Quotes & Sayings About Falsehood

It is indeed the truth of the traumatic experience that forms the center of its psychopathology; it is not a pathology of falsehood or displacement of meaning, but of history itself (p. 5) — Cathy Caruth

In argument, truth always prevails finally; in politics, falsehood always. — Walter Savage Landor

My title "The Fabrication of Facts," has the virtue not only of indicating pretty clearly what I am going to discuss but also of irritating those fundamentalists who know very well that facts are found not madder, that facts constitute the one and only real world, and that knowledge consists of believing the facts. These articles of faith so firmly possess most of us, they so bind and blind us, that "fabrication of fact" has a paradoxical sound. "Fabrication" has become a synonym for "falsehood" or "fiction" as contrasted with "truth" or "fact." Of course, we must distinguish falsehood and fiction from truth and fact; but we cannot, I am sure, do it on ground that fiction is fabricated and fact found. - 91 — Nelson Goodman

A convention is an agreed-upon falsehood, a permitted lie. — Thornton Wilder

Nay, if there be any mistakes in the Bible, there may as well be a thousand. If there be one falsehood in that book, it did not come from the God of truth — John Wesley

... He was a bad courtier and painted an ambiguous picture entitled La Menzogna or Falsehood, to show what he felt about the need for dissimulation to achieve success; a man holds up a mask to indicate to his companion that he must adopt it if he wants to make progress at court... ... The clear message was that Rosa was not prepared to demean himself in that way. — Jonathan Scott

A wise man's goal shouldn't be to say something profound, but to say something useful. — Criss Jami

Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood. — Jean Giraudoux

There cannot be even the smallest grain of falsehood in it or it is not truth. I have discovered the source of all truth; how can I deny what I know? — Stephen R. Lawhead

The problem with being a liar is you can never believe anyone else. — Chloe Thurlow

Weary and stuffed from being force-fed the falsehood that when one of your kind makes it, it means that you've all made it. — Paul Beatty

And this,' said she, 'is the end of all his friend's anxious circumspection! of all his sister's falsehood and contrivance! The happiest, wisest, most reasonable end! — Jane Austen

Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation — Willard Van Orman Quine

When one enters any intellectual battle, big or small, public or private, one cannot seek, desire or expect the enemy's sanction. Truth or falsehood must be one's sole concern and sole criterion of judgment - not anyone's approval or disapproval; and, above all, not the approval of those whose standards are the opposite of one's own. — Ayn Rand

I saw that all who do not profess an identical faith with themselves are considered by the Orthodox to be heretics, just as the Catholics and others consider the Orthodox to be heretics. And i saw that the Orthodox (though they try to hide this) regard with hostility all who do not express their faith by the same external symbols and words as themselves; and this is naturally so; first, because the assertion that you are in falsehood and I am in truth, is the most cruel thing one man can say to another; and secondly, because a man loving his children and brothers cannot help being hostile to those who wish to pervert his children and brothers to a false belief. And that hostility is increased in proportion to one's greater knowledge of theology. And to me who considered that truth lay in union by love, it became self-evident that theology was itself destroying what it ought to produce. — Leo Tolstoy

There is no crime more infamous than the violation of truth. It is apparent that men can be social beings no longer than they believe each other. When speech is employed only as the vehicle of falsehood, every man must disunite himself from others, inhabit his own cave and seek prey only for himself. — Samuel Johnson

Fear prevents us from becoming what we suppose to be especially when we tenaciously hold unto falsehood. Fear makes us look ugly, stifled and dissipated. Guard your heart against any form of fear because fear simply means you are expecting something bad. — Uzoma Nnadi

Swann could at once detect in this story one of those fragments of literal truth which liars, when taken by surprise, console themselves by introducing into the composition of the falsehood which they have to invent, thinking that it can be safely incorporated, and will lend the whole story an air of verisimilitude. — Marcel Proust

Parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy — Michel Foucault

Animals have this way of constantly confronting us with ultimate questions - about truth and falsehood, guilt and innocence, God and sanctity and the soul - forcing us to define ourselves and our relationship to the world. — Matthew Scully

The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul. — E. M. Forster

Truth came home one day, naked and wounded, having been beaten and cursed by the people who did not wish to hear, while his brother Falsehood went dressed in the brightest garments and feasted with every household.
"What shall I do?" cried Truth to the gods. "No man wishes to hear me and all beat me and throw things at me; look, I am covered with dung."
"You are naked" said the goddess Maat, sympathetically. "No naked one can command respect. Therefore take these robes and you will walk without fear and all men will sit at your feet to hear your stories." And she dressed Truth in Fable's garments, and he was welcome at every house. — Kerry Greenwood

