Truthfulness Quotes (page 108)
If I tell you that Mrs. Robbins had bad teeth and looked like a horse, you will laugh at me as a clich-monger; yet it is the truth. I can do nothing with the teeth; but let me tell you that she looked like a French horse, a dark, Mediterranean, market-type horse that has all its life begrudged to the poor the adhesive-tape on a torn five-franc note - that has tiptoed (to save its shoes) for centuries along that razor-edge where Greed and Caution meet.
Randall Jarrell
He had two lives: one, open, and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And though some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people.
Anton Chekhov
Rules?" said Roark. "Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own...
Ayn Rand
When we stop believing in gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things as miracles, but if there were and so tomorrow we woke up to find no more believers on earth, no more devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, why then, sure the beauty of the stories would be a thing we could focus on because they wouldn't be dangerous any more, they would become capable of compelling the only belief that leads to truth, that is, the willing, disbelieving of...
Salman Rushdie
Yes, this is the logic of the Nation. And itwill never heed the voice of truth and goodness. It will go on in its ring-dance of moral corruption, linking steel unto steel, and machine untomachine; trampling under its tread all the sweetflowers of simple faith and the living ideals ofman.
Rabindranath Tagore
Who will believe my verse in time to come,
If it were fill'd with your most high deserts?
Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say 'This poet lies:
Such heavenly touches ne'er touch'd earthly faces.'
So should my papers yellow'd with their age
Be scorn'd like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be term'd a...
William Shakespeare