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First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.
Sep 18, 2025
In any event, a truth that disheartens, because it is true, is still of far more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods.
You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth.
The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.
The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.
I conclude that, while it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.
For politicians truth and falsehood are unimportant. So I never could become a politician - not even a church politician.
The ultimate truth is penultimately a falsehood.
Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.
Unless we love the truth we cannot know it.
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.
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.
Let her (Truth) and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?
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.
Though truth and falsehood be Near twins, yet truth a little elder is.
So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge.
Duration is not a test of truth or falsehood.
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.
Truth is confirmed by inspection and delay; falsehood by haste and uncertainty.
Man's mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth.
A lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies.
. . . is to attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing Darkness. It cannot be.
A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.
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.
Most Christians are not convinced of their own faith. I would say 90 percent of Christians do not have a worldview, in other words a view of the world, based on the Scripture and a relationship with God. And so they cannot discern between the truth and falsehood.
Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
the senses alone are not implicitly to be depended on. We must correct their evidence by reason, and by considerations, derived from the nature of the medium, the distance of the object, and the disposition of the organ, in order to render them, within their sphere, the proper criteria of truth and falsehood.
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.
Once to every person and nation come the moment to decide. In the conflict of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.
The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of the pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.
Time's glory is to command contending kings, To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light.
Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.
There has been a controversy started of late, much better worth examination, concerning the general foundation of Morals; whether they be derived from Reason, or from Sentiment; whether we attain the knowledge of them by a chain of argument and induction, or by an immediate feeling and finer internal sense; whether, like all sound judgement of truth and falsehood, they should be the same to every rational intelligent being; or whether, like the perception of beauty and deformity, they be founded entirely on the particular fabric and constitution of the human species.
It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.
A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma.
The greatest truth is honesty, and the greatest falsehood is dishonesty.
Truth may be stretched, but cannot be broken, and always gets above falsehood, as does oil above water.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!
A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.
Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.
True and False are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood.
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence.
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.
Truth indeed rather alleviates than hurts, and will always bear up against falsehood, as oil does above water.
Reason, in a strict sense, as meaning the judgment of truth and falsehood, can never, of itself, be any motive to the will, and can have no influence but so far as it touches some passion or affection. Abstract relations of ideas are the object of curiosity, not of volition. And matters of fact, where they are neither good nor evil, where they neither excite desire nor aversion, are totally indifferent, and whether known or unknown, whether mistaken or rightly apprehended, cannot be regarded as any motive to action.
It is so difficult to draw a clear line of separation between the abuse and the wholesome use of the press, that as yet we have found it better to trust the public judgment, rather than the magistrate, with the discrimination between truth and falsehood. And hitherto the public judgment has performed that office with wonderful correctness.
This (functional - E.W.) language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction; by substituting images for concepts. It denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary; it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood.
It is a dangerous and fateful presumption, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend. For after you have established, according to your fine undertstanding, the limits of truth and falsehood, and it turns out that you must necessarily believe things even stranger than those you deny, you are obliged from then on to abandon these limits.