Truthful Quotes & Sayings

I believe politicians should aim to be accurate and truthful in what they say at all times. You can be truthful and inaccurate but what you shouldn't be doing at any time is saying things that are untrue or making commitments that you have no intention of honouring. — Malcolm Turnbull

I'm willing to go wherever with this because music is everything to me. This is my world and how I see it. My music speaks for me in a way that's relatable and truthful. — Luke James

Positive, truthful and helping people always get rewards. Oneness, love, compassion and enlightenment can be attained by following the spiritual laws of the universe. -Hina Hashmi — Hina Hashmi

I would love to say
that you
make me
weak in the knees
but
to be quite upfront
and completely
truthful
you
make my body
forget
it has knees
at all. — Tyler Knott Gregson

Trust. It was a word that only liars used. A word the truthful had no need of. — Joe Abercrombie

Many people would be more truthful were it not for their uncontrollable desire to talk. — E.W. Howe

Man pays deference to woman instinctively, involuntarily, not because she is beautiful or truthful or wise or foolish or proper, but because she is a woman, and he cannot help it. If she descends, he will lower to her level; if she rises, he will rise to her height. — Mary Abigail Dodge

The umbrella that I live under is that you must be truthful with everyone except when to do so would injure them or others. — Rob Lowe

Holiness makes sin useless because it is truthful, just, faithful, righteous, godly, loving, meek, and enduring. — Joseph Choi

Because I finally can," Sebastian said. "You've no idea what it's been like, being around the lot of you these past few days, having to pretend I could stand you. That the sight of you didn't make me sick. You," he said to Jace, "every second you're not panting after your own sister, you're whining on and on about how your daddy didn't love you. Well, who could blame him? And you, you stupid bitch" - he turned to Clary - "giving that priceless book away to a half-breed warlock; have you got a single brain cell in that tiny head of yours? — Cassandra Clare

In public and in private life, it often happens that there is simply no time to collect the relevant facts or to weigh their significance. We are forced to act on insufficient evidence and by a light considerably less steady than that of logic. With the best will in the world, we cannot always be completely truthful or consistently rational. All that is in our power is to be as truthful and rational as circumstances permit us to be, and to respond as well as we can to the limited truth and imperfect reasonings offered for our consideration by others. — Aldous Huxley

It sometime is so amazing to know, how the most ordinary day turns so extraordinary, in a flash of second. And depending on harshness of a sudden jolt of reality, sometime one has no option but to still be hopeful, listen to the heartbeat, still dream grand, still dream impossible; and keep one's inner self illuminated forever. After all, dream only turns into reality, if one is genuinely passionate and truthful to it. What a waste of life it would be otherwise. — Smishra

We look up, if only to see if we're likely to be rained on. The sky calls attention to itself, whether scored by herons, cranes, or wires; illumined by sunsets, Perseids, or ballparks; broken up by the twigwork of oaks or maples, painted in rainbows, or just primed in the pale gray of my '52 Ford. If we are truthful, the sky is never neutral. — Robert Michael Pyle

A person with no children says, "Well I just love children," and you say "Why?" and they say, "Because a child is so truthful, that's what I love about 'em - they tell the truth." That's a lie, I've got five of 'em. The only time they tell the truth is if they're having pain. — Bill Cosby

I'm not being nice, I'm being truthful, — Lili Valente

I've been hounded by a reputation of being difficult when really what I'm being is truthful and honest. And I think that's been a thorn in my side. — Gabrielle Anwar

The first glance at the pillow showed me a repulsive sentinel perched upon each end of it
cockroaches as large as peach leaves
fellows with long, quivering antennae and fiery, malignant eyes. They were grating their teeth like tobacco worms, and appeared to be dissatisfied about something. I had often heard that these reptiles were in the habit of eating off sleeping sailors' toe nails down to the quick, and I would not get in the bunk any more. I lay down on the floor. But a rat came and bothered me, and shortly afterward a procession of cockroaches arrived and camped in my hair. In a few moments the rooster was crowing with uncommon spirit and a party of fleas were throwing double somersaults about my person in the wildest disorder, and taking a bite every time they stuck. I was beginning to feel really annoyed. I got up and put my clothes on and went on deck.
The above is not overdrawn; it is a truthful sketch of inter-island schooner life. — Mark Twain

For all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to deception, selfishness, and lust. It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things - maybe even one with them in essence. Maybe! — Friedrich Nietzsche

