Top 100 Truth And Falsehood Quotes
#1. Though truth and falsehood be Near twins, yet truth a little elder is.
John Donne
#2. 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
#3. The firmness with which the (American) people have withstood the ... abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood, show that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false and to form a correct judgment between them.
Thomas Jefferson
#4. Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some new decision, offering each bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever twixt that darkness and that light.
James Russell Lowell
#5. Our analysis of truth and falsehood, or of the nature of judgment, is not very likely to be influenced by our hopes and fears.
Charles D. Broad
#6. Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols
it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.
William Hazlitt
#7. A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
John F. Kennedy
#8. Truth and falsehood are opposed; but truth is the norm not of truth only but of falsehood also.
C.S. Lewis
#9. Animals have this way of constantly confronting us with ultimate questions - about truth and falsehood, guilt and innocence, God and sanctity and the soul - forcing us to define ourselves and our relationship to the world.
Matthew Scully
#10. Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#11. Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.
John Milton
#12. Belief is with them mechanical, voluntary: they believe what they are paid for - they swear to that which turns to account. Do you suppose, that after years spent in this manner, they have any feeling left answering to the difference between truth and falsehood?
William Hazlitt
#14. Come! let us take a moment's shelter under some roof
Look! there - before you, a little way off
There is an empty space
Between truth and falsehood.
Amrita Pritam
#15. In order to understand the interrelation of truth and falsehood in life, a man must understand falsehood in himself, the constant incessant lies he tells himself.
G.I. Gurdjieff
#16. truth and falsehood mingle in life - and to what God builds, man adds his own decoration.
Rabindranath Tagore
#17. For politicians truth and falsehood are unimportant. So I never could become a politician not even a church politician.
Martin Niemoller
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Falsehood is often rocked by truth, but she soon outgrows her cradle and discards her nurse.
Charles Caleb Colton
#21. Falsehood always endeavors to copy the mien and attitude of truth.
Samuel Johnson
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Truth may be stretched, but cannot be broken, and always gets above falsehood, as does oil above water.
Miguel De Cervantes
#28. Willing or preferring is the same with respect to good and evil, that judging is with respect to truth or falsehood.
Anthony Collins
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.
Jonathan Swift
#33. You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.
C.S. Lewis
#34. Yes, I know most of you can tell the difference between the truth and a lie, but a lie repeated often enough is easily mistaken for the truth. A falsehood left unrefuted in time becomes a fact. I tell you, the tongue is mightier than the sharpest talon.
Jim Tan
#35. Falsehood is never so successful as when she baits her hook with truth, and no opinions so fatally mislead us as those that are not wholly wrong, as no watches so effectively deceive the wearer as those that are sometimes right.
Charles Caleb Colton
#36. This is the way of peace: Overcome evil with good, falsehood with truth, and hatred with love.
Peace Pilgrim
#37. Time's glory is to command contending kings,
To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light.
William Shakespeare
#38. The assertion that you are in falsehood and I am in truth ist the most cruel thing one man can say to another
Leo Tolstoy
#39. Lose with truth and right rather than gain with falsehood and wrong.
Maimonides
#40. So spake Israel's true king, and to the Fiend
Made answer meet, that made void all his wiles.
So fares it, when with truth falsehood contends.
John Milton
#41. All lies are not meant to deceive, some become inevitable in a society lacking in transparency and openness.
Tarif Naaz
#42. We swear by the Quran and Sunnah, and we will not compromise with any infidel ... Islam is the truth and all else is falsehood.
Abu Bakar Bashir
#43. Truth is Timeless, and returning to Truth is better than continuing in Falsehood
Umar
#44. The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, in-as-much as he who knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehood and errors.
Thomas Jefferson
#45. Truth can be sliced a hundred different ways, and it will still remain true, but falsehood shrinks into the shadows, hoping never to be tested, with excuses aplenty.
Chris Johnson
#46. The best lesson which we get from the tragedy of Karbala is that Husain and his companions were rigid believers in God. They illustrated that the numerical superiority does not count when it comes to the truth and the falsehood. The victory of Husain, despite his minority, marvels me!
