Remain true to yourself, child. If you know your own heart, you will always have one friend who does not lie.
Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Forest House
Any view of things that is not strange is false.
Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Fables and Reflections
Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.
J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man
We attempt to conceal ourselves, Emily, but the truth is we do not entirely want to be concealed. We want to be found. Every poet, sooner or later, discovers this: that within perfect walls, there is nothing worth protecting. There is, in fact, nothing. And so we exchange privacy for intimacy. We gamble with it, hoping that by exposing ourselves, someone will find a way in. This is why the human animal will always be vulnerable: because it wants to be.
Max Barry, Lexicon
Like having eyes but keeping them always closed, so that you didn't even realize that you were seeing darkness; and then one day the eye opened, and saw the world.
Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
A woman can forget a lot of love in two years.
T.H. White, The Once and Future King
The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
Nadine Gordimer, "A Bolter and the Invincible Summer", London Magazine, May 1963
It is always the novice who exaggerates. The young man who has risen in society is overrefined; the young scholar is pedantic.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
He was interested in being witty, and wit and truth are often at odds with each other.
Edward Seidensticker, Tokyo Central: A Memor
It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sumbitch or another.
Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly: "Jaynestown"
theblastofatrumpet reblogged
If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.
Carl Sagan (via sevenpointed)
There may be truth in platitudes.
Emma Bull, War for the Oaks
He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a little bit of truth check the rush of the big truth, like a small rock does a railway truck.
Bram Stoker, Dracula
I saw that one enquiry only gave occasion to another, that book referred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed.
Samuel Johnson, Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language
Thus it happens, that in things difficult there is danger from ignorance, and in things easy from confidence; the mind, afraid of greatness, and disdainful of littleness, hastily withdraws herself from painful searches, and passes with scornful rapidity over tasks not adequate to her powers, sometimes too secure for caution, and again too anxious for vigorous effort; sometimes idle in a plain path, and sometimes distracted in labyrinths, and disspiated by different intentions.
Samuel Johnson, Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language