1. A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
- Mark Twain
2. The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
- Oscar Wilde
3. Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
- George Orwell, 1984
4. Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point 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.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
5. In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
- George Orwell
6. The unexamined life is not worth living.
- Socrates
7. The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
- Flannery O'Connor
8. Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
9. Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.
- Pablo Picasso
10. There are no facts, only interpretations.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
11. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
- Ernest Hemingway
12. No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.
- François de La Rochefoucauld
13. A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
- William Blake
14. The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
- Nadine Gordimer
15. It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.
- George Washington
16. The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
17. Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
18. 1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.
- Kurt Vonnegut
19. Truth never damages a cause that is just.
- Mahatma Gandhi
20. All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; Third, it is accepted as self-evident.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
21. Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away.
- Dorothy L. Sayers
22. Three things can not hide for long: the Moon, the Sun and the Truth.
- Gautama Buddha
23. There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.
- Søren Kierkegaard
24. I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
- Georges Bataille, Violent Silence: Celebrating Georges Bataille
25. Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.
- Leo Tolstoy
26. I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.
- Hunter S. Thompson
27. Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
- André Gide
28. The most common form of despair is not being who you are.
- Søren Kierkegaard
29. History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
- James Joyce, Ulysses
30. 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
31. 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
32. Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
- Ernest Hemingway
33. The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.
- Aristotle
34. Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
- Banksy
35. To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.
- Bertrand Russell
36. 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
37. 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
38. You should not honor men more than truth.
- Plato
39. To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
- George Orwell
40. 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
Thank you for reading.
If you found this list useful, please share this with your friends and family.
There are 200+ guides to succeeding in business, career and personal life in The Success Manual. Get the pdf ebook for $12 only.