I am. I'm rude because I don't conform to society's standards that white lies are inconsequential. I don't believe in hiding behind words that aren't truthful. I'm an impatient man. I don't beat around the bush. If you ask me something, I won't lie to you. — Whitney Barbetti

When you eliminate vanity from an art form, and I would think that this would be any art form, what is left is an opportunity to be incredibly naked and truthful. — Lorraine Toussaint

I've always loved Victorian melodrama. And I've always liked larger-than-life theater, providing it's truthful and honest. I like what the theater can provide in energy and bombast - I enjoy it when it's large, and by that I don't mean in size, I mean in emotions. Shakespeare did that. — Harold Prince

Wes Clark is a man of whom you can ask a question, and he will look you directly in the eye, and give you the most truthful and complete answer you can imagine. You will know the absolute truth of the statement as well as the thought process behind the answer. You will have no doubt as to the intellect of the speaker and meaning of the answer to this question ... So you can see, as a politician, he has a lot to learn. — Mario Cuomo

truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all. . . . — Friedrich Nietzsche

One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life. — Henry Miller

Eternity is not just looking to the future and our place with God in Heaven, but it is looking at our Eternity as if it were only moments away. — Beth Nimmo

People who say "no" right away are usually lying. A truthful person is perfectly capable of saying "no" but generally they stop and think about it first. And they add "sorry" or something like that. Maybe they come out with some questions of their own. It's human nature. They say, "Sorry, no, why, what happened? — Lee Child

We were made to enjoy music, to enjoy beautiful sunsets, to enjoy looking at the billows of the sea and to be thrilled with a rose that is bedecked with dew ... Human beings are actually created for the transcendent, for the sublime, for the beautiful, for the truthful ... and all of us are given the task of trying to make this world a little more hospitable to these beautiful things. — Desmond Tutu

There's no right or wrong just truthful or untruthful. — Robert Duvall

The theatre will never find itself again except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior. [ ... ] If theatre wants to find itself needed once more, it must present everything in love, crime, war and madness. — Antonin Artaud

I think any actor should be aware of where they're starting to stretch into what's not truthful. — Naveen Andrews

I love big, bold, truthful theater - the tradition of Victorian theater. — Harold Prince

Be bold, free, and truthful. — Brenda Ueland

If you're really truthful with yourself, it's a wonderful guidance. — Charlie Chaplin

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. — Roger Zelazny

There is nothing new and nothing truthful in the false accusations against public officials make by the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation today, ... The simple reality is that the Schaghticoke fail to meet the criteria for federal recognition. — Richard Blumenthal

Seemingly by design, the American legal system encourages defense counsel to be as mendacious as possible. As Monroe Freedman, a legal ethicist and former dean of Hofstra Law School, has written, "The attorney is obligated to attack, if he can, the reliability or credibility of an opposing witness whom he knows to be truthful." It's an essential component of our adversarial system of justice, based on the theory that justice is best achieved not through a third-party investigation directed by an impartial judge but, instead, through vigorous disputation by the interested parties: trial by verbal combat. The — Jon Krakauer

At the very moment when we refuse to follow our conscience and refuse to be truthful, we become all the more aware of the presence of conscience and the absolute truthfulness inside. — Ilchi Lee

Credulity is perhaps a weakness almost inseparable from eminently truthful characters. — Henry Theodore Tuckerman

As actors, if we are truthful to ourselves and we know what we can do and what we cannot do and just go after it, there are possibilities out there. If you don't try, you won't find out if you get them or not. — Navid Negahban

All truths, not merely ideas, but truthful faces, truthful pictures or songs, are highly beautiful. — Mahatma Gandhi

I decided a long time ago but sometimes it takes you 40 years to get around to doing something - and that's the truthful answer. — Dustin Hoffman

We have to be honest, we have to be truthful and speak to the one dirty secret in American life, and that is racism. — Henry Cisneros

Any attempt to ease guilt by justification is false. That the crimes of another appease none of one's own offenses. That, if one is being truthful, the greater pain is that of the offender. I know now that I would much rather be a victim of violence than a perpetrator — Frank Delaney

HONESTLY ... I believe people are intimidated with truthful/ outspoken people.
HONESTY ... will help you grow and it shows maturity.
HONEST ... people will push you closer towards your destiny. — Takina Cupp

