A Quote by Letitia Elizabeth Landon
It is said that ridicule is the test of truth: it is never applied, but when we wish to deceive ourselves.
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It is said that ridicule is the test of truth; but it is never applied except when we wish to deceive ourselves - when if we cannot exclude the light, we would fain draw the curtain before it. The sneer springs out of the wish to deny; and wretched must that state of mind be, that wishes to take refuge in doubt.
It is commonly said that ridicule is the best test of truth; for that it will not stick where it is not just. I deny it. A truth learned in a certain light, and attacked in certain words, by men of wit and humor, may, and often doth, become ridiculous, at least so far, that the truth is only remembered and repeated for the sake of the ridicule.
Reason is the test of ridicule, not ridicule the test of truth.
Ridicule is the best test of truth.
And took for truth the test of ridicule.
We deceive ourselves when giving respect to the person for whom we have surrendered ourselves, when we respectively expect them to be as we would wish them to be.
But though every created thing is, in this sense, a mystery, the word mystery cannot be applied to moral truth, any more than obscurity can be applied to light. ... Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion. Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself.
The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
We must trust to nothing but facts: These are presented to us by Nature, and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.
We must trust to nothing but facts: these are presented to us by nature and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.
If we judge our lives by what we know or by what we say, we can easily deceive ourselves into thinking that we are something we are not; it is wiser to evaluate ourselves by the amount of truth we actually live. This is very humbling.
We have great power to see the truth when the truth is all we wish to see; but what is easier than to credit what we desire? and can a man deceive anyone so easily as himself?
Ridicule may be the evidence of with or bitterness and may gratify a little mind, or an ungenerous temper, but it is no test of reason or truth.
We learn to deceive ourselves while we are trying to deceive others.
We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that "ridicule is the test of truth."
We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.
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