“Something inside Clary cracked and broke, and words came pouring out. 'What do you want me to tell you? The truth? The truth is that I love Simon like I should love you, and I wish he was my brother and you weren't, but I can't do anything about that and neither can you!”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes
“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
“It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy, truth liberates.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj
“The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should be treated with caution.”
― J.K. Rowling
“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29
“I am not pretty. I am not beautiful. I am as radiant as the sun.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
“A book without words is like love without a kiss; it's empty.”
― Andrew Wolfe
“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”
― Winston Churchill
“When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth.”
― Jess C. Scott, The Intern
“I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?”
― John Lennon
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
― Mark Twain
“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
― Oscar Wilde
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.”
― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders
“Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you.”
― Stephanie Klein, Straight Up and Dirty: A Memoir
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
― Oscar Wilde
“that as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón
“I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.”
― Anne Sexton
“A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you
is that a fact or a weapon?”
― Margaret Atwood
“The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.”
― Robert M. Pirsig
“We're taught that in life, we should try to look on the bright side. Not in this case. In this case, assume rejection first. Assume you're the rule, not the exception. It's liberating. But we also know it's not an easy concept. -He's not just into you”
― Greg Behrendt
“Frustration and Love can’t exist in the same place at the same time, so get real and start doing what you would rather be doing in life. Love your life. All of it. Even the heavy shit that happened to you when you were 8. All of it was and IS perfect.”
― Jason Mraz
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
― John Keats
“If you're not comfortable enough with yourself or with your own truth when entering a relationship, then you're not ready for that relationship.”
― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
“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, History of Western Philosophy
“It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.”
― Neil Gaiman
“I believe in God but people are liars. It's those people who say they are appointed by God who I don't believe in.”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer
“When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.”
― Benjamin Disraeli
“I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.”
― Al Pacino
“Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.
These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is – I repeat it – a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
“There are three types of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
― Benjamin Disraeli
“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”
― Pablo Picasso
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods
“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“The truth is, unless you let go, unless you forgive yourself, unless you forgive the situation, unless you realize that that situation is over, you cannot move forward.”
― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
“Nothing, Everything, Anything, Something: If you have nothing, then you have everything, because you have the freedom to do anything, without the fear of losing something.”
― Jarod Kintz, This is the story my great-grandfather told my father, who then told my grandfather, who then told me about how The Mythical Mr. Boo, Charles Manseur Fizzlebush Grissham III, better known as Mr. Fizzlebush, and Orafoura are all in fact me...
“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
“Whether you live to be 50 or 100 makes no difference, if you made no difference in the world.”
― Jarod Kintz, Great Listener Series Mute Women
“To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
“There are times to stay put, and what you want will come to you, and there are times to go out into the world and find such a thing for yourself.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
“It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”
― George Washington
“Love truth, but pardon error.”
― Voltaire
“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
“The truth doesn't always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatley wrapped lies”
― Jodi Picoult, Keeping Faith
“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner
“Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Blank Book
“We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Usually we walk around constantly believing ourselves. "I'm okay" we say. "I'm alright". But sometimes the truth arrives on you and you can't get it off. That's when you realize that sometimes it isn't even an answer--it's a question. Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
“You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
― Anne Lamott
“What does it mean to be the best? It means you have to be better than the number two guy. But what gratification is there in that? He's a loser—that’s why he's number two.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale
“I don't understand people who say they need more "Me Time." What other time is there? Do these people spend part of their day in someone else's body?”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale
“I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”
― C.S. Lewis
“I'm about to make a wild, extreme and severe relationship rule: the word busy is a load of crap and is most often used by assholes. The word "busy" is the relationship Weapon of Mass Destruction. It seems like a good excuse, but in fact in every silo you uncover, all you're going to find is a man who didn't care enough to call. Remember men are never to busy to get what they want.”
― Greg Behrendt
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
― Socrates
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell
“So you're always honest," I said.
"Aren't you?"
"No," I told him. "I'm not."
"Well, that's good to know, I guess."
"I'm not saying I'm a liar," I told him. He raised his eyebrows. "That's not how I meant it, anyways."
"How'd you mean it, then?"
"I just...I don't always say what I feel."
"Why not?"
"Because the truth sometimes hurts," I said.
"Yeah," he said. "So do lies, though.”