Sull imagined wild brook trout, cold and firm in the fast, healthy current, buried in the water like ingots of precious metal. They hold fast to the bank, laurel-green with bellies of coal-fire. Wilder colors than you'd dare imagine on your own. Stock had destroyed the run--to be truthful, {his family} had--and silky mud rose off the bottom in slow veils where the Angus dropped their hooves. Do rivers have ghosts? Do trout swim in the air? — Matthew Neill Null

Editing is a very tough period. You're confronted with yourself. It's a deep, dark, truthful mirror. — Thomas Bidegain

I loved her, for she was beauty dressed in a selfless personality and the skin of unconditional love. A voice of truthful melody and eyes holding a vision so large, maybe, just maybe she was born to change the world. — Nikki Rowe

The Buddha's criteria for Wise Speech include - in addition to the obvious expectation that speech be truthful - that it be timely, gentle, motivated by kindness, and helpful. — Sylvia Boorstein

There is nothing truthful, wise, humane, or strategic about confusing hostility to injustice and oppression, which is leftist, with hostility to science and rationality, which is nonsense. — Michael Albert

Lying is for the weak-minded. If you can't think of a truthful way to solve your problems, you're not thinking hard enough. — Robin Brande

April is the cruelest month.' So begins T.S. Eliot's 1922 masterpiece, a 434-line poem titled 'The Waste Land.' Until my employment as a trail maintenance worker, this had simply been a line on a page, albeit a line fraught with metaphorical import and potential. Now I saw it for what it was - a big fat lie - because Eliot grew up in St. Louis and no one forgets what a Missouri summer is like. If the Nobel laureate had been truthful with himself, the opening verse would start out, 'June's a bitch. — Michael Gurnow

We all teach from that same frame of reference. We're like neighborhood - the people who have had the opportunity through this music to gain a platform and spread the message of this music, which is basically love in a form of communication that's honest and truthful. — Wynton Marsalis

And it seems to me that everyone is like me - they're all afraid of the slightest movement ... Everyone's sitting all closed up in his own glass cage waiting for something. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

You long for life and try to settle the problems of life by a logical tangle. And how tiresome, how insolent your outbursts are, and at the same time, how scared you are! You talk nonsense and are pleased with it; you say imprudent things and are constantly afraid of them and apologizing for them. You declare that you are afraid of nothing and at the same time try to ingratiate yourself with us. You declare that you are gnashing your teeth and at the same time you try to be witty so as to amuse us. You know that your witticisms are not witty, but you are evidently well satisfied with their literary value. You may perhaps really have suffered, but you have no respect whatsoever for your own suffering. You may be truthful in what you have said but you have no modesty; out of the pettiest vanity you bring your truth to public exposure, to the market place, to ignominity. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Be truthful.
Be presentable.
Be tactical.
Be profitable. — Matshona Dhliwayo

It's hard t want to fit in and not be able to," his voice came barely above a whisper. "They make us feel like it's easier to lie than be truthful. Easier to hide than be seen. Make us feel like we did something wrong to not be like them. Like we made a conscious choice". — Dan Skinner

My letters seeking a job, though truthful, diminished the full truth. Face would blanch if the facts had been complete: "Dear Sir," I thought. "Do you have a position for a journeyman burglar, con man, forger and car thief; also with experience as armed robber, pimp, card cheat and several other things. I smoked marijuana at twelve (in the 40's) and shot heroin at sixteen. I have no experience with LSD and methedrine. They came to popularity since my imprisonment. I've buggered pretty young boys and feminine homosexuals (but only when locked up away from women). In the idiom of jails, prisons and gutters (some plush gutters) I'm a motherfucker! Not literally, for I don't remember my mother. In my world the term, used as I used it, is a boast of being hell on wheels, outrageously unpredictable, a virtuoso of crime. Of course by being a motherfucker in that world I'm a piece of garbage in yours. Do you have a job? — Edward Bunker

On the whole, age comes more gently to those who have some doorway into an abstract world-art, or philosophy, or learning-regions where the years are scarcely noticed and the young and old can meet in a pale truthful light. — Freya Stark

After all, mirrors are only as truthful as the eyes that are looking into them. — Cherie Currie

A work of art does not need an explanation. The work has to speak for itself. The work may be subject to many interpretations, but only one was in the mind of the artist. Some artists say to make the work readable for the public is an artist's responsibility, but I don't agree with that. The only responsibility to be absolutely truthful to the self. My work disturbs people and nobody wants to be disturbed They are not fully aware of the effect my work has on them, but they know it is disturbing. — Louise Bourgeois

