Untrue Words Quotes & Sayings

The true word leads; the untrue misleads. — Franz Kafka

If we sometimes lie and sometimes tell the truth, no one can be certain what they are hearing at any given time. Like yin and yang, truth and lies are inseparable, each containing a seed of the other, no words are ever entirely true or entirely untrue. — Chloe Thurlow

Bad temper is bad temper even in the apparent privacy of your own hard drive, and harsh and unjust words, when released into the wild, rampage around and do real damage. And as for the practice of saying mean and untrue things while hiding behind a pseudonym - well, if I get a letter like that it goes straight in the bin. But — N. T. Wright

Everything that can be said with words can be contradicted with words, so what's the point of dissertations, novels, literature? Or put another way: whatever we say is true we can also always say is untrue. It is a zero point and the place from which the zero value begins to spread. However, it is not a dead point, not for literature either, for literature is not just words, literature is what words evoke in the reader. It is this transcendence that validates literature, not the formal transcendence in itself, as many believe. — Karl Ove Knausgard

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

While sticks and stones break bones, words can never hurt? Manifestly untrue. Politics everywhere are holistic, interconnected, and the rhetoric of right or left can produce toxic atmospheres in which lunacy thrives. — Phillip Adams

A strange thing, words. Once they're said, it's hard to imagine they're untrue. — Sharon Biggs Waller

We cannot see Beauty till we let go our hold of it. It was Buddha who conquered the world, not Alexander - this is untrue when stated in dry prose - oh when shall we be able to sing it? When shall all these most intimate truths of the universe overflow the pages of printed books and leap out in a sacred stream like the Ganges from the Gangotrie? — Rabindranath Tagore

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind. — Philip Larkin

To doubt the literal meaning of the words of Jesus or Moses incurs hostility from most people, but it's just a fact that if Jesus or Moses were to appear today, unidentified, with the same message he spoke many years ago, his mental stability would be challenged. This isn't because what Jesus or Moses said was untrue or because modern society is in error but simply because the route they chose to reveal to others has lost relevance and comprehensibility. "Heaven above" fades from meaning when space-age consciousness asks, Where is "above"? But the fact that the old routes have tended, because of language rigidity, to lose their everyday meaning and become almost closed doesn't mean that the mountain is no longer there. It's there and will be there as long as consciousness exists. — Robert M. Pirsig

also may be untrue. One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope. In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive? Does Luke hope? — Margaret Atwood

How do you untell something? You can't. You can't put words back in your mouth. What you can do, is spread false gossip ... so people think that everything that's been said is untrue. Include that Stanley is having an affair. It's like the end of Spartacus. I have seen the movie half a dozen times, and I still don't know who the real Spartacus is. And, that is what makes that movie a classic whodunnit. — Michael Scott