― Sarah Dessen, Just Listen
“She says he says, but she could be lying to me, and he could be lying to her, so I can’t believe her, even if I could believe her. ”
― Jarod Kintz, This is the best book I've ever written, and it still sucks
“What you do speaks so loudly that I can not hear what you say.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Thinking something does not make it true. Wanting something does not make it real.”
― Michelle Hodkin, The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer
“Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina
“It’s strange how dreams get under your skin and give your heart a test for what’s real and what’s imaginary.”
― Jason Mraz
“Wait a second," Four says. I turn toward him, wondering which version of Four I'll see now-the one who scolds me, or the one who climbs Ferris wheels with me. He smiles a little, but the smile doesn't spread to his eyes, which look less tense and worried.
"You belong here, you know that?" he says. "You belong with us. It'll be over soon, so just hold on, okay?"
He scratches behind his ear and looks away, like he's embarrassed by what he said.
I stare at him. I feel my heartbeat everywhere, even in my toes. I feel like doing something bold, but I could just as easily walk away. I am not sure which option is smarter, or better. I am not sure that I care.
I reach out and take his hand. His fingers slide between mine. I can't breathe.
I stare up at him, and he stares down at me. For a long moment, we stay that way. Then I pull my hand away and run after Uriah and Lynn and Marlene. Maybe now he thinks I'm stupid, or strange. Maybe it was worth it.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent
“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?”
― Carl Sagan
“I envy people that know love. That have someone who takes them as they are.”
― Jess C. Scott, The Devilin Fey
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave...when first we practice to deceive.”
― Walter Scott, Marmion
“V-Day…if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for “your loved one” I think it’s quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It’s all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love.”
― Jess C. Scott, EyeLeash: A Blog Novel
“I no longer feel allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despise being one myself. I think that Peeta was onto something about us destroying one another and letting some decent species take over. Because something is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children’s lives to settle its differences. You can spin it any way you like…but in the end, who does it benefit? No one. The truth is, it benefits no one to live in a world where these things happen.”
― Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“The truth is not for all men but only for those who seek it.”
― Ayn Rand
“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
“Let’s start with this statistic: You are delicious. Be brave, my sweet. I know you can get lonely. I know you can crave companionship and sex and love so badly that it physically hurts. But I truly believe that the only way you can find out that there’s something better out there is to first believe there’s something better out there. What other choice is there?”
― Greg Behrendt, He's Just Not That Into You
“Boredom: the desire for desires.”
― Leo Tolstoy
“My bullshit meter is reading that as 'false'.”
― Charlaine Harris, Dead as a Doornail
“One swing set, well worn but structurally sound, seeks new home. Make memories with your kid or kids so that someday he or she or they will look into the backyard and feel the ache of sentimentality as desperately as I did this afternoon. It's all fragile and fleeting, dear reader, but with this swing set, your child(ren) will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may also learn the most important lesson of all: No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
“Does truth have a moral?”
― Rick Riordan, The Sea of Monsters
“Nothing is ever certain.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones
“Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“[The Bible] has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.”
― Mark Twain
“Equality is not a concept. It's not something we should be striving for. It's a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who's confronted with it. We need equality. Kinda now.”
― Joss Whedon
“Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
― Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach and Other Poems
“The more I see, the less I know for sure.”
― John Lennon
“Here's all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.”
― George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops?
“No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld
“Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.”
― Robert Orben
“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.”
― Jim Morrison
“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
“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
“The things you do for yourself are gone when you are gone, but the things you do for others remain as your legacy.”
― Kalu Kalu
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
― Virginia Woolf
“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“The past has no power over the present moment.”
― Eckhart Tolle
“A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.”
― William Blake, Auguries of innocence
“Truth never damages a cause that is just.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
“One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.”
― Oscar Wilde
“All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer
“If you win, you need not have to explain...If you lose, you should not be there to explain!”
― Adolf Hitler
“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. Matthew 6:34”
― Anonymous, Holy Bible: King James Version
“The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
“I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
“If the road is easy, you're likely going the wrong way.”
― Terry Goodkind
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”
― George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950
“Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.”
― André Gide
“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.”
― Doris Lessing, Under My Skin
“Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.”