I think the currency of leadership is transparency. You've got to be truthful. I don't think you should be vulnerable every day, but there are moments where you've got to share your soul and conscience with people and show them who you are, and not be afraid of it. — Howard Schultz

Strangely, the subsequent AIDS works that have become iconic in our culture rarely mention the movement, or the engaged community of lovers, but both formations were inseparable from the crisis itself. Now, looking back, I fear that the story of the isolated helpless homosexual was one far more palatable to the corporations who control the reward system in the arts.The more truthful story of the American mass - abandoning families, criminal governments, indifferent neighbors - is too uncomfortable and inconvenient to recall. The story of how gay people who were despised, had no rights, and carried the burden of a terrible disease came together to force the country to change against its will, is apparently too implicating to tell. Fake tales of individual heterosexuals heroically overcoming their prejudices to rescue helpless dying men with AIDS was a lot more appealing to the powers that be, but not at all true. — Sarah Schulman

The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard it ceases to be anything more than 'the gang in possession,' and its days are numbered. — H.G.Wells

It must be good to die in the knowledge that one has done some truthful work ... and to know that, as a result, one will live on in the memory of at least a few and leave a good example for those who come after. — Vincent Van Gogh

Don't believe everything you read or hear, remember a large part of our world is made up of fiction!! — Victoria Addino

Zits are beauty marks. — Kurt Cobain

Integrity is fundamental to being men. Integrity means being truthful, but it also means accepting responsibility and honoring commitments and covenants. — D. Todd Christofferson

The important correction needed by worldly religions is the transformation from external religious teaching to truthful internal spiritual reality. — Hua Ching Ni

While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace. — Virginia Woolf

All works of nonfiction, or memoir, have to first and foremost be art before they can be true. They have to be artful first before they can be truthful... If you emphasize the truth-telling at the expense of art, nobody is going to be interested in it. And if you sacrifice truth in the name of art, you risk triviality. There's a constant balance between those two. — Alan Shapiro

I was never a pretty girl, so I wasn't the one to get the boy. I used to cast myself as a good sport. Sometimes I wonder if I do that too much with roles I play, because if I'm absolutely truthful, I quite like being the best friend, or the supporting role, and actually I ought to gear-change and make myself the leading role. — Celia Imrie

Always be truthful and you will have fewer visits from regret, guilt or fear. — Suzy Kassem

That's what I want, a mental evidence I can feel. I don't want physical evidence, proof you have to go out and drag in. I want evidence that you can carry in your mind and always touch and smell and feel. But there's no way to do that. In order to believe in a thing you've got to carry it with you. You can't carry the Earth, or a man, in your pocket. I want a way to do that, carry things with me always, so I can believe in them. How clumsy to have to go to all the trouble of going out and bringing in something terribly physical to prove something. I hate physical things because they can be left behind and become impossible to believe in them. — Ray Bradbury

Say to the next generation again and again: God is truthful; God keeps his word; God does not lie; God can be trusted! That's one blessing of Advent. Receive it as a wonderful Christmas gift, and give it to as many people as you can. — John Piper

In short, we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear. — Daniel M. Gilbert

Jazz is so difficult. A lot of people think once they've learned these licks they can get up and play them for the rest of their life. But that's not being truthful to the music 'cause it's not developing. Cats you hear that don't make no mistakes? They ain't trying to do nothing. everything they hear is on the mark, but they've played it so many times ... I've built a whole career out of making mistakes! — Lester Bowie

For it is the business and duty of historians to be exact, truthful, and wholly free from passion, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor love, should make them swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, storehouse of deeds, witness for the past, example and counsel for the present, and warning for the future. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

In this way all violent bonds and orders are cancelled as if the freedom of the primal world had been restored with one blow. Man, too, is made open and true by this freedom. Wine, as Plutarch says so nicely, frees the soul of subservience, fear, and insincerity; it teaches men how to be truthful and candid with one another. It reveals that which was hidden. Wine and truth have long been associated in proverbs. It is a good thing, so it is said, to search for the truth in earnest conversation while one drinks wine, and agreements arrived at over a wine glass were at one time considered to be the most sacred and inviolable agreements. — Walter F. Otto