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness. — Hannah Arendt

Truth is comfortable in your eyes, but falsehood looks for ways to escape and clearly shows itself in the way you look at the person to whom you are lying. — V.C. Andrews

The radio is at the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment's pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence. — Barbara Kingsolver

Man may deceive his fellow-men, deception may follow deception, and the children of the wicked one may have power to seduce the foolish and untaught, till naught but fiction feeds the many, and the fruit of falsehood carries in its current the giddy to the grave; but one touch with the finger of his love, yes, one ray of glory from the upper world, or one word from the mouth of the Savior, from the bosom of eternity, strikes it all into insignificance, and blots it forever from the mind. (Messenger and Advocate Oct 1934 pp 14-16) — Oliver Cowdery

He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people. — Anton Chekhov

We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves. — Blaise Pascal

The more sincerity is developed, the greater share of truth you will have. And however much sincerity a person may have, there is always a gap to fill, for we live in the midst of falsehood, and we are always apt to be carried away by this world of falsehood. Therefore we must never think we are sincere enough, and we must always be on our guard against influences which may carry us away from that sincerity which is the bridge between ourselves and our ideal. No study, no meditation is more helpful than sincerity itself. — Hazrat Inayat Khan

With union grounded on falsehood and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable; the noisome is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one! — Thomas Carlyle

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
[Remarks on the 20th Anniversary of the Voice of America; Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, February 26, 1962] — John F. Kennedy

... forgotten friend Mushkin ... we read. Time had erased the never, and corrected the falsehood of man. — Anton Chekhov

Liar! I know that you humans build your life in lies. It starts with your mortal lords and their fabricated gods. They use fictitious stories to impregnate the minds of people, and like herds of sheep they do as their told. With manipulation alone is enough to secure their reign. After all, is it not in your nature to be wanted and purposeful? It is such an easy game to play. I have observed this falsehood accepted by fathers and mothers over and over again. The idiocy becomes one with their children, and they become the infrastructure that not only sedates but corrodes the soul with instructed conformity. In the end, lies are all that you are. — H.S. Crow

Let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpationsall of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood. — Thomas Jefferson

Reason will always be logical,
Logic not always reasonable,
For truth from reason derivable,
And logic falsehood multipliable. — Munindra Misra

Every lying thought bears in itself a proof of its falsehood. This proof is its deadly effect upon the heart; — John Of Kronstadt

Falsehood of a good man is better than truth of a bad one. — Raheel Farooq

Truth and falsehood are opposed; but truth is the norm not of truth only but of falsehood also. — C.S. Lewis

On the road to nowhere there are many people who lack the vision to get you anywhere. — Johnnie Dent Jr.

Philosophers talk about truth and falsehood. People in life talk about payoff, exposure, and consequences (risks and rewards), hence fragility and antifragility. And sometimes philosophers and thinkers and those who study conflate Truth with risks and rewards. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

First one gives off his best picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humor. Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and third
before long the best lines cancel out
and the secret is exposed at last; the planes of the picture have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture. We must be satisfied with hoping such fatuous accounts of ourselves as we make to our wives and children and business associates are accepted as true. — F Scott Fitzgerald

He hath a share of man's intelligence, but no share of man's falsehood. — Walter Scott

Past all shame, so past all truth. — William Shakespeare

Can the same nature be a lover of wisdom and a lover of falsehood? Never. The true lover of learning then must from his earliest youth, as far as in him lies, desire all truth? Assuredly. But then again, as we know by experience, he whose desires are strong in one direction will have them weaker in others; they will be like a stream which has been drawn off into another channel. True. He whose desires are drawn towards knowledge in every form will be absorbed in the pleasures of the soul, and will hardly feel bodily pleasure - I mean, if he be a true philosopher and not a sham one. That is most certain. Such — Plato

Theological error is the most pernicious of errors; it strikes at man's center and separates him from his Creator and Redeemer. God insisted not only that Israelites should judge their own hearts and cast aside falsehood about Him but that they should also confront it wherever it emerged. — Max Anders

God's mouth knows not how to speak falsehood, but he brings to pass every word. — Aeschylus

