were her words, and how likely that she was simply sleepy! She felt herself clad in an impenetrable armor of falsehood. She felt that some unseen force had come to her aid and was supporting her.
Leo Tolstoy
#16. We must fight their falsehood with our truth, but we must also fight the falsehood in our truth.
H. Richard Niebuhr
#17. What the world stigmatises as romantic, is often more nearly allied to the truth than is commonly supposed; for, if the generous ideas of youth are too often over-clouded by the sordid views of after-life, that scarcely proves them to be false.
Anne Bronte
#19. We cannot separate doubt from deception. Doubt robs a man of his confidence; it is a fearful thing. Offer him deception to restore that confidence and he will embrace the falsehood for the comfort it brings. If you would deceive, begin with doubt.
D.A. Blankinship
#20. One of the reasons, surely, why women have been credited with less perfect veracity than men is that the burden of conventional falsehood falls chiefly on them.
Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould
#21. Man is nothing but insincerity, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in regard to himself and in regard to others. He does not wish that he should be told the truth, he shuns saying it to others; and all these moods, so inconsistent with justice and reason, have their roots in his heart.
Blaise Pascal
#22. A man of faith will remain steadfast to truth even though the whole world might appear to be enveloped in falsehood.
Mahatma Gandhi
#23. There is such a thing as a hatred of lies and dissimulation, which is the outcome of a delicate sense of humor; there is also the selfsame hatred but as the result of cowardice, in so far as falsehood is forbidden by Divine law. Too cowardly to lie.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#24. As ten millions of circles can never make a square, so the united voice of myriads cannot lend the smallest foundation to falsehood.
Oliver Goldsmith
#25. Lying is sometimes acted, insinuated, or implied, in a manner as injurious and shameful as when the falsehood is spoken outright.
Elias Lyman Magoon
#26. Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another.
Aleister Crowley
#27. A churlish courtesy rarely comes but either for gain or falsehood.
Philip Sidney
#28. The total destruction of falsehood allows authentic creative flow to happen.
Bryant McGill
#29. I will take all my rights! Can you deliver them to my house?
Ljupka Cvetanova
#30. The notion that you can endanger your physical and mental health by letting strong passions go unsatisfied is a vicious falsehood.
Joseph B. Wirthlin
#31. Falsehood is often rocked by truth, but she soon outgrows her cradle and discards her nurse.
Charles Caleb Colton
#32. Lies don't make you happy. They just make you lie about being happy.
Stefan Molyneux
#33. It is difficult to say what truth is, but sometimes it is so easy to recognize a falsehood.
Albert Einstein
#34. It is man's unique privilege, among all other organisms. By pursuing falsehood you will arrive at the truth!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#35. Falsehood always endeavors to copy the mien and attitude of truth.
Samuel Johnson
#36. Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.
Samuel Johnson
#37. A lie should be trampled on and extinguished wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that falsehood, like pestilence, breathes around me.
Thomas Carlyle
#38. We aim above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#39. No human being can control love, and no one is to blame either for feeling it or for losing it. What alone degrades a woman is falsehood.
George Sand
#40. When a man has once forfeited the reputation of his integrity, he is set fast, and nothing will then serve his turn, neither truth nor falsehood.
John Tillotson
#41. It will sometimes be necessary to use falsehood for the benefit of those who need such a mode of treatment.
Eusebius
#42. There is something very sublime, though very fanciful, in Plato's description of the Supreme Being,
that truth is His body and light His shadow. According to this definition there is nothing so contradictory to his nature as error and falsehood.
Joseph Addison
#43. Man's mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth.
Desiderius Erasmus
#45. Organized religion, being founded on superstition, is, perforce, not scientific. And all that which is not scientific - that is, truthful - must be bolstered up by force, fear and falsehood. Thus we always find slavery and organized religion going hand in hand.
Elbert Hubbard
#46. Though truth and falsehood be Near twins, yet truth a little elder is.
John Donne
#47. Deceit and falsehood, whatever conveniences they may for a time promise or produce, are, in the sum of life, obstacles to happiness. Those who profit by the cheat distrust the deceiver; and the act by which kindness was sought puts an end to confidence.
Samuel Johnson
#48. Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#49. For the soul that is blind considers falsehood to be falsehood no longer, evil not to be evil, because it puts darkness for light, and light for darkness, and falls into endless disorders.
San Juan De La Cruz
#50. Abide not with dualism,
Carefully avoid pursuing it;
As soon as you have right and wrong,
Confusion ensues, and Mind is lost. (172)
Edward Conze
#51. If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.
Michel De Montaigne
#52. The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice - or not yet - a decided one. So also is the truth or falsehood of every one of the miracle stories that religions rely upon to impress multitudes of the faithful.
Richard Dawkins
#53. It is the surest proof of man's natural enmity against God that he dares to impute falsehood to one who is truth itself.
Charles Spurgeon
#54. It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.
Samuel Johnson
#55. Falsehood often lurks upon the tongue of him, who, by self-praise, seeks to enhance his value in the eyes of others.
Arnold Bennett
#56. Truth may be stretched, but cannot be broken, and always gets above falsehood, as does oil above water.
Miguel De Cervantes
#57. Conversation should be pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, free without indecency, learned without conceitedness, novel without falsehood.
William Shakespeare
#58. A doubtful friend is worse than a certain enemy. Let a man be one thing or the other, and we then know how to meet him.
Aesop
#59. If there were no falsehood in the world, there would be no doubt, if there were no doubt, there would be no inquiry; if no inquiry, no wisdom, no knowledge, no genius; and Fancy herself would lie muffled up in her robe, inactive, pale, and bloated.