Google's a strange place. When I met Eric Schmidt, he said, "If you are kind to everybody, then you will make good decisions because people will give you good information, and if you are truthful to everybody, they will be truthful to you." That's what's different about Google. They screw up and make mistakes, but they genuinely mean the good stuff about "don't be evil." — Larry Brilliant

Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem. — Paul Celan

Truth's nakedness is not concerned with whom it strikes - painfully, or with pleasure; responding appropriately to its ingenuous temperament, however, rewards perceptions of unbiased transparency. — T.F. Hodge

I like the way we talk to each other. It feels honest. It was different with Manuel. One of us always had to win. Husbands and wives do that, worry more about being right than being truthful. — Richard Lange

My intent, here, is to tell our story in a dramatically truthful way. While the facts may be less than accurate, please understand that the emotion is true. The intent is true. And, dramatically speaking, intention is everything. — Garth Stein

Funny how people don't really see each other. Men and women. They invent each other in their minds and then they see what they invent.They don't really see each other. Now she was in love with him and she didn't even know his real name, didn't know anything real about him. — Andrew Klavan

In order to discover truth, we must be truthful ourselves, and must welcome those who point out our errors as heartily as those who approve and confirm our discoveries. — Max Muller

My pet peeve and my goal in life is to somehow get an adjective for 'integrity' in the dictionary. 'Truthful' doesn't really cover it, or 'genuine.' It should be like 'integritus.' — Rashida Jones

Still, when your truthful eyes,
your keen, attentive stare,
endow the vacuous slut
with royalty, when you match
her soul to her shimmering hair,
what can she do but rise
to your imagined throne?
And what can I, but see
beyond the world that is,
when, faithful, you insist
I have the golden key
and learn from you once more
the terror and the bliss,
the world as it might be? — Lisel Mueller

One cannot reach Truth by untruthfulness. Truthful conduct alone can reach truth. — Mahatma Gandhi

Certain things can't be approximated, so I'm always interested in getting in another way, one which makes the reader bend in closer to the scene even if that scene, especially if that scene, is painful ... Brutal language isn't necessarily the most truthful way of describing a brutal moment. — Anne Michaels

Compassion is the basis of all truthful relationship: it means being present with love-for ourselves and for all life, including animals, fish, birds, and trees. Compassion is bringing our deepest truth into our actions, no matter how much the world seems to resist, because that is ultimately what we have to give this world and one another. — Ram Dass

Readers love fantasy, but we need horror. Smart horror. Truthful horror. Horror that helps us make sense of a cruelly senseless world. — Brian K. Vaughan

I have no idea what truth has to do with love, and vice versa. i'm not even thinking in terms of love here. it's way, way, way early for that. but i guess i am thinking in terms of truth. i want this to be truthful. and even as i protest to tiny and i protest to myself, the truth is becoming increasingly clear. it's time for us to figure out how the hell this is ever going to work. — David Levithan

True courtesy," he continued, "earns the name. It is courtesy that is truthful. When the plebeian kneels to the monarch, he is offering his neck. He offers it because he knows his ruler can take it if he wishes. Common people like that say-or rather, they used to say, in older and better times - that I have no love of truth. But the truth is that it is precisely truth that I love, an open acknowledgment of fact. — Gene Wolfe

I don't believe truth is conveyed by style and presentation. I don't think that if it was grainy and full of handheld material, it would be any more truthful. — Errol Morris

In the plays - that's where I go crazy. But my prose has a much lighter touch; it's not trying to thrill with language, just to be more truthful. I'm not concerned with the accuracy of anything. We don't get to the truth of anything with facts. — Denis Johnson

God wants you to be truthful and humble to yourself and others. He made you good and industrious, but you can't benefit from it if you always stumble on pride. — Stevan V. Nikolic

I don't believe that if I came out as bisexual the world will change. But it's really important for people to be truthful about who they are and fight for equality. We need to help the world usher itself into the next phase. — Olivia Thirlby

Truthful movements spontaneously attract to themselves all manner of pure and disinterested help. — Mahatma Gandhi

Once upon a time, my world revolved around you. — Katie McGarry

Is not the gospel its own sign and wonder? Is not this a miracle of miracles, that 'God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish'? Surely that precious word, 'Whosoever will, let him come and take the water of life freely' and that solemn promise, 'Him that cometh unto Me, I will in no wise cast out,' are better than signs and wonders! A truthful Saviour ought to be believed. He is truth itself. Why will you ask proof of the veracity of One who cannot lie? — Charles Haddon Spurgeon