Taste is the feminine of genius.
EDWARD FITZGERALD
Truffles are globose, whatever that is – brown, black, sandy, and warty. The taste of truffles has been likened variously to that of strawberries, garlic, flannel, and unclassified.
WILL CUPPY
Those … from whom Nature has withheld the legacy of taste have long faces, and long eyes and noses; whatever their height there is something elongated in their proportions. Their hair is dark and unglossy, and they are never plump; it was they who invented trousers.
JEAN-ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN The original gastronome, his endlessly quotable The Physiology of Taste was written as he was dying in 1825. It is an epicurean hymn to food and the virtues of a discriminating palate, stuffed with anecdotes, aphorisms and culinary one-liners. The classic translation into English by M. F. K. Fisher in 1949 brought him a huge new audience in the English-speaking world.
Taste is not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is ‘What do you like?’ Tell me what you like, I’ll tell you what you are.
JOHN RUSKIN
Tea is not like vodka, which you can drink a lot of.
RUSSIAN SAYING
Where there’s tea there’s hope.
SIR ARTHUR WING PINERO
I always fear that creation will expire before teatime.
SYDNEY SMITH
We had a kettle; we let it leak:
Our not repairing made it worse.
We haven’t had any tea for a week …
The bottom is out of the Universe.
RUDYARD KIPLING
If a man has no tea in him, he is incapable of understanding truth and beauty.
JAPANESE PROVERB
The perfect temperature for tea is two degrees hotter than just right.
TERRI GUILLEMETS Pen-name for the creator of ‘The Quote Garden’ website (guillemets are angled quotation marks: << >>).
Nobody can teach you how to make the perfect cup of tea. It just happens over time. Wearing cashmere helps, of course.
JILL DUPLEIX
Tea! Thou soft, thou sober, sage, and venerable liquid, thou innocent pretence for bringing the wicked of both sexes together in a morning; thou female tongue-running, smile-smoothing, heart-opening, wink-tipping cordial, to whose glorious insipidity I owe the happiest moment of my life, let me fall prostrate thus, and adore thee.
COLLEY CIBBER
The best quality tea must have creases like the leathern boot of Tartar horsemen, curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock, unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine, gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr, and be wet and soft like a fine earth newly swept by rain.
LU YU Born in what is now Hubei province in central China, Lu Yu, a former clown, became known as the Sage of Tea for his book, The Classic of Tea, written between ad 760 and 780. As well being the first book written on tea, combining practical hints on growing and preparation, it is also a semi-religious text meditation which sees the beverage as a reflection of the essential harmony of the Universe.
The hot water is to remain upon it no longer than whiles you can say the Miserere Psalm very leisurely.
SIR KENELM DIGBY The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Opened (1603) included this recipe for tea with eggs. (Saying Psalm 50 aloud lasts two and a half to three minutes.)
Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats.
J. B. PRIESTLEY
Its proper use is to amuse the idle, and relax the studious, and dilute the full meals of those who cannot use exercise, and will not use abstinence.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
The old philosopher is still among us in the brown coat with the metal buttons and the shirt which ought to be at the wash, blinking, puffing, rolling his head, drumming with his fingers, tearing his meat like a tiger, and swallowing his tea in oceans.
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULEY
I suppose no person ever enjoyed with more relish the infusion of that fragrant leaf than Johnson.
JAMES BOSWELL
Tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities will always be the favorite beverage of the intellectual.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? – how did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea!
SYDNEY SMITH
Indeed, Madame, your ladyship is very sparing of your tea; I protest the last I took was no more than water bewitched.
JONATHAN SWIFT
Why do they always put mud into coffee on board steamers? Why does the tea generally taste of boiled boots?
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone.
HILAIRE BELLOC
Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves – slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.
THICH NAT HAHN Founder in 1966 of the Order of Interbeing, and one of the most influential Buddhist teachers to operate in the West, he evolved the practice of ‘Engaged Buddhism’, which combines meditation and political action (all washed down with a nice cup of tea).
… it must be evident to every one that the practice of tea drinking must render the frame feeble, and unfit to encounter hard labour or severe weather … Hence succeeds a softness, an effeminacy, a seeking for the fireside, a lurking in the bed, and, in short, all the characteristics of idleness.
