Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Truth

"Just as a tested and rugged virtue of the moral hero is worth more than the lovely, tender, untried innocence of the child, so is the massive strength of a soul that has conquered truth for itself worth more than the soft peach-bloom faith of a soul that takes truth on trust." - Francis Ellington Abbot

"Candor may be considered as a compound of justice and the love of truth." - John Abercrombie

"Hell is truth seen too late." -

"The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear." - Herbert Sebastian Agar

"Whoever sets out to persuade men to accept a new idea, or one which seems to be new, not just as an idea, but as a truth that is felt, should know beforehand that the human mind is not a blank sheet, on which one an write with ease, and should not therefore grieve or despair when he finds that people do not pay attention to him." - Ahad HaAm, pen name, born Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg

"The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous." - Shana Alexander, fully Shana Agar Alexander

"The most intangible, and therefore the worst, kind of lie is a half truth. This is the peculiar device of a “conscientious” detractor." -

"Once thing here is worth a great deal, to pass thy life in truth and justice, with a benevolent disposition even to liars and unjust men." - Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

"The greatest of all pleasures consists in the contemplation of truth." -

"Right thinking is a prerequisite to right living... In truth the destiny of any life is determined by what fills that mind." - Roy I. Bagley

"Beauty, like truth and justice, lives within us; like virtue, and like moral law, it is a companion of the soul." - George Bancroft

"The farther you enter into the truth, the deeper it is." - Bankei Yōtaku

"Nothing has wrought more prejudice to religion, or brought more disparagement upon truth, than boisterous and unseasonable zeal." - Isaac Barrow

"Truth breeds hatred." - Bias NULL

"The truth shall set you free." -

"Sentiment and principle are often mistaken for each other, though, in fact, they widely differ. Sentiment is the virtue of ideas; principle the virtue of action. Sentiment has its seat in the had; principle, in the heart. Sentiment suggest fine harangues and subtle distinctions; principle conceives just notions, and performs good actions in consequence of them. Sentiment refines away the simplicity of truth, and the plainness of piety; and "gives us virtue in words, and vice in deeds."" - Hugh Blair

"A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent." - William Blake

"A truth-seeker will not check to see if a person who admonished him is worthy or not. Rather, he weighs the complaint to see if it is valid or not." - Yitzchok Blauser, aka Reb Itzelle Peterburger

"Young people imagine there is great value in fame. Those with life experience know that in truth publicity is extremely short-lived. The nature of the world is that every piece of news makes an impression for only a very short time. After those few minutes the impression is erased and quickly forgotten. It is as if it never was." - Yosef Leib Bloch, fully R' Yosef Yehudah Leib Bloch

"The great seal of truth is simplicity." - Hermann Boerhaave

"Truth has not such an urgent air." -

"Man cannot live by bread alone. The making of money, the accumulation of material power, is not all there is to living. Life is something more than these, and the man who misses this truth misses the greatest joy and satisfaction that can come into his life - service for others." - Edward William Bok

"Truth is only developed in the hour of need; time, and not man, discovers it." - Louis Gabriel Bonald, fully Louis Gabriel Ambroise, Vicomte de Bonald

"Every error is truth abused." -

"Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it." - James Boswell

"The appalling thing about war is that it kills all love of truth." - Georg Brandes, fully Georg Morris Cohen Brandes

"Truth exists, only lies have to be invented." -

"It is better to inspire the heart with a noble sentiment than to teach the mind a truth of science." - Phillips Brooks

"Give a child the habit of sacredly regarding the truth - of carefully respecting the property of others - of scrupulously abstaining from all acts of improvidence which can involve him in distress, and he will just as likely think of rushing into the element in which he cannot breathe, as of lying or cheating or stealing." -

"Nowhere are prejudices more mistaken for truth, passion for reason, and invective for documentation than in politics. That is a realm, peopled only by villains or heroes, in which everything is black or white and gray is a forbidden color." -

"I am a fellow citizen of all men who think. Truth; that is my country." - Jean de La Bruyère

"The simple truth is, that there has lived on the earth, “appearing at intervals,” for thousands of years among ordinary men, the first faint beginnings of another race; walking the earth and breathing the air with us, but at the same time walking another earth and breathing another air of which we know little or nothing, but which is, all the same, our spiritual life, as its absence would be our spiritual death. This new race is in act of being born from us, and in the near future it will occupy and possess the earth." - Richard Maurice Bucke, often called Maurice Bucke

"The wise man learns to meet the changing circumstances of life with an equitable spirit, being neither elated by success nor depressed by failure. Thus one realizes the truth of non-duality." - Buddha, Gautama Buddha, or The Buddha, also Gotama Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha and Buddha Śākyamuni NULL

"Arm thyself for the truth!" -

"Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes not victories without it." -

"Nothing conveys a more inaccurate idea of a whole truth than a part of a truth so prominently brought forth as to throw the other parts into shadow. This is the art of caricature." -

"Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm; it moves stones, it charms brutes. Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity and truth accomplishes no victories without it." -

"There is no permanent absolute unchangeable truth; what we should pursue is the most convenient arrangement of our ideas." - Samuel Butler

"Adversity is the first path to truth." -

"Free and fair discussion will ever be found the firmest friend to truth." - George Campbell

"Truth may be stretched, but cannot be broken, and always gets above falsehood, as oil does above water." - Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa

"Benevolence is not in word and in tongue, but in deed and in truth. It is a business with men as they are, and with human life as drawn by the rough hand of experience. It is a duty which you must perform at the call of principle; though there be no voice of eloquence to give splendor to your exertions, and no music of poetry to lead your willing footsteps through the bowers of enchantment. It is not the impulse of high and ecstatic emotion. It is an exertion of principle. :You must go to the poor man’s cottage, though no verdure flourish around it, the gentleness of its murmurs. If you look for the romantic simplicity of fiction you will be disappointed; but it is your duty to persevere in spite of every discouragement. Benevolence is not merely a feeling but a principle; not a dream of rapture for the fancy to indulge in, but a business for the hand to execute." - Thomas Chalmers

"Pleasure can be supported by the illusion, but happiness rests upon truth." -

"I see nothing worth living for but the divine virtue which endures and surrenders all things for truth, duty, and mankind." - William Ellery Channing

"Sincerity, truth, faithfulness, come into the very essence of friendship." - William Ellery Channing

"The greatest man is he who chooses the right with invincible resolution, who resists the sorest temptations from within and without, who bears the heaviest burdens cheerfully, who is calmest in storms and most fearless under menace and frowns, whose reliance on truth, on virtue, on God, is most unfaltering. I believe this greatness to be most common among the multitude, whose names are never heard." - William Ellery Channing

"The more discussion the better, if passion and personality be eschewed; and discussion, even if stormy, often winnows truth from error - a good never to be expected in an uninquiring age." - William Ellery Channing

"Bigotry dwarfs the soul but shutting out the truth." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin

"Man was sent into the world to be a growing and exhaustless force. The world was spread out around him to be seized and conquered. Realms of infinite truth burst open above him, inviting him to tread those shining coasts which Newton dropped his plummet, and Herschel sailed, a Columbus of the skies." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin