How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four; calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.
Abraham Lincoln

If you love somebody, let them go. If they return, they were always yours. If they don’t, they never were.

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.”
Abraham Lincoln

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Truth is generally the best vindication against slander.
Abraham Lincoln

You can bend it and twist it… You can misuse and abuse it… But even God cannot change the Truth.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.
Abraham Lincoln

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.
Adrienne Rich

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news.
Adrienne Rich

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.
Albert Einstein

I love you, and because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
Albert Einstein

Unless your heart, your soul, and your whole being are behind every decision you make, the words from your mouth will be empty, and each action will be meaningless. Truth and confidence are the roots of happiness.

There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.
Alfred North Whitehead

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
Anais Nin

You never find yourself until you face the truth

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
Anais Nin

Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.
Andre Gide

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.

Whenever you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Arthur Conan Doyle

For every beauty there is an eye somewhere to see it. For every truth there is an ear somewhere to hear it. For every love there is a heart somewhere to receive it.

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.
Bertrand Russell

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

You always admire what you really don’t understand.
We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.
Blaise Pascal

There are truths on this side of the Pyranees, which are falsehoods on the other.
Blaise Pascal

The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.

We know the truth, not only by the reason, but by the heart.
Blaise Pascal

There is no squabbling so violent as that between people who accepted an idea yesterday and those who will accept the same idea tomorrow.
Christopher Morley

Chase after the truth like all hell and you’ll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails.
Clarence Darrow

What you perceive, your observations, feelings, interpretations, are all your truth. Your truth is important. Yet it is not The Truth.

The intuition of free will gives us the truth.
Corliss Lamont

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

Truth springs from argument amongst friends.
David Hume

Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.
Demosthenes

If you want your dreams to come true, don’t sleep

Fear grows in darkness; if you think there’s a bogeyman around, turn on the light.
Dorothy Thompson

There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth, the persistent refusal to analyze the causes of happenings.
Dorothy Thompson

History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
E. L. Doctorow

Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit.
Edward R. Murrow

Reformers who are always compromising, have not yet grasped the idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Some minds remain open long enough for the truth not only to enter but to pass on through by way of a ready exit without pausing anywhere along the route.
Elizabeth Kenny

Truth is such a rare thing, it is delighted to tell it.
Emily Dickinson

The truth which has made us free will in the end make us glad also.
Felix Adler

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
Friedrich Nietzsche

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
Galileo

New opinions often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions open to discussion, and finally as established truths.
George Bernard Shaw

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.
George Bernard Shaw

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.
George Eliot

It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings � much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
George Eliot

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
George Orwell

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
George Orwell

The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.
Gloria Steinem

The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth. The Living of These Days, 1956
Harry Emerson Fosdick

Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence.
Henry David Thoreau

The only way to tell the truth is to speak with kindness. Only the words of a loving man can be heard.
Henri Frederic Amiel

The lawyer’s truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.
Henry David Thoreau

Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction; but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies. They go prospecting farther and farther away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate when they think themselves most successful.
Henry David Thoreau

It takes two to speak truth — one to speak and another to hear.
Henry David Thoreau

It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.
Henry Ward Beecher

A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.
Isaac Asimov

Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.
Jean-Paul Sartre

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.
Joan of Arc

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive and unrealistic
John F. Kennedy

It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth.
John Locke

Unity without verity is no better than conspiracy.
John Trapp

As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
Josh Billings

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.
Leonardo da Vinci

The old faiths light their candles all about, but burly truth comes by and blows them out.
Lizette W. Reese

If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.
Marcus Aurelius

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.
Margaret Mead

Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain’t so.
Mark Twain

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.
Mark Twain

If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.
Mark Twain

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.
Mark Twain

If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.
Mark Twain

Every generalization is dangerous, especially this one.
Mark Twain

The old saw says, “Let a sleeping dog lie.” Right. Still, when there is much at stake it is better to get a newspaper to do it.
Mark Twain

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.
Mark Twain

Always tell the truth. That way, you don’t have to remember what you said.
Mark Twain

Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain’t so.
Mark Twain

When in doubt, tell the truth.
Mark Twain

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
Martin Luther King, jr

It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him.
Max Planck

One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.
Maya Angelou

There are many more wrong answers than right ones, and they are easier to find.
Michael Friedlander

I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil. And that no one knows the truth.
Molly Ivins

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.
Noam Chomsky

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.
Pearl S. Buck

There are no creeds in mathematics.
Peter F. Drucker

The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.
Pierre Abelard

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
Plato

Truth comes as conqueror only to those who have lost the art of receiving it as friend.
Rabindranath Tagore

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.
Rabindranath Tagore

Truth is our element.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Reform is affirmative, conservatism negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truth, and goodness, and beauty are but different faces of the same all.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
Richard Avedon

Son, always tell the truth. Then you’ll never have to remember what you said the last time.
Sam Rayburn

From error to error one discovers the entire truth.
Sigmund Freud

Truth is powerful and it prevails.
Sojourner Truth

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
Stephen King

Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.
Thomas Jefferson

The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.
Thomas Jefferson

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
Umberto Eco

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Virginia Woolf

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
Virginia Woolf

As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities.

All the poet can do today is warn.
That is why true Poets must be truthful.
Wilfred Owen

I guess truth can hurt you worse in an election than about anything that can happen to you.
Will Rogers

I have always noticed that people will never laugh at anything that is not based on truth.
Will Rogers

The true is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our thinking.
William James

Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The ‘facts’ themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.
William James

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
William James

The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
William Sloane Coffin