WILLIAM COBBETT
Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.
OKAKURA KAKUZO
To be good is noble, but to teach others how to be good is nobler – and less trouble.
MARK TWAIN
The test of a good teacher is not how many questions he can ask his pupils that they will answer readily, but how many questions he inspires them to ask him which he finds it hard to answer.
ALICE WELLINGTON ROLLINS Mostly forgotten, she was a collector of aphorisms who lived in the elegant literary suburb of Bronxville. Uncle Tom’s Tenement (1888) painted a shocking portrait of the poverty and hardship of life in New York, without the ‘impracticable vaporing of Socialism’.
Any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest way to any child at any stage of development.
JEROME BRUNER
Teaching is the process by which the notes of the professor become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either.
ANONYMOUS Although often attributed to Woody Allen.
I taught Bill and Hillary Clinton when they were at Yale. Let me rephrase that. Bill and Hillary Clinton were in the room when I was teaching at Yale.
JUDGE ROBERT H. BORK
We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master.
MARIA MONTESSORI
A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself.
WALTER BAGEHOT
To teach is to learn twice.
JOSEPH JOUBERT
I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
Math was always my bad subject. I couldn’t convince my teachers that many of my answers were meant ironically.
CALVIN TRILLIN
A poor surgeon hurts one person at a time. A poor teacher hurts 130.
ERNEST BOYER
One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
CARL JUNG
Technology is the knack of arranging the world so that we don’t have to experience it.
MAX FRISCH
Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.
ERIC HOFFER
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
CARL SAGAN
For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.
ALICE KAHN
It is a mistake to believe that any technological innovation has a one-sided effect. Every technology is both a burden and a blessing: neither either-or, but this-and-that.
NEIL POSTMAN
The technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages.
FREEMAN DYSON
The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to stop the man touching the equipment.
WARREN BENNIS Best known for inventing leadership studies as a major discipline and as a pioneer of the flatter, less hierarchical organisation.
You have put something in my room which will never let me forget how strange is this world – and how unknown.
RAMSAY MACDONALD To John Logie Baird after a demonstration of television at 10 Downing Street in 1930.
The television set in American homes is like the toaster. You press a button and the same thing pops out almost every time.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK
Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.
BILL HICKS
In Russia, we had only two channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: ‘Turn back at once to Channel One.’
YAKOV SMIRNOFF
Television is the first truly democratic culture – the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.
CLIVE BARNES
I know exactly what the people want, and I’m damned if I’m going to give it to them.
LORD REITH
Dealing with network executives is like being nibbled to death by ducks.
ERIC SEVAREID Originally a war correspondent working for the legendary Ed Murrow of CBS, he became a roving reporter and master interviewer, at one point finding himself on the wrong end of McCarthy’s anti-commnist witch-hunt. His brief ‘thinkpieces’ on Walter Cronkite’s CBS evening news broadcasts led to his nickname, the ‘Grey Eminence’.
We’ve formed many a theory and belief, but as we look about the human world, it is clear that nobody actually knows what’s going on. Yet claims to Truth are being made at every hand, including the claim that there is no Truth.
STEVE HAGEN
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
JAN L. A. VAN DE SNEPSCHEUT
A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
There are many examples of old, incorrect theories that stubbornly persisted, sustained only by the prestige of foolish but well-connected scientists. Many of these theories have been killed off only when some decisive experiment exposed their incorrectness. Thus the yeoman work in any science, and especially physics, is done by the experimentalist, who must keep the theoreticians honest.
MICHIO KAKU
It is also a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in the observational results that are put forward until they are confirmed by theory.
SIR ARTHUR EDDINGTON
There are only forty people in the world, and five of them are hamburgers.
CAPTAIN BEEFHEART
That theory is worthless. It isn’t even wrong.
WOLFGANG PAULI Famous perfectionist, known by his colleagues as ‘the conscience of physics’ because of his rigour, this famous remark was prompted by a student paper. ‘Not even wrong’ is a very succinct statement of the key principle of ‘falsifiability’, which many consider to be the essential precondition of scientific truth (i.e., if you can’t test a theory, you can’t claim it as true).
The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Sometimes when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things, I am tempted to think there are no little things.