― T.S. Eliot
“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”
― C.S. Lewis
“I can't believe I said it out loud. The truth doesn't set you free, you know. It makes you feel awkward and embarrassed and defenseless and red in the face and horrified and petrified and vulnerable. But free? I don't feel free. I feel like shit.”
― Melina Marchetta, Saving Francesca
“The truth is like a nipple: the more you twist it, the more somebody is going to get hurt.”
― Jarod Kintz
“I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.”
― Hunter S. Thompson
“With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not.”
― Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants
“I have survived. I am here. Confused, screwed up, but here. So, how can I find my way? Is there a chain saw of the soul, an ax I can take to my memories or fears?”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
“Life's as kind as you let it be.”
― Charles Bukowski, Hot Water Music
“It is an occupational hazard that anyone who has spent her life learning how to lie eventually becomes bad at telling the truth.”
― Ally Carter, Heist Society
“Sometimes it takes a good fall to really know where you stand”
― Hayley Williams
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
― George Orwell
“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral
“Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Music is crucial. Beyond no way can I overstress this fact. Let's say you're southbound on the interstate, cruising alone in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on top of your little sheetmetal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you're sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you--do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega, clearance, closeout, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Rant
“People are always complaining that life's not fair, but that simply isn't true. Life is extraordinarily fair. It's just not centered on you.”
― Lynn Marie Sager, A River Worth Riding
“All Dogs Go To Heaven? Sorry, kids. It's only the dogs who've accepted Christ.”
― Stephen Colbert, I Am America
“Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
“I want to write a poem about "Truth," "Honor," "Dignity," and whether the toilet paper should roll over or under when you pull on it.”
― Jarod Kintz, I Want
“Those sweet lips. My, oh my, I could kiss those lips all night long.
Good things come to those who wait.”
― Jess C. Scott, The Intern
“Here's something else to think about: calling when you say you're going to is the very first brick in the house you are building of love and trust. If he can't lay this one stupid brick down, you ain't never gonna have a house baby, and it's cold outside.”
― Greg Behrendt, He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys
“A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
“Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.”
― Jane Austen, Emma
“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME... SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
MY POINT EXACTLY.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
“Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.”
― Walt Whitman
“Three things can not hide for long: the Moon, the Sun and the Truth.”
― Hermann Hesse
“A man's true character comes out when he's drunk.”
― Charles Chaplin
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
― Marcus Aurelius
“I guess sometimes you have to lie to find the truth. ”
― Scott Westerfeld
“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't going away.”
― Elvis Presley
“Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
“Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time.”
― Benjamin Disraeli
“I'm sure you think that I don't understand what you're going through, but I do. It's just that sometimes, our future is dictated by what we are, opposed to what we want.”
― Nicholas Sparks
“Nothing is yet in its true form.”
― C.S. Lewis
“I quote others only to better express myself.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
“All sacrifice and suffering is redemptive. It is used to either teach the individual or to help others. Nothing is by chance.”
― Arthur J. Russell
“Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can't ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees:
“There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.”
― Harold Pinter
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
― Søren Kierkegaard
“Truth is on the side of the oppressed.”
― Malcolm X
“He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising; a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps most remarkable because it moves as if it always hears music.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
“Half of writing history is hiding the truth”
― Joss Whedon
“She has been to the compound before. She remembered this hallway. She knows about the initiation process.
My mother was Dauntless.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent
“Real life's nasty. It's cruel. It doesn't care about heroes and happy endings and the way things should be. In real life, bad things happen. People die. Fights are lost. Evil often wins.”
― Darren Shan
“Most of what I say is complete truth. My edit button is broken.”
― Myra McEntire, Hourglass
“When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool you end up looking like a moron instead.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice
“I’ve come to the conclusion that people who wear headphones while they walk, are much happier, more confident, and more beautiful individuals than someone making the solitary drudge to work without acknowledging their own interests and power.”
― Jason Mraz
“A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
“The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.”
― Brent Weeks
“The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.”
― Aristotle
“I felt like an animal, and animals don’t know sin, do they?”
― Jess C. Scott, Wicked Lovely
“It has been said, 'the truth will make men free.' The truth alone has never made anyone free. It is only doubt which will bring mental emancipation.”
― Anton LaVey
“Transformation is my favorite game and in my experience, anger and frustration are the result of you not being authentic somewhere in your life or with someone in your life. Being fake about anything creates a block inside of you. Life can’t work for you if you don’t show up as you.”
