Quotes about truth

"Are stories true?"

"Which ones?"

"The mermaid mother and Hansel and Gretel and all them."

"Well," says Ma, "not literally."

"What's—"

"They're magic, they're not about real people walking around today."

"So they're fake?"

"No, no. Stories are a different kind of true."

It was true, it was all true. But none of it was the truth.

I don’t want easy. I want true.

“All things on earth have their price, and for truth we pay the dearest. We barter it for love and sympathy. The road to honour is paved with thorns; but on the path to truth, at every step you set your foot down on your heart.”

“I have sought,” he said, “for long years I have laboured; but I have not found her. I have not rested, I have not repined, and I have not seen her; now my strength is gone. Where I lie down worn out other men will stand, young and fresh. By the steps that I have cut they will climb; by the stairs that I have built they will mount. They will never know the name of the man who made them. At the clumsy work they will laugh; when the stones roll they will curse me. But they will mount, and on my work; they will climb, and by my stair! They will find her, and through me! And no man liveth to himself and no man dieth to himself.”

There are certain truths that, in themselves, are as dangerous as any advanced technology.

If my years as a shatterling had taught me anything, it was that not all questions had answers. Societies had reduced themselves to radioactive dust because they could not accept that single unpalatable truth.

I’m fed up with everyone being lied to just because the administration thinks it’s in our best interests not to know all the facts.

She had almost dared ask, but was perhaps too fearful of hearing something she could not refute.

War does strange things to truth.

I had never understood mathematics with any great agility, but now I sensed it as a hard grid of truth underlying everything: bones shining through the thin flesh of the world.

In a climate of confusion, one of the surest ways of confounding the enemy is to tell him the plain truth.