BRUCE BARTON Ad man (he co-founded BBDO), Republican congressman, implacable opponent of the New Deal and best-selling self-help author, credited with naming both General Motors and General Electric.
The world is made up of facts, not things.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
There are no things, only processes.
DAVID BOHM
I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.
HENRI MATISSE
I do not believe in things. I believe only in their relationships.
GEORGES BRAQUE
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
A. N. WHITEHEAD
I think people have had too much to think and ought to flex their magic muscles.
CAPTAIN BEEFHEART
Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.
RAY BRADBURY
You don’t think thoughts any more than you hear hearing or smell smelling.
ALAN WATTS
The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.
WILL DURANT
Isn’t it strange that we talk least about the things we think about most?
CHARLES A. LINDBERGH
The highest stage in moral culture at which we can arrive is when we recognise that we ought to control our thoughts.
CHARLES DARWIN
Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.
HENRI POINCARÉ
Thinking is the crest of deep physical turbulence rushing from a point of original unity at the beginning of the universe. It is a product of the same motility and physical processes that created galaxies. When one thinks clearly about thinking, one is present at the first instant of time.
EDGAR ALLAN POE His prose poem ‘Eureka’ (1848) first expressed the idea that all matter had once been concentrated into a single particle which then expanded to fill space, a theory not accepted by science until 1931. ‘Eureka’ goes on to predict the general theory of relativity, parallel universes and the structure of the atom. Pretty good going for a poem that doesn’t rhyme.
It has been said that we have approximately 187,000 thoughts a day, 98 per cent of which we had the day before, and the day before that.
ARIEL AND SHYA KANE
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
WILLIAM JAMES
Intellectual blemishes, like facial ones, grow more prominent with age.
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Our thinking should have a vigorous fragrance, like a wheat field on a summer’s night.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them.
A. N. WHITEHEAD
We are no more responsible for the evil thoughts which pass through our minds, than a scarecrow for the birds which fly over the seed-plot he has to guard; the sole responsibility in each case is to prevent them from settling.
JOHN CHURTON COLLINS Edwardian who had an eye for the choice epigram. He died – of accidental causes – in a ditch.
Our most important thoughts are those which contradict our emotions.
PAUL VALÉRY
We are all capable of evil thoughts, but only very rarely evil deeds: we can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.
CESARE PAVESE
People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.
HELEN KELLER
I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.
SAINT AUGUSTINE
The past is solid, the future is liquid.
J. L. AUBERT Philosophically minded distinctive lead singer of Téléphone, the greatest French group of the late seventies and early eighties (according to their official website).
There are many different opinions concerning the essence of time.
BLAISE PASCAL
It’s a question of whether we’re going to go forward into the future or past to the back.
DAN QUAYLE
So little time, so little to do.
OSCAR LEVANT
Eat the present moment and break the dish.
EGYPTIAN PROVERB
Time is a great teacher. Unfortunately, it kills all its pupils.
HECTOR BERLIOZ
What is time and what is its nature? Is it a being? Is it a non-being? Does it imply space? Does it insist on change? And what is its origin?
ARISTOTLE
Only in the present do things happen.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
It is common error to infer that things which are consecutive in order of time have necessarily the relation of cause and effect.
JACOB BIGELOW
Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money but you can’t get more time.
JIM ROHN
Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
FRANK ZAPPA
Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
WILL DURANT
Who cannot give an account to himself of 3,000 years may remain in darkness and inexperience and live but from day to day.
GOETHE
I’m a visionary; I’m ahead of my time. Trouble is, I’m only about an hour and a half ahead.
GEORGE CARLIN
Half our time is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
WILL ROGERS
Love a girl with all your heart and kiss her on the mouth: then time will stop, and space will cease to exist.
ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER Nobel laureate in 1933, friend to Einstein and inventor of the most famous modern thought experiment, which demonstrated the strange ness of quantum processes inside the atom by comparing them to a cat inside a box, which, theoretically, could be both dead and alive simultaneously. His personal life was unconventional, too: he lived openly with two women for most of his adult life.
What we perceive as the present is nothing but the recent past tinged with a vivid fringe of anticipation.
A. N. WHITEHEAD
The world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time. There was no time before the world.
SAINT AUGUSTINE
People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
There exists only the present instant … a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.
MEISTER ECKHART
Time is not a road – it is a room.
