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.