― Jason Mraz
“The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with joy are goodness, beauty, and truth.”
― Albert Einstein
“The truth will make you odd.”
― Judy Blume
“Lies run sprints, but the truth runs marathons.”
― Michael Jackson
“A man will never love you or treat you as well as a store. If a man doesn’t fit, you can’t exchange him seven days later for a gorgeous cashmere sweater. And a store always smells good. A store can awaken a lust for things you never even knew you needed. And when your fingers first grasp those shiny, new bags…”
― Sophie Kinsella, Confessions of a Shopaholic
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor : Collected Works : Wise Blood / A Good Man Is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear It Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays & Letters
“Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“it is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
“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
“Sometimes what we want isn't what we need.”
― Gena Showalter, The Darkest Night
“There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden
“You're so easy to read but the book is boring me.”
― Emilie Autumn
“I'm telling you a lie in a vicious effort that you will repeat my lie over and over until it becomes true”
― Lady Gaga
“I love the stars.
Because they can't say anything.
I love the stars.
Because they do not judge anyone.”
― Natsuki Takaya
“I believe in the fundamental truth of all great religions of the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
“Expectations make people miserable, so whatever yours are, lower them. You'll definitely be happier.”
― Simone Elkeles, How to Ruin Your Boyfriend's Reputation
“The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
“I told him I was going to betray you, and betray Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness; he looked so deep I felt sure he'd see the truth. But I lied too well. I was lying with every nerve and fiber and everything I'd ever done...I wanted him to find no good in me, and he didn't. There is none.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
“Macy: “In Truth,” I said, “there are no rules other than you have to tell the truth.”
Wes: “How do you win?” he asked
Macy: “That,” I said, “is such a boy question.”
― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever
“The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.”
― H.G. Wells
“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.”
― John Keats
“Nothing is real.”
― John Lennon, Beatles Lyrics
“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”
“On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?
There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
“The only truth is music.”
― Jack Kerouac
“It is difficult, when faced with a situation you cannot control, to admit you can do nothing.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”
― C.S. Lewis
“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.”
― Kahlil Gibran
“There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.”
― Maya Angelou
“I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”
― Malcolm X
“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”
― Jessamyn West
― Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes
“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
“It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy, truth liberates.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj
“The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should be treated with caution.”
― J.K. Rowling
“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29
“I am not pretty. I am not beautiful. I am as radiant as the sun.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
“A book without words is like love without a kiss; it's empty.”
― Andrew Wolfe
“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”
― Winston Churchill
“When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth.”
― Jess C. Scott, The Intern
“I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?”
― John Lennon
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
― Mark Twain
“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
― Oscar Wilde
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.”
― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders
“Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you.”
― Stephanie Klein, Straight Up and Dirty: A Memoir
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
― Oscar Wilde
“that as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón
“I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.”
― Anne Sexton
“A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you
is that a fact or a weapon?”
― Margaret Atwood
“The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.”
― Robert M. Pirsig
“We're taught that in life, we should try to look on the bright side. Not in this case. In this case, assume rejection first. Assume you're the rule, not the exception. It's liberating. But we also know it's not an easy concept. -He's not just into you”
― Greg Behrendt
“Frustration and Love can’t exist in the same place at the same time, so get real and start doing what you would rather be doing in life. Love your life. All of it. Even the heavy shit that happened to you when you were 8. All of it was and IS perfect.”
― Jason Mraz
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
― John Keats
“If you're not comfortable enough with yourself or with your own truth when entering a relationship, then you're not ready for that relationship.”
― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
“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, History of Western Philosophy
“It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.”
― Neil Gaiman
“I believe in God but people are liars. It's those people who say they are appointed by God who I don't believe in.”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer
“When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.”
― Benjamin Disraeli
“I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.”
― Al Pacino
“Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.
These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is – I repeat it – a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
“There are three types of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
― Benjamin Disraeli
“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”
― Pablo Picasso
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods
“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“The truth is, unless you let go, unless you forgive yourself, unless you forgive the situation, unless you realize that that situation is over, you cannot move forward.”
― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free
“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
“Nothing, Everything, Anything, Something: If you have nothing, then you have everything, because you have the freedom to do anything, without the fear of losing something.”
