An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it's beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth... Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them.

One may sometimes tell a lie, but the grimace that accompanies it tells the truth.

Unless one always speaks the truth, one cannot find God Who is the soul of truth.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

Of course I do not regret the Bond days, I regret that sadly heroes in general are depicted with guns in their hands, and to tell the truth I have always hated guns and what they represent.

In everything truth surpasses the imitation and copy.

I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.

Truth is what works.

For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

Imagination is the wide-open eye which leads us always to see truth more vividly.

Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.

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.

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.

For though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honor the truth first.

When you look at yourself in a mirror, do you like what you see, or do you judge your body and use the word to tell yourself lies? If you believe that you are not attractive enough, then you believe a lie, and you are using the word against yourself, against the truth.

Where all is but dream, reasoning and arguments are of no use, truth and knowledge nothing.

We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe, having surveyed a few boxes full of letters, diaries, bank statements and photographs, that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life.

All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.

A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.