Quotes about Truth

To free a man from error is not to deprive him of anything but to give him something: for the knowledge that a thing is false is a piece of truth. No error is harmless: sooner or later it will bring misfortune to him who harbours it. Therefore deceive no one, but rather confess ignorance of what you do not know, and leave each man to devise his own articles of faith for himself.

A man cannot serve two masters: so it is either reason or the scriptures. - On Religion

the ancient wisdom of the Indian philosophers declares, "It is Mâyâ, the veil of deception, which blinds the eyes of mortals, and makes them behold a world of which they cannot say either that it is or that it is not: for it is like a dream; it is like the sunshine on the sand which the traveller takes from afar for water, or the stray piece of rope he mistakes for a snake.

Truth that has merely been learned is like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a waxen nose; it adheres to us only because it is put on. But truth acquired by thought of our own is like a natural limb; it alone really belongs to us.

The actual facts of morality are too much on my side for me to fear that my theory can ever be replaced or upset by any other.

whoever attributes no merit to himself because he really has none is not modest, but merely honest.

Simplicity has always been looked upon as a token, not only of truth, but also of genius. Style receives its beauty from the thought expressed, while with those writers who only pretend to think it is their thoughts that are said to be fine because of their style. Style is merely the silhouette of thought; and to write in a vague or bad style means a stupid or confused mind.

Deny that the Bible is, without any qualifications, the very Word of God, and you are left without any ultimate standard of measurement and without any supreme authority. Grant that the Bible is a Divine revelation and communication of God's own mind and will to men, and you have a fixed starting point from which an advance can be made into the domain of truth.

Almost all doctrinal error is really truth perverted. Truth wrongly divided. Truth disproportionately held and taught.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? 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?

Once it was easy to know who were my people... I do not believe our wants have made all our lies holy.

More than twenty years later I meet Muriel at a poetry reading at a women's coffee-house in New York. Her voice is still soft, but her great brown eyes are not. I tell her, "I am writing an unfolding of my life and loves." "Just make sure you tell the truth about me," she says.