― Jarod Kintz, This is the story my great-grandfather told my father, who then told my grandfather, who then told me about how The Mythical Mr. Boo, Charles Manseur Fizzlebush Grissham III, better known as Mr. Fizzlebush, and Orafoura are all in fact me...
“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
“Whether you live to be 50 or 100 makes no difference, if you made no difference in the world.”
― Jarod Kintz, Great Listener Series Mute Women
“To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
“There are times to stay put, and what you want will come to you, and there are times to go out into the world and find such a thing for yourself.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
“It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”
― George Washington
“Love truth, but pardon error.”
― Voltaire
“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
“The truth doesn't always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatley wrapped lies”
― Jodi Picoult, Keeping Faith
“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner
“Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Blank Book
“We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Usually we walk around constantly believing ourselves. "I'm okay" we say. "I'm alright". But sometimes the truth arrives on you and you can't get it off. That's when you realize that sometimes it isn't even an answer--it's a question. Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
“You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
― Anne Lamott
“What does it mean to be the best? It means you have to be better than the number two guy. But what gratification is there in that? He's a loser—that’s why he's number two.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale
“I don't understand people who say they need more "Me Time." What other time is there? Do these people spend part of their day in someone else's body?”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale
“I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”
― C.S. Lewis
“I'm about to make a wild, extreme and severe relationship rule: the word busy is a load of crap and is most often used by assholes. The word "busy" is the relationship Weapon of Mass Destruction. It seems like a good excuse, but in fact in every silo you uncover, all you're going to find is a man who didn't care enough to call. Remember men are never to busy to get what they want.”
― Greg Behrendt
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
― Socrates
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell
“So you're always honest," I said.
"Aren't you?"
"No," I told him. "I'm not."
"Well, that's good to know, I guess."
"I'm not saying I'm a liar," I told him. He raised his eyebrows. "That's not how I meant it, anyways."
"How'd you mean it, then?"
"I just...I don't always say what I feel."
"Why not?"
"Because the truth sometimes hurts," I said.
"Yeah," he said. "So do lies, though.”
― Sarah Dessen, Just Listen
“She says he says, but she could be lying to me, and he could be lying to her, so I can’t believe her, even if I could believe her. ”
― Jarod Kintz, This is the best book I've ever written, and it still sucks
“What you do speaks so loudly that I can not hear what you say.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Thinking something does not make it true. Wanting something does not make it real.”
― Michelle Hodkin, The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer
“Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.”
― Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina
“It’s strange how dreams get under your skin and give your heart a test for what’s real and what’s imaginary.”
― Jason Mraz
“Wait a second," Four says. I turn toward him, wondering which version of Four I'll see now-the one who scolds me, or the one who climbs Ferris wheels with me. He smiles a little, but the smile doesn't spread to his eyes, which look less tense and worried.
"You belong here, you know that?" he says. "You belong with us. It'll be over soon, so just hold on, okay?"
He scratches behind his ear and looks away, like he's embarrassed by what he said.
I stare at him. I feel my heartbeat everywhere, even in my toes. I feel like doing something bold, but I could just as easily walk away. I am not sure which option is smarter, or better. I am not sure that I care.
I reach out and take his hand. His fingers slide between mine. I can't breathe.
I stare up at him, and he stares down at me. For a long moment, we stay that way. Then I pull my hand away and run after Uriah and Lynn and Marlene. Maybe now he thinks I'm stupid, or strange. Maybe it was worth it.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent
“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?”
― Carl Sagan
“I envy people that know love. That have someone who takes them as they are.”
― Jess C. Scott, The Devilin Fey
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave...when first we practice to deceive.”
― Walter Scott, Marmion
“V-Day…if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for “your loved one” I think it’s quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It’s all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love.”
― Jess C. Scott, EyeLeash: A Blog Novel
“I no longer feel allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despise being one myself. I think that Peeta was onto something about us destroying one another and letting some decent species take over. Because something is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children’s lives to settle its differences. You can spin it any way you like…but in the end, who does it benefit? No one. The truth is, it benefits no one to live in a world where these things happen.”
― Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“The truth is not for all men but only for those who seek it.”
― Ayn Rand
“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
“Let’s start with this statistic: You are delicious. Be brave, my sweet. I know you can get lonely. I know you can crave companionship and sex and love so badly that it physically hurts. But I truly believe that the only way you can find out that there’s something better out there is to first believe there’s something better out there. What other choice is there?”
