Truth

No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies.
Mark Twain

It is hard to believe that someone is telling the truth when you are quite sure that if you were in his place you would lie.

Truth rises above mere consideration of good and evil and becomes something more than the sum of its parts.

If a thousand old beliefs were ruined in our march to truth we must still march on.

(Stopford Brooke)

Truth is absolute. The fact that everyone once believed that the world is flat didn't succeed in unrounding it by a single millimeter. If five billion people are making a mistake, it's still a mistake.

It is twice as hard to crush a half-truth as a whole lie.

Austin O'Malley

Truth is never pure, and rarely simple.

Oscar Wilde--The Importance of Being Earnest Act i

The thing you tell people when you just can't think of anything else.

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Oscar Wilde

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in posession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of someone or other of their daughters.

To a man of a mathematical turn of mind – to a student and lover of the exact sciences these inaccuracies of expression – this inability to understand exactly how things are must be a constant source of annoyance; and to one who, like myself, writes this turn of mind to an ardent love of truth, for its own sake – the reflection that the English language does not enable us to speak the truth with exactness (hello, mr. president!), is peculiarly painful.
John Phoenix, A New System of English Grammar, 1854.

When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.
Bismarck