Thomas Carlyle
#47. Imagination is the deceptive part in man, the mistress of error and falsehood.
Blaise Pascal
#48. No educated person believes the Adam and Eve myth nowadays, but it's surprising how many parents think that it's somehow fun to pass on this falsehood to their children ... I would want to argue that the truth of evolution is more interesting and more poetic
Richard Dawkins
#49. Truth is comfortable in your eyes, but falsehood looks for ways to escape and clearly shows itself in the way you look at the person to whom you are lying.
V.C. Andrews
#50. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?
John Milton
#51. True and false are attributes of speech not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither truth nor falsehood. Error theremay be, as when we expect that which shall not be; or suspect what has not been: but in neither case can a man be charged with untruth.
Thomas Hobbes
#53. If a man fasten his attention on a single aspect of truth and apply himself to that alone for a long time, the truth becomes distorted and not itself but falsehood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#54. If I can assign names as well as pictures to objects, the right assignment of them we may call truth, and the wrong assignment of them falsehood.
Socrates
#55. You don't have to feed the lie if you don't want it to. If you make it credible it will become that, but only in your mind and only as disproportionate as you've decided it is. Truth has a way of being more persistent and if the two ever meet, truth will win.
Howard L. Salter
#56. So obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity.
Tacitus
#57. Truth is more deceptive than falsehood, for it is more frequently presented by those from whom we do not expect it, and so has against it a numerical presumption.
Ambrose Bierce
#58. He had the unlucky capacity many men have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to take any serious part in it.
Leo Tolstoy
#59. Alas! Victor, when falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness? I feel as if I were walking on the edge of a precipice, towards which thousands are crowding, and endeavouring to plunge me into the abyss.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#60. A liar begins with making falsehood appear like truth, and ends with making truth itself appear like falsehood.
William Shenstone
#61. Fire destroys falsehood, that is sophistry, and restores truth, driving out darkness.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#62. The word 'religion' has acquired a very bad name among those who really love truth, justice, charity. It also exhales the musty odor of sanctimony and falsehood.
Luther Burbank
#63. See you now your bait of falsehood take this carp of truth; and thus do we of wisdom and of reach, with windlasses and with assays of bias, by indirections find directions out.
William Shakespeare
#64. Whatever convenience may be thought to be in falsehood and dissimulation, it is soon over; but the inconvenience of it is perpetual, because it brings a man under everlasting jealousy and suspicion, so that he is not believed when he speaks the truth, nor trusted when perhaps he means honestly.
John Tillotson
#65. 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
#66. He had the unfortunate capacity many men, especially Russians, have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to be able to take a serious part in it.
Leo Tolstoy
#67. Truth, though, is nothing in the face of self-falsehood, and principles are of no value if the idealist cannot live up to his own standards.
R.A. Salvatore
#68. I mean that man is ruled by a tyrant whose name is Ignorance, and that is the tyrant I sought to overthrow. That is the tyrant which gave birth to monarchy, and monarchy is authority based on falsehood, whereas knowledge is authority based on truth. Man should be ruled by knowledge.
Victor Hugo
#69. Every politician, every member of the clerical profession, ought to incur the reasonable suspicion of being an interested supporter of false doctrines, who becomes angry at opposition, and endeavors to cast an odium on free inquiry. Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it.
Thomas Cooper
#70. Heretic ... is a person who seizes upon a truth and pushes it to the point at which it becomes a falsehood.
T. S. Eliot
#71. Truth, when we are fortunate enough to find it, is like bad-tasting medicine. It rarely comes as a pleasant surprise, because if it surprises us, it means we've been denying it for some time and have a lot of beliefs based on falsehood. It's hard to give up those beliefs.
Orson Scott Card
#72. Oh, what is brighter than the light?
What is darker than the night?
What is keener than an axe?
What is softer than melting wax?
Truth is brighter than the light,
Falsehood darker than the night.
Revenge is keener than an axe,
And love is softer than melting wax.
Cassandra Clare
#73. Christianity, contrasted with the Jewish system of emblems, is truth in the sense of reality, as substance is opposed to shadows, and, contrasted with heathen mythology, is truth as opposed to falsehood.