A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'. — Ian Hacking

Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? — John Milton

Peace is the whole truth that wishes to enrapture humanity. War is the whole falsehood that wants to capture humanity. Peace begins in the soul and ends in the heart. War begins in the mind and ends in the body. — Sri Chinmoy

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood. — Aldous Huxley

The Prophet supplicated that God, the Exalted, show him things in their reality, distinguished and clear: Show me the truth as truth and give me the ability to follow it; and show me falsehood as falsehood and give me the ability to avoid it. — Hamza Yusuf

For the truth may run fine but will not break, and always rises above falsehood as oil above water; — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Truth leads to good deeds, and good deeds lead to Paradise. Falsehood leads to evil deeds, and evil deeds lead to the Fire. — Anonymous

I know how ingratitude burns, how falsehood tortures, for I have been deceived in friendship and in love; I have learned to lose and to resign myself. — Franz Grillparzer

When misguided public opinion honors what is despicable and despises what is honorable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns it's back on progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe. — Frederic Bastiat

Dissembling profiteth nothing; a feigned countenance, and slightly forged externally, deceiveth but very few. — Seneca The Younger

Slender certainty is better than portentous falsehood. — Leonardo Da Vinci

Couples often live out years of falsehood trying to protect and save a relationship, all the while destroying any chance of real relationship. — Henry Cloud

I fear the day when the Kuffar are proud of their falsehood, and the Muslims are shy of their faith. — Umar

I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious. — H.L. Mencken

That practis'd falsehood under saintly shew, Deep malice to conceal, couch'd with revenge. — John Milton

We are living in the falsehood due to the erroneous teachings of the society, community and the bordered nations. — Vishal Chipkar

That still would hardly reduce all other religions to mere falsehood. More to the point, no one really acquainted with the metaphysical and spiritual claims of the major theistic faiths can fail to notice that on a host of fundamental philosophical issues, and especially on the issue of how divine transcendence should be understood, the areas of accord are quite vast. — David Bentley Hart

All err the more dangerously because each follows a truth. Their mistake lies not in following a falsehood but in not following another truth. — Blaise Pascal

The firmness with which the (American) people have withstood the ... abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood, show that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false and to form a correct judgment between them. — Thomas Jefferson

Every politician, every member of the clerical profession, ought to incur the reasonable suspicion of being an interested supporter of false doctrines, who becomes angry at opposition, and endeavors to cast an odium on free inquiry. Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it. — Thomas Cooper

The besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking a part of the truth for the whole. — John Stuart Mill

Man has a tyrant, ignorance. I voted for the demise of that particular tyrant. That particular tyrant has engendered royalty, which is authority based on falsehood, whereas science is authority based on truth. Man should be governed by science alone."
"And conscience," added the bishop.
"It's the same thing. Conscience is the quota of innate science we each have inside us. — Victor Hugo

The thing I understood least of all was that knowledge led to despair and damnation. Our spiritual mentor had not said that those bad books had given a false picture of life: if that had been the case, he could easily have exposed their falsehood; the tragedy of the little girl whom he had failed to bring to salvation was that she had made a premature discovery of the true nature of reality. Well, anyhow, I thought, I shall discover it myself one day, and it isn't going to kill me: the idea that there was a certain age when knowledge of the truth could prove fatal I found offensive to common sense. — Simone De Beauvoir

Is it not He whose immortal hand ... has written there the death sentence of tyrants? He did not create kings to devour the human race. He did not create priests to harness us, like vile animals, to the chariots of kings and to give to the world examples of baseness, pride, perfidy, avarice, debauchery and falsehood. He created the universe to proclaim His power.
[The Cult of the Supreme Being] — Maximilien De Robespierre

Truth is more deceptive than falsehood, for it is more frequently presented by those from whom we do not expect it, and so has against it a numerical presumption. — Ambrose Bierce

But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare? What are the habits of the military? The aim of war is murder; the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country's inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud and falsehood termed military craft. The habits of the military class are the absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. And in spite of all this it is the highest class, respected by everyone. All the kings, except the Chinese, wear military uniforms, and he who kills most people receives the highest rewards. — Leo Tolstoy

A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence. — Joseph Conrad

We cannot separate doubt from deception. Doubt robs a man of his confidence; it is a fearful thing. Offer him deception to restore that confidence and he will embrace the falsehood for the comfort it brings. If you would deceive, begin with doubt. — D.A. Blankinship