JOHN FOWLES
Time is the meaning of life.
PAUL CLAUDEL
Now mark what I say. The Right Eye looketh forward in thee into Eternity. The Left Eye looketh backward into Time. If thou now sufferest thyself to be always looking into Nature and the Things of Time, it will be impossible for thee ever to arrive at the Unity which thou wishest for.
JAKOB BÖHME
For eternally and always there is only one now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.
ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER
I went to a restaurant that serves ‘breakfast at any time’. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.
STEVEN WRIGHT
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Time is that which man is always trying to kill, but which ends in killing him.
HERBERT SPENCER
The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
The big artist … keeps an eye on nature and steals her tools.
THOMAS EAKINS
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
Aberdeen, a lazy town.
ROBERT BURNS
Bologna is celebrated for producing popes, painters, and sausage.
LORD BYRON
I wish I could think of just one nice thing I could tell you about Hull. Oh yes … it’s very nice and flat for cycling.
PHILIP LARKIN
Ipswich isn’t twinned with anywhere, but it does have a suicide pact with Grimsby.
KEN DODD
Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs at one go.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable.
MARK TWAIN
My cousin François and I are in perfect accord. He wants Milan, and so do I.
CHARLES V, HOLY ROMAN EMPEROR François I, King of France, formed an alliance with the Ottoman Turks against Charles to try and regain his former possessions in Italy in 1536.
This day show that you are Boswell, a true soldier. Take your post. Shake off sloth and spleen, and just proceed. Nobody knows your conflicts. Be fixed as a Christian, and shun vice. Go not to Amsterdam.
JAMES BOSWELL
New York is a gothic Roquefort. San Francisco reminds me of a romanesque Camembert.
SALVADOR DALÍ
If Amsterdam or Leningrad vie for the title of Venice of the North, then Venice – what compliment is high enough? Venice, with all her civilisation and ancient beauty, Venice with her addiction to curious aquatic means of transport, yes, my friends, Venice is the Henley of the South.
BORIS JOHNSON
Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
KURT VONNEGUT
Travel makes a wise man better but a fool worse.
THOMAS FULLER
If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER One of the leaders of the Christian resistance to the Nazis. In 1943 he was arrested for participating in an intelligence plot to kill Hitler. He was tortured and brutally executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp in April 1945, just a fortnight before it was liberated.
Modern travelling is not travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.
JOHN RUSKIN
Sooner or later we must realize there is no station, no one place to arrive at once and for all. The true joy of life is the trip.
ROBERT J. HASTINGS
Do not require a description of the countries to which you sail.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
No travel writer I have ever known has written about the importance of parking.
J. G. BALLARD
The further one travels, the less one knows.
LAOZI (LAO-TZU)
A sure cure for seasickness is to sit under a tree.
SPIKE MILLIGAN
Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.
ARTHUR MILLER
Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
JEAN GENET
A woman’s best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.
LAWRENCE DURRELL
All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.
REBECCA WEST
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
E. M. FORSTER
In politics, it is necessary either to betray one’s country or the electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate.
GENERAL DE GAULLE
Corporations cannot commit treason, or be outlawed or excommunicated, for they have no souls.
EDWARD COKE
The best way to keep your friends is not to give them away.
WILSON MIZNER As well as writing, he was a restaurateur, thief, boxing promoter, opium addict and master of the witty one-liner. He is the original source for the old saw: ‘Be nice to people on the way up because you’ll meet the same people on the way down.’
Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.
JOHN MUIR
For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold or silver.
MARTIN LUTHER
As the poet said, ‘Only God can make a tree’ – probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.
WOODY ALLEN
Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.
KAHLIL GIBRAN Lebanese but he grew up in Boston. His 1923 classic of spiritual verse, The Prophet, became a counterculture sensation in the 1960s. It was the second best-selling book of the twentieth century in America, narrowly beaten by the Bible.
Trees are much like human beings and enjoy each other’s company. Only a few love to be alone.
JENS JENSEN
Trees cause more pollution than automobiles.
RONALD REAGAN
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. As a man is, so he sees.
WILLIAM BLAKE
The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is now.
CHINESE PROVERB
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.
THORTON WILDER
When eating a fruit, think of the person who planted the tree.
VIETNAMESE PROVERB
The axe forgets what the tree remembers.