Richard Whately
#74. Truth can be sifted out from falsehood only if the government is vigorously and consistently cross-examined, so that the fundamental issues of the struggle may be clearly defined
Zechariah Chafee
#75. The moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it histruth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced a falsehood.
Sherwood Anderson
#76. Reason forbade me many things which,
Instinctively, my nature was attracted to;
And a perpetual loss I feel if, knowing,
I believe a falsehood or deny the truth.
Abu'l-A'la Al-Ma'arri
#77. There is not a single untruth, no -but after ten lines Truth shrieks, she runs distraught and disheveled through her temple's corridors; she does not know herself. 'I can endure lies,' she cries. 'I cannot survive this stifling verisimilitude
Thornton Wilder
#78. Man can certainly keep on lying (and does so), but he cannot make truth falsehood.
Karl Barth
#79. Fire is to represent truth because it destroys all sophistry and lies; and the mask is for lying and falsehood which conceal truth.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#80. Justice implies knowledge of the right and proper place for a thing or a being to be; of right as against wrong; of the mean and limit; of spiritual gain as against loss; of truth as against falsehood.
Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas
#81. It is only when one is thoroughly true that there can be purity and freedom. Falsehood always punishes itself.
Berthold Auerbach
#82. I renounce falsehood, whatsoever be the guise it assumes, and I embrace truth, wheresoever I find it.
Ameen Rihani
#83. People who are open about their own faults, especially, often want to ferret out "inner feelings" beneath the surface and expose any falsehood, and they think that it's in their inner feelings that the truth lies. But I don't think that's the truth.
Mamoru Hosoda
#84. Truth indeed rather alleviates than hurts, and will always bear up against falsehood, as oil does above water.
Miguel De Cervantes
#85. Truth leads to good deeds, and good deeds lead to Paradise. Falsehood leads to evil deeds, and evil deeds lead to the Fire.
Anonymous
#86. Father, we ask that you give us a passion for the truth and not merely a hatred of falsehood. Keep us concerned for the spiritual health of people but open to your own rebukes from your mighty Word.
Max Anders
#87. Truth is confirmed by inspection and delay; falsehood by haste and uncertainty.
Tacitus
#88. Christ taught us truth; the Devil teaches us falsehood, and strives in every way to contradict every truth; devising various calumnies against it.
John Of Kronstadt
#89. The Prophet supplicated that God, the Exalted, show him things in their reality, distinguished and clear: Show me the truth as truth and give me the ability to follow it; and show me falsehood as falsehood and give me the ability to avoid it.
Hamza Yusuf
#90. Woe to falsehood! it affords no relief to the breast, like truth; it gives us no comfort, pains him who forges it, and like an arrow directed by a god flies back and wounds the archer.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#91. Perhaps it is better to be a machine that does its duty than a flesh-and-blood person who will not, for a dead truth is better than a live falsehood.
L. Frank Baum
#92. We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
William James
#93. Be terrified. Nothing in life is certain. It does not owe you anything, and if it decides to take something from you it will. You must accept this truth. Accept the dreadful possibility that your blind optimism is merely a fancied lie.
H.S. Crow
#94. When satire flies abroad on falsehood's wing, Short is her life, and impotent her sting; But when to truth allied, the wound she gives Sinks deep, and to remotest ages lives.
Charles Churchill
#95. The dull flat falsehood serves for policy, and in the cunning, truth's itself a lie.
Alexander Pope
#96. Whether statistics be an art or a science ... or a scientific art, we concern ourselves little. It is the basis of social and political dynamics, and affords the only secure ground on which the truth or falsehood of the theories and hypotheses of that complicated science can be brought to the test.
Adolphe Quetelet
#97. I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him.
Abraham Lincoln
#98. The greatest truth is honesty, and the greatest falsehood is dishonesty.
Abu Bakr
#99. Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.
Blaise Pascal
#100. What is truth? What is falsehood? Whatever gives wings to men, whatever produces great works and great souls and lifts up a man's height above the earth - that's true. Whatever clips off man's wings - that's false.
Nikos Kazantzakis