― Greg Behrendt, He's Just Not That Into You
“Boredom: the desire for desires.”
― Leo Tolstoy
“My bullshit meter is reading that as 'false'.”
― Charlaine Harris, Dead as a Doornail
“One swing set, well worn but structurally sound, seeks new home. Make memories with your kid or kids so that someday he or she or they will look into the backyard and feel the ache of sentimentality as desperately as I did this afternoon. It's all fragile and fleeting, dear reader, but with this swing set, your child(ren) will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may also learn the most important lesson of all: No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
“Does truth have a moral?”
― Rick Riordan, The Sea of Monsters
“Nothing is ever certain.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones
“Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“[The Bible] has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.”
― Mark Twain
“Equality is not a concept. It's not something we should be striving for. It's a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who's confronted with it. We need equality. Kinda now.”
― Joss Whedon
“Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
― Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach and Other Poems
“The more I see, the less I know for sure.”
― John Lennon
“Here's all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.”
― George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops?
“No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld
“Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.”
― Robert Orben
“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.”
― Jim Morrison
“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
“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
“The things you do for yourself are gone when you are gone, but the things you do for others remain as your legacy.”
― Kalu Kalu
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
― Virginia Woolf
“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“The past has no power over the present moment.”
― Eckhart Tolle
“A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.”
― William Blake, Auguries of innocence
“Truth never damages a cause that is just.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
“One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.”
― Oscar Wilde
“All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer
“If you win, you need not have to explain...If you lose, you should not be there to explain!”
― Adolf Hitler
“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. Matthew 6:34”
― Anonymous, Holy Bible: King James Version
“The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
“I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
“If the road is easy, you're likely going the wrong way.”
― Terry Goodkind
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”
― George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950
“Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.”
― André Gide
“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.”
― Doris Lessing, Under My Skin
“Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.”
― T.S. Eliot
“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”
― C.S. Lewis
“I can't believe I said it out loud. The truth doesn't set you free, you know. It makes you feel awkward and embarrassed and defenseless and red in the face and horrified and petrified and vulnerable. But free? I don't feel free. I feel like shit.”
― Melina Marchetta, Saving Francesca
“The truth is like a nipple: the more you twist it, the more somebody is going to get hurt.”
― Jarod Kintz
“I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.”
― Hunter S. Thompson
“With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not.”
― Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants
“I have survived. I am here. Confused, screwed up, but here. So, how can I find my way? Is there a chain saw of the soul, an ax I can take to my memories or fears?”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
“Life's as kind as you let it be.”
― Charles Bukowski, Hot Water Music
“It is an occupational hazard that anyone who has spent her life learning how to lie eventually becomes bad at telling the truth.”
― Ally Carter, Heist Society
“Sometimes it takes a good fall to really know where you stand”
― Hayley Williams
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
― George Orwell
“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral
“Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
“Music is crucial. Beyond no way can I overstress this fact. Let's say you're southbound on the interstate, cruising alone in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on top of your little sheetmetal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you're sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you--do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega, clearance, closeout, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Rant
“People are always complaining that life's not fair, but that simply isn't true. Life is extraordinarily fair. It's just not centered on you.”
― Lynn Marie Sager, A River Worth Riding
“All Dogs Go To Heaven? Sorry, kids. It's only the dogs who've accepted Christ.”
― Stephen Colbert, I Am America
“Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
“I want to write a poem about "Truth," "Honor," "Dignity," and whether the toilet paper should roll over or under when you pull on it.”
― Jarod Kintz, I Want
“Those sweet lips. My, oh my, I could kiss those lips all night long.
Good things come to those who wait.”
― Jess C. Scott, The Intern
“Here's something else to think about: calling when you say you're going to is the very first brick in the house you are building of love and trust. If he can't lay this one stupid brick down, you ain't never gonna have a house baby, and it's cold outside.”
― Greg Behrendt, He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys
“A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
“Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.”
― Jane Austen, Emma
“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME... SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
MY POINT EXACTLY.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
“Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.”
― Walt Whitman
“Three things can not hide for long: the Moon, the Sun and the Truth.”
― Hermann Hesse
“A man's true character comes out when he's drunk.”
