Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

It is not the truth which a man possesses, or believes he possesses, but the earnest effort which he puts forth to reach the truth, which constitutes the worth of a man. For it is not by the possession, by the search after truth that he enlarges his power, wherein alone consists his ever-increasing perfection. Possession makes one content, indolent, proud.

Character | Effort | Man | Perfection | Power | Search | Truth | Worth |

Israel Salanter Lipkin

Sincerity makes an untruth seem like a truth, while insincerity makes a truth seem like an untruth.

Character | Insincerity | Sincerity | Truth |

Walter Lippmann

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative in to an absolute.

Absolute | Character | People | Truth |

Gaius Cassius Longinus

There are three ways whereby a man may become great: being loyal, telling the truth and not thinking idle thoughts.

Character | Man | Thinking | Truth |

Elias L. Magoon

Half a fact is a whole falsehood. He who gives the truth a false coloring by his false manner of telling it, is the worst of liars.

Character | Falsehood | Truth |

Walter Lippmann

We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.

Change | Character | Truth | Will | Truths |

Johann Kaspar Lavater

Obstinacy is the strength of the weak. Firmness founded upon principle, upon the truth and right, order and law, duty and generosity, is the obstinacy of sages.

Character | Duty | Firmness | Generosity | Law | Order | Right | Strength | Truth |

Maurice Maeterlinck, fully Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck

But it is not enough to possess a truth; it is essential that the truth should possess us.

Character | Enough | Truth |

James Russell Lowell

Enthusiasm begets enthusiasm, eloquence produces conviction for the moment; but it is only by truth to Nature and the everlasting institutions of mankind that those abiding influences are won that enlarge from generation to generation.

Character | Enthusiasm | Mankind | Nature | Truth |

Johann Kaspar Lavater

True worth is as inevitably discovered by the facial expression, as its opposite is sure to be clearly represented there. The human face is nature’s tablet, the truth is certainly written thereon.

Character | Nature | Truth | Worth |

John Locke

To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.

Character | Love | Perfection | Truth | World |

Thomas Merton

We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us.

Character | Truth |

Theodore T. Munger

The meaning, the value, the truth of life can be learned only by an actual performance of its duties, and truth can be learned and the soul saved in no other way.

Character | Life | Life | Meaning | Soul | Truth |

Francis William Newman

Truth is congenial to man. Moral truth is then most consummate when, like beauty, it commends itself without argument. The righteous not only does right, but loves to do right.

Argument | Beauty | Character | Man | Right | Truth |

William H. Masters

Science by itself has no moral dimension. But it does seek to establish truth. And upon this truth morality can be built.

Character | Morality | Science | Truth |

Nicomachus of Gerasa NULL

If we crave for the goal that is worthy and fitting for man, namely, happiness of life - and this is accomplished by philosophy alone and by nothing else, and philosophy, as I said, means for us desire for wisdom, and wisdom the science of truth in things, and of things some are properly so called, others merely share the name - it is reasonable and most necessary to distinguish and systematize the accidental qualities of things.

Character | Desire | Distinguish | Life | Life | Man | Means | Nothing | Philosophy | Qualities | Science | Truth | Wisdom | Happiness |

Maurice Nicoll

Man gains freedom only through the use of his highest faculties. Materialism makes him more and more a slave to the forces of the phenomenal world... Our present-day materialism points in this direction - that is, in the direction of the enslavement of man by mechanisation and by its direct results, by state organisations, uniformity, the sacrifice of independent intelligence, the sweeping away of individual differences, local customs, local diversity, and all the infinite branchings of humanity that enrich life... Man is made free by ‘truth’. The truth spoken here is equated with mind. This kind of truth begins with self-knowledge.

Character | Day | Diversity | Freedom | Humanity | Individual | Intelligence | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Materialism | Mind | Present | Sacrifice | Self | Self-knowledge | Truth | Uniformity | World |

H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

Character | Man | Truth |