AMERICAN PROVERB
No tree falls on the first stroke.
GERMAN PROVERB
When a tree is falling, everyone cries, down with it!
ITALIAN PROVERB
When the big tree falls, the goat eats its leaves.
AFRICAN PROVERB
From a fallen tree, all make kindling.
SPANISH PROVERB
When the axe came into the forest the trees all said, ‘Well, at least the handle is one of us.’
TURKISH PROVERB
In a moment the ashes are made, but the forest is a long time growing.
SENECA
Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names streets after them.
BILL VAUGHAN
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
WILLA CATHER
Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.
CARL JUNG
If you will call your troubles experiences, and remember that every experience develops some latent force within you, you will grow vigorous and happy, however adverse your circumstances may seem to be.
JOHN R. MILLER Appointed senior adviser to the State Department on human trafficking in 2003, and until 2007, US Ambassador-at-large on the issue of modern slavery.
She would take any amount of trouble to avoid trouble.
WILLA CATHER
If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn’t pass it around. Wouldn’t be doing anybody a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don’t say embrace trouble. That’s as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say, meet it as a friend, for you’ll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
That’s what stoicism is: the avoidance of bother when bother’s the other option.
JONATHAN MEADES
Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him and to let him know that you trust him.
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Born into slavery, the first African American invited into the White House and the leading campaigner for civil rights and education for Black Americans in the early twentieth century. His best-selling autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), is still widely taught and read.
Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
Never trust a man who speaks well of everybody.
JOHN CHURTON COLLINS
Never trust a man who, when left alone in a room with a tea-cosy, doesn’t try it on.
BILLY CONNOLLY
Nothing is too wonderful to be true.
MICHAEL FARADAY
The Truth shall make you free.
JOHN 8: 32
For ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.
MOTTO OF THE CIA The full verse from John 8:31–2 is: ‘If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’ In context, Jesus was trying to explain why he wasn’t going to lead a revolution to ‘free’ the Jews from the Roman yoke. His freedom was an inner state of grace, not something most of us associate with the CIA.
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
There is nothing more likely to drive a man mad than an obstinate, constitutional preference for the true to the agreeable.
FREIDRICH NIETZSCHE
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
ANAÏS NIN
Truth is for the minority.
BALTASAR GRACIÁN Author of The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1637), a witty and influ en tial collection of maxims, praised by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Churchill. When re-released in 1992, it spent several weeks on the US non-fiction best-seller lists.
Never tell the truth to those unworthy of it.
MARK TWAIN
There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.
A. N. WHITEHEAD
Truth is eternal, knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.
MADELEINE L’ENGLE
One must explore deep and believe the incredible to find the new particles of truth floating in an ocean of insignificance.
JOSEPH CONRAD
As scarce as the truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
JOSH BILLINGS
The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE His satirical portraits of his contemporaries, Caractères (1688), brought him, in his own words, ‘many readers and many enemies’. As a writer of pithy maxims, he is (almost) the equal of his contemporary, La Rochefoucauld.
In war, Truth is the first casualty.
AESCHYLUS
Who ever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
No man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatsoever.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.
WILL DURANT
The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.
ARISTOTLE
Truth is the daughter of search.
ARABIC PROVERB
Truth is a woman. One must not use force with her.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
The smallest atom of truth represents some man’s bitter toil and agony. For every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker’s grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.
H. L. MENCKEN
No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth.
FRANCIS BACON
None attains to the Degree of Truth until a thousand honest people have testified that he is a heretic.
JUNAID OF BAGHDAD Sufi and former wrestler. Sufism is based on three principles: islam (submission – of the non-wrestling kind), iman (faith) and ishan (to act ‘beautifully’ through awareness of God).
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of men of old; seek what they sought.
BASHO
There is nothing so powerful as truth – and often nothing so strange.
DANIEL WEBSTER
Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.
MARK TWAIN
There is no a priori reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered, will necessarily prove interesting.
ISAIAH BERLIN
Give me fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.
VILFREDO PARETO
To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practised, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behaviour of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know.
GEORGE SPENCER BROWN
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.
FRANCIS BACON
The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.
RÉMY DE GOURMONT
Follow not truth too near the heels, lest it dash out thy teeth.
GEORGE HERBERT