Oscar WildeSourced
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
Source: The Critic as Artist, Part II (1891)
Checked quotes about truth
15 quotes with a known source.
Mark TwainSourced
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
Source: Quoted by Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea (1899)
Mark TwainSourced
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
Source: Following the Equator, ch. 15 (1897)
Mahatma GandhiAttributed
A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.
Source: Attributed to Young India (1927)
Friedrich NietzscheSourced
There are no facts, only interpretations.
Source: Notebooks (1886–87), published posthumously
ConfuciusSourced
When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it — this is knowledge.
Source: Analects 2.17, tr. James Legge
Fyodor DostoevskySourced
Above all, don't lie to yourself.
Source: The Brothers Karamazov, Book 2, ch. 2 (1880) — Father Zosima
William ShakespeareSourced
This above all: to thine own self be true.
Polonius is a windbag; Shakespeare puts this wisdom in a fool's mouth.
Source: Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3 — Polonius
François de La RochefoucauldSourced
Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.
Source: Maxims, no. 218 (1665)
Jonathan SwiftSourced
Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.
Source: The Examiner (1710)
George OrwellSourced
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Source: "The Freedom of the Press", proposed preface to Animal Farm (1945)
Václav HavelAttributed
Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred.
Source: His motto during the Velvet Revolution (1989)
John KeatsSourced
Beauty is truth, truth beauty.
Source: "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1819)
Carl SaganSourced
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Sagan popularised it; similar wording was used earlier by Marcello Truzzi.
Source: Cosmos, episode 12 (1980)
Richard FeynmanSourced
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.
Source: "Cargo Cult Science", Caltech commencement address (1974)
Famous, but not theirs
Quotes about truth that are usually credited to the wrong person.
Abraham LincolnNo source found
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
The trail: Credited to Lincoln since about 1885, twenty years after his death, with no contemporary record.
William ShakespeareMisquoted
Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
The real words: The line in Hamlet (III.2) is "The lady doth protest too much, methinks" — and "protest" meant "promise", not "object".
Arthur SchopenhauerNot theirs
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Actually: Not found anywhere in Schopenhauer's works; the attribution appears in the 20th century.
Galileo GalileiNo source found
And yet it moves.
The trail: First printed in 1757, more than a century after his trial. No contemporary records it.
George OrwellNot theirs
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
Actually: Not found in Orwell's works; it starts appearing under his name in the 1980s.