Walter Savage Landor
#60. Whenever masses of people, especially educated people, know something - and when what they know is something they greatly fear because they believe it affects virtually everything they do or want to do - then most likely we stand in the presence of a vast falsehood.
Thomas Szasz
#61. PREHISTORIC, adj. Belonging to an early period and a museum. Antedating the art and practice of perpetuating falsehood.
Ambrose Bierce
#62. It is indeed the truth of the traumatic experience that forms the center of its psychopathology; it is not a pathology of falsehood or displacement of meaning, but of history itself (p. 5)
Cathy Caruth
#63. The truth cannot be asserted without denouncing the falsehood.
Leslie Stephen
#64. Had this author [Sir W Drummond Academical Questions, chap. iii.], instead of inveighing against the guilt and absurdity of atheism, demonstrated its falsehood, his conduct would have, been more suited to the modesty of the skeptic and the toleration of the philosopher.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#66. All err the more dangerously because each follows a truth. Their mistake lies not in following a falsehood but in not following another truth.
Blaise Pascal
#67. To lie is always a necessity for women; above all when they choose to deceive, falsehood becomes vital to them.
Marquis De Sade
#68. To live a life which is a perpetual falsehood is to suffer unknown tortures.
Victor Hugo
#69. A convention is an agreed-upon falsehood, a permitted lie.
Thornton Wilder
#70. O brave poets, keep back nothing; Nor mix falsehood with the whole! Look up Godward! speak the truth in Worthy song from earnest soul! Hold, in high poetic duty, Truest Truth the fairest Beauty.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#71. RUMOUR:
Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.
William Shakespeare
#72. Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices.
Jean-Baptiste Rousseau
#73. In Europe democracy is a falsehood. I do not know where it will end, but it cannot end in a quiet old age.
Klemens Von Metternich
#74. A small lie, if it actually is a lie, condemns a man as much as a big and black falsehood. If a man will deliberately cheat to the amount of a single cent, give him opportunity and he would cheat to any amount.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
#75. Hence there is nothing that Satan so much endeavors to accomplish as to bring on mists with the view of obscuring Christ, because he knows, that by this means the way is opened up for every kind of falsehood.
John Calvin
#76. I could dispense with nothing when I created the superman. His seed still carries all your evil and falsehood, your lies and yourignorance.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#77. There always comes a point beyond which lying becomes counterproductive. This point is reached when the audience to which the lies are addressed is forced to disregard altogether the distinguishing line between truth and falsehood in order to be able to survive.
Hannah Arendt
#78. I stand for truth. Truth will never ally itself with falsehood. Even if all the world should be against me, Truth must prevail in the end.
Swami Vivekananda
#79. History is nothing more than the belief in the senses, the belief in falsehood.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#80. Willing or preferring is the same with respect to good and evil, that judging is with respect to truth or falsehood.
Anthony Collins
#81. Might call it a great passion. When the true name of what we're dealing with is greed, or lust. We all have the special talent of believing in a falsehood, and believing it devoutly, when we want it to be true.
Barbara Kingsolver
#82. Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.
Robert Pinsky
#83. The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood.
Thomas Jefferson
#84. But secrets never, ever disappear, even after they are revealed. And that's the real secret right there. The empty space that never gets filled. The entropy of falsehood. The real secret is the secret itself.
Michael Lavigne
#85. One could push a pack of truths together to make one despicable falsehood.
Courtney Milan
#86. Meanwhile, the question is not whether we should 'lose ourselves' - since all do so in one way or another - but where we lose ourselves: in light or in darkness, in good dreams or in nightmares, in truth or in falsehood.
Charles Le Gai Eaton
#87. Who begins with severity, in judging of another, ends commonly with falsehood.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#88. Fear prevents us from becoming what we suppose to be especially when we tenaciously hold unto falsehood. Fear makes us look ugly, stifled and dissipated. Guard your heart against any form of fear because fear simply means you are expecting something bad.
Uzoma Nnadi
#89. All dies! and not alone
The aspiring trees and men and grass;
The poets' forms of beauty pass,
And noblest deeds they are undone,
Even truth itself decays, and lo,
From truth's sad ashes pain and falsehood grow.
Herman Melville
#90. Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever; but, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure, that he may speak it the longer.
Edmund Burke
#92. To tell a falsehood is like the cut of a saber: for though the wound may heal, the scar of it will remain.
Saadi
#93. Dr. Stockmann. I have already told you that what I want to speak about
is the great discovery I have made lately
the discovery that all the
sources of our moral life are poisoned and that the hole fabric of our
civic community is founded on the pestiferous soil of falsehood.
Henrik Ibsen
#94. Weakness ever sympathizes with vice, because vice is a weakness which assumes the mask of strength. Madness holds reason in horror, and on all subjects it delights in the exaggerations of falsehood. The cause of all bewitchments, the poison of all philtres, the power of all sorcerers are there.
Eliphas Levi
#95. He who has no confidence utters falsehoods, and he who utters falsehoods has no confidence.
Nachman Of Breslov
#96. Once to every person and nation come the moment to decide. In the conflict of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.
James Russell Lowell
#97. Seropusly, why do flies line up in the sky every time someone lies? Hovering over they long to take the shit out from where It belongs so They compete to eat it alive.
Ana Claudia Antunes
#98. Stupidity, outrage, vanity, cruelty, iniquity, bad faith, falsehood - we fail to see the whole array when it is facing in the same direction as we.
Jean Rostand
#99. If you do not love me, say, nonetheless, you do, for on your tongue falsehood for very shame would turn to truth.
Oscar Wilde
#100. A man whose mind feels that it is captive would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood, he will not do so; and in that case he will have to suffer a lot. He will beat his head against the wall until he faints. He will come to again
Simone Weil