― Charles Chaplin
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
― Marcus Aurelius
“I guess sometimes you have to lie to find the truth. ”
― Scott Westerfeld
“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't going away.”
― Elvis Presley
“Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
“Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time.”
― Benjamin Disraeli
“I'm sure you think that I don't understand what you're going through, but I do. It's just that sometimes, our future is dictated by what we are, opposed to what we want.”
― Nicholas Sparks
“Nothing is yet in its true form.”
― C.S. Lewis
“I quote others only to better express myself.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
“All sacrifice and suffering is redemptive. It is used to either teach the individual or to help others. Nothing is by chance.”
― Arthur J. Russell
“Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can't ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees:
“There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.”
― Harold Pinter
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
― Søren Kierkegaard
“Truth is on the side of the oppressed.”
― Malcolm X
“He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising; a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps most remarkable because it moves as if it always hears music.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
“Half of writing history is hiding the truth”
― Joss Whedon
“She has been to the compound before. She remembered this hallway. She knows about the initiation process.
My mother was Dauntless.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent
“Real life's nasty. It's cruel. It doesn't care about heroes and happy endings and the way things should be. In real life, bad things happen. People die. Fights are lost. Evil often wins.”
― Darren Shan
“Most of what I say is complete truth. My edit button is broken.”
― Myra McEntire, Hourglass
“When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool you end up looking like a moron instead.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice
“I’ve come to the conclusion that people who wear headphones while they walk, are much happier, more confident, and more beautiful individuals than someone making the solitary drudge to work without acknowledging their own interests and power.”
― Jason Mraz
“A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
“The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.”
― Brent Weeks
“The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.”
― Aristotle
“I felt like an animal, and animals don’t know sin, do they?”
― Jess C. Scott, Wicked Lovely
“It has been said, 'the truth will make men free.' The truth alone has never made anyone free. It is only doubt which will bring mental emancipation.”
― Anton LaVey
“Transformation is my favorite game and in my experience, anger and frustration are the result of you not being authentic somewhere in your life or with someone in your life. Being fake about anything creates a block inside of you. Life can’t work for you if you don’t show up as you.”
― Jason Mraz
“The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with joy are goodness, beauty, and truth.”
― Albert Einstein
“The truth will make you odd.”
― Judy Blume
“Lies run sprints, but the truth runs marathons.”
― Michael Jackson
“A man will never love you or treat you as well as a store. If a man doesn’t fit, you can’t exchange him seven days later for a gorgeous cashmere sweater. And a store always smells good. A store can awaken a lust for things you never even knew you needed. And when your fingers first grasp those shiny, new bags…”
― Sophie Kinsella, Confessions of a Shopaholic
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor : Collected Works : Wise Blood / A Good Man Is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear It Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays & Letters
“Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
“it is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
“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
“Sometimes what we want isn't what we need.”
― Gena Showalter, The Darkest Night
“There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden
“You're so easy to read but the book is boring me.”
― Emilie Autumn
“I'm telling you a lie in a vicious effort that you will repeat my lie over and over until it becomes true”
― Lady Gaga
“I love the stars.
Because they can't say anything.
I love the stars.
Because they do not judge anyone.”
― Natsuki Takaya
“I believe in the fundamental truth of all great religions of the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
“Expectations make people miserable, so whatever yours are, lower them. You'll definitely be happier.”
― Simone Elkeles, How to Ruin Your Boyfriend's Reputation
“The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
“I told him I was going to betray you, and betray Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness; he looked so deep I felt sure he'd see the truth. But I lied too well. I was lying with every nerve and fiber and everything I'd ever done...I wanted him to find no good in me, and he didn't. There is none.”
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
“Macy: “In Truth,” I said, “there are no rules other than you have to tell the truth.”
Wes: “How do you win?” he asked
Macy: “That,” I said, “is such a boy question.”
― Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever
“The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.”
― H.G. Wells
“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.”
― John Keats
“Nothing is real.”
― John Lennon, Beatles Lyrics
“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”
“On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?
There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
“The only truth is music.”
― Jack Kerouac
“It is difficult, when faced with a situation you cannot control, to admit you can do nothing.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid
“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”
― C.S. Lewis
“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.”
― Kahlil Gibran
“There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.”
― Maya Angelou
“I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”
― Malcolm X
“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”
― Jessamyn West
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