Truth Quotes — page 99

When we have not the strength or the courage to grasp a new truth, we persuade ourselves that it is not a truth at all.

Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.

I do not say, and I do not believe, that Christians are as bad as their creeds. In spite of church and dogma, there have been millions and millions of men and women true to the loftiest and most generous promptings of the human heart.

If we claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our …

Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.

False and doubtful positions, relied upon as unquestionable maxims, keep those who build on them in the dark from truth. Such are usually the prejudices imbibed from education, party, reverence, fashion, interest, et cetera.

A thought is an arrow shot at the truth; it can hit a point, but not cover the whole target. But the archer is too well satisfied with his success to ask anything farther.

Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan.

Never be discouraged because good things get on so slowly here; and never fail daily to do that good which lies next to your hand.

Where it concerns himself, Who's angry at a slander makes it true.

He who has the truth at his heart need never fear the want of persuasion on his tongue.

And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well — but ’tis not true!

It will be a strange sort of book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree; — & to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which …

Might the simple maxim, that honesty is the best policy be laid to heart! Might a sense of the true aims of life elevate the tone of politics and trade, till public and private honor become identical!

And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie, That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

He was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.

I need not excuse myself to your Lordship, nor, I think, to any honest man, for the zeal I have shown in this cause; for it is an honest zeal, and in a good cause. I have defended natural religion against a confederacy of atheists and …

This mournful truth is ev'rywhere confessed — Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed.

Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough, What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town, If juster battles are enacted now Between the ants upon this hummock's crown?

Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,— Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind …

The zest of life lies in right doing, not in the garnered harvest.

An intellectual dapperling of these times boasts chiefly of his irresistible perspicacity, his “dwelling in the daylight of truth,” and so forth; which, on examination, turns out to be a dwelling in the rush-light of “closet logic,” and a …

Blasphemy is a padlock which hypocrisy tries to put on the lips of all honest men.

The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over …