A Quote by George Eliot

Wise books For half the truths they hold are honored tombs.

George Eliot

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Books Half Hold Honored Tombs Truths Wise

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George Eliot
British - Novelist
November 22, 1819 - December 22, 1880

Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world.

Russell Jacoby

The Adlerians, in the name of "individual psychology," take the side of society against the individual. ... Adler's later thought succumbs to the worst of his earlier banalization. It is conventional, practical, and moralistic. "Our science ... is based on common sense." Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world.

Alfred Adler

We can die by it, if not live by love, And if unfit for tombs and hearse Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; And if no peace of chronicle we prove, We'll build in sonnet pretty rooms; As well a well wrought urne becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs.

John Donne

There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.

Alfred North Whitehead

Both in verse and in prose [Karl] Shapiro loves, partly out of indignation and partly out of sheer mischievousness, to tell the naked truths or half-truths or quarter-truths that will make anybody's hair stand on end; he is always crying: "But he hasn't any clothes on!" about an emperor who is half the time surprisingly well-dressed.

Randall Jarrell

For books [Charles Darwin] had no respect, but merely considered them as tools to be worked with. ... he would cut a heavy book in half, to make it more convenient to hold. He used to boast that he had made Lyell publish the second edition of one of his books in two volumes, instead of in one, by telling him how ho had been obliged to cut it in half. ... his library was not ornamental, but was striking from being so evidently a working collection of books.

Francis Darwin

Every president to hold office has espoused some version of Americanism - the truths that we hold self-evident, even when those truths are not always in evidence. But for all their grand rhetoric and mostly good deeds, none was able to seal the deal on the trifecta of equality, plurality and socioeconomic ascendancy. Obama has.

John Ridley

The ancient sages never put their teachings in a systematic form. They spoke in paradoxes, for they were afraid of uttering half-truths. They began by talking like fools and ended by making their hearers wise.

Okakura Kakuzo

Partial truths or half-truths are often more insidious than total falsehoods.

Samuel P. Huntington

On the eve of the election last month my wife Judith and I were driving home late in the afternoon and turned on the radio for the traffic and weather. What we instantly got was a freak show of political pornography: lies, distortions, and half-truths - half-truths being perhaps the blackest of all lies. They paraded before us as informed opinion.

Bill Moyers

There are no whole truths: All truths are half-truths.

Alfred North Whitehead

Fools and wise men are equally harmless. It is the half-fools and half-wise that are dangerous.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We waste half our strength in a useless regretting; We sit by old tombs in the dark too long.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

Karl Kraus

It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.

H. L. Mencken

Half-truths are like half a brick - they can be thrown farther.

Hyman Rickover

A Quote by George Eliot

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