Untrue Stories Quotes & Sayings

Nobody's too old for stories
not even God himself. — Jonathan Auxier

Professional historians approach such stories with great caution, knowing there will certainly be many fake baubles in the pile. Some accounts will be almost entirely untrue. All will be somewhat distorted according to the prejudices of the author and the political requirements of the moment. Different accounts must be weighed against each other, as well as the documentary evidence and the archaeological record. Sometimes the surviving records are scant and confusing. — Richard Fidler

All governments lie, as I.F. Stone pointed out, including Israel and Hamas. But Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic and totalitarian regimes. It does not deform the truth; it inverts it. It routinely paints a picture for the outside world that is diametrically opposed to reality. And all of us reporters who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel's Alice-in-Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our stories - required under the rules of American journalism - although we know they are untrue. — Chris Hedges

Well, you can't argue with somebody that won't argue back. — Victoria Osteen

There are people accusing me that I'm sick, that I'm a danger to morals, western civilization and basically everything under the sun. And they've got these wild stories about me, completely off the wall, completely untrue. They thought them up and it makes you wonder what goes on in their brain, but of course, they don't consider themselves sick. They think they're normal because they don't dress like I do. — Marilyn Manson

Despite all that good news, there's plenty of horror stories being told. All of them are untrue, but they're being told all over America, — Harry Reid

The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue ... — Bruno Bettelheim

Music is part of being human. — Oliver Sacks

We spend most of our life cooking up all kinds of untrue things. Why? So we won't be afraid. The mind likes to soothe itself with stories, and after they get made up, we run around under their spell. — Deepak Chopra

If somebody tells you an obviously untrue story, on the Continent you would remark, "You are a liar, Sir, and a rather dirty one at that." In England you just say "Oh, is that so?" Or "That's rather an unusual story, isn't it? — George Mikes

Every man is a moon; he has a side no one sees. — Mark Twain

She told him of ship voyages she had taken to places he had never heard of, and stories he knew were all untrue, were bad not-truths, even, but he nodded, and tried to convince himself to be convinced, tried to believe her, because he knew that the origin of the story is always an absence and he wanted to live among presences. — Jonathan Safran Foer

When a possibility is unfamiliar to us, we do not even think about it. — Nate Silver

No, the only way to know what people think is to watch what they do, not what they say. Do they come back for more? Do you cause them to change their behavior? Can you make them smile? — Seth Godin

I am a free person.
I am free to dream.
I am free to pursue my dreams.
I am free to love.
I am free to serve mankind. — Lailah Gifty Akita

To grow up steeped in these tellings was to learn two unforgettable lessons: first, that stories were not true (there were no "real" genies in bottles or flying carpets or wonderful lamps), but by being untrue they could make him feel and know truths that the truth could not tell him, and second, that they all belonged to him, just as they belonged to his father, Anis, and to everyone else, they were all his, as they were hsi father's, bright stories and dark stories, sacred stories and profane, his to alter and renew and discard and pick up again as and when he pleased, his to laugh at and rejoice in and live in and with and by, to give the stories life by loving them and to be given life in return. Man was the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away. — Salman Rushdie

Don't worry about being acknowledged by others; worry about failing to acknowledge them. — Confucius

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it. — George R R Martin

War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art. — Richard Flanagan

All I can say is that these cult stories are totally untrue, are without any foundation, and trade on a deep bias against Westerners who dare to embrace an Eastern belief-system. — Frederick Lenz

There are a lot more tabloids in England that like to report other things in your life, some of which are true and some of which are exaggerated and untrue. There have been stories where people claim to have seen me in one place and I wasn't even in that city then. The Aussie press is more judgmental and moralistic. — Shane Warne

Now, clear your minds. It knows what scares you. It has from the very beginning. Don't give it any help, it knows too much already. — Poltergeist The Movie

Heaven be thanked, we live in such an age when no man dies for love except upon the stage. — John Osborne

I dislike the word mythology because of its secondary definition meaning "something untrue." Myth is a Greek word that simply means "story," and mythologies are collections of ancient stories explaining the order of the universe or a society's ideals and customs. — Alaric Albertsson

Between economic freedom and government regulation? Chapter 2 will address these issues. The specific question I ask is how far very complex regulation has become the disease of which it purports to be the cure, distorting and corrupting both the political and the economic process. — Niall Ferguson

Look, how many stories have I broken? Hundreds. How many have proved to be untrue? There isn't one. — Jude Law

One reason I avoid the American TV talk show circuit, when I'm over there, is that the tabloids and the gossip mill are always churning with new, true, or untrue stories about new loves, old loves, pending marriages, divorces, trial separations, flings and affairs with people of every description. I'm not into any of that. — George Harrison

I have heard stories that it was love at first sight for both of us, that we disappeared to a guest room at Merle's house, had our meals sent up, and didn't emerge for several days. This is absolutely untrue. I would never behave like that as a guest in someone's home. Carlos and I went to my beach house. — Martha Graham

An ordinary hole beside a path through the woods might begin to open to altered worlds. — Jane Hirshfield

STORY, n. A narrative, commonly untrue. The truth of the stories here following has, however, not been successfully impeached. — Ambrose Bierce

You've got to be in the moment, especially in the playoffs. If you're worried about the past, worried about what happened last game, that's a lost cause. — Drew Storen

Definitions belong to the definer, not the defined, & I no longer wished to have my life & death foretold by others. I had endured too much to be reduced to an idea. Onto that pyre I threw so many, many words - that entire untrue literature of the past which had shackled & subjugated my as surely as the spiked iron collars & leg locks & jagged basils & balls & chains & headshaving - that had so long denied me my free voice & the stories I needed to tell. I no longer wished to read lies as to who & why I was. I knew who I was — Richard Flanagan