History - a vast Mississippi of falsehoods — Matthew Arnold

Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood. — Robert Pinsky

Dishonor waits on perfidy. A man should blush to think a falsehood; it is the crime of cowards. — Samuel Johnson

When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, - and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Justice implies knowledge of the right and proper place for a thing or a being to be; of right as against wrong; of the mean and limit; of spiritual gain as against loss; of truth as against falsehood. — Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas

Come! let us take a moment's shelter under some roof
Look! there - before you, a little way off
There is an empty space
Between truth and falsehood. — Amrita Pritam

Affliction by that falsehood is the act of dying. To be free from that delusion is to attain Immortality. — Sathya Sai Baba

So may the outward shows be least themselves:
The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil? In religion,
What damned error, but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?
There is no vice so simple but assumes
Some mark of virtue on his outward parts. — William Shakespeare

Would that I could discover truth as easily as I can uncover falsehood. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

So the popular notion that "God will never give us more than we can handle" is in reality a blatant falsehood - a lie. He will give us more than we can handle, and this for the express purpose of bringing us to the end of ourselves so that we realize our very life, breath, and sustaining power comes only from God all the time. Jesus clearly said, "Apart from me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). — Eric J. Bargerhuff

Racism springs from the lie that certain human beings are less than fully human. It's a self-centered falsehood that corrupts our minds into believing we are right to treat others as we would not want to be treated. — Alveda King

Whether statistics be an art or a science ... or a scientific art, we concern ourselves little. It is the basis of social and political dynamics, and affords the only secure ground on which the truth or falsehood of the theories and hypotheses of that complicated science can be brought to the test. — Adolphe Quetelet

Ignorance is the necessary condition, i do not say of happiness, but of life itself. If we knew everything, we could not endure existence a single hour. The sentiments that make it sweet to us, or at any rate tolerable, spring from a falsehood, and are fed on illusions.
If, like God, a man possessed the truth, the sole and perfect truth, and once let it escape out of his hands, the world would be annihilated there and then, and the universe melt away instantly like a shadow. — Anatole France

Abide not with dualism,
Carefully avoid pursuing it;
As soon as you have right and wrong,
Confusion ensues, and Mind is lost. (172) — Edward Conze

As children's inquiries are not to be slighted, so also great care is to be taken, that they never receive deceitful and illuding answers. They easily perceive when they are slighted or deceived, and quickly learn the trick of neglect, dissimulation, and falsehood, which they observe others to make use of. We are not to intrench upon truth in any conversation, but least of all with children; since, if we play false with them, we not only deceive their expectation, and hinder their knowledge, but corrupt their innocence, and teach them the worst of vices. — John Locke

Our analysis of truth and falsehood, or of the nature of judgment, is not very likely to be influenced by our hopes and fears. — Charles D. Broad

Truth, though, is nothing in the face of self-falsehood, and principles are of no value if the idealist cannot live up to his own standards. — R.A. Salvatore

If there were no falsehood in the world, there would be no doubt, if there were no doubt, there would be no inquiry; if no inquiry, no wisdom, no knowledge, no genius; and Fancy herself would lie muffled up in her robe, inactive, pale, and bloated. — Walter Savage Landor

He had all sorts of rules he'd constructed for himself over the decades, based on lessons someone must have taught him
what he wasn't entitled to; what he mustn't enjoy; what he mustn't hope or wish for; what he mustn't covet
and it took some years to figure out what these rules were, and longer still to figure out how to try to convince him of their falsehood. But this was very difficult: they were rules by which he had survived his life, they were rules that made the world explicable to him. — Hanya Yanagihara

There is more than duplicity in scope-less-ness. There is the fraudulent manifest of falsehood as generosity. — Dew Platt

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood. — Rollo May

Crime isn't pretty, only fashionably dressed. — S.W. Frank

The fools of this world prefer to look for sages far away. They don't believe that the wisdom of their own mind is the sage ... the sutras say, "Mind is the teaching." But people of no understanding don't believe in their own mind or that by understanding this teaching they can become a sage. They prefer to look for distant knowledge and long for things in space, buddha-images, light, incense, and colors. They fall prey to falsehood and lose their minds to insanity. — Bodhidharma

In classical understanding, education is the attempt to "lead out" from within the self a core of wisdom that has the power to resist falsehood and live in the light of truth, not by external norms but by reasoned and reflective self-determination. The inward teacher is the living core of our lives that is addressed and evoked by any education worthy of the name. — Parker J. Palmer

Duration is not a test of truth or falsehood. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh