Truth Quotes
“If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor” is credited to Einstein and flagged as misattributed. The earliest attribution found is in Arthur Koestler’s The Yogi and the Commissar (1945). It appears to be a rewording of something Einstein did write: in the preface to Relativity (1916) he says he followed the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann’s rule that matters of elegance should be left to the tailor and the cobbler. So the idea is Boltzmann’s, and Einstein credited it to him. The version people repeat came later.
Elsewhere on the page, Ulysses S. Grant, in his Personal Memoirs (1885), notes that wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true. Pope John Paul II, in Fides et Ratio (1998), writes that every truth presents itself as universal, even when it is not the whole truth.
Truth makes on the ocean of nature no one track of light—every eye looking on finds its own.
A man who couldn’t see truth when it tried to shoot him wouldn’t live long, and didn’t deserve to.
When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.
The advent of truth, like the dawn of day, agitates the elements, while it disperses the gloom.
We must never throw away a bushel of truth because it happens to contain a few grains of chaff.
Truth does not consist in minute accuracy of detail; but in conveying a right impression.