A Quote by Richard Steele
When a man has no design but to speak plain truth, he may say a great deal in a very narrow compass.
Related Quotes
If people depend on me to be a man of truth, I have to prove again and again and again and again that I am a man of truth. It cannot be that on Monday I am a man of truth, on Tuesday I speak three-quarters truth, Wednesday I speak half-truth, on Thursday I speak one-quarter truth, on Friday I don't speak at all, and on Saturday I can't even think how to speak the truth.
Truth lies in a small compass! The Aristotelians say, all truth is contained in Aristotle, in one place or another. Galileo makes Simplicius say so, but shows the absurdity of that speech by answering all truth is contained in a lesser compass, namely, in the alphabet.
A man may say, "From now on I'm going to speak the truth." But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking.
Never disregard what your enemies say. They may be severe, they may be prejudiced, they may be determined to see only in one direction, but still in that direction see clearly. They do not speak all the truth, but they generally speak the truth from one point of view; so far as that goes, attend to them.
A man must first of all understand certain things. He has thousands of false ideas and false conceptions, chiefly about himself, and he must get rid of some of them before beginning to acquire anything new. Otherwise the new will be built on a wrong foundation and the result will be worse than before. To speak the truth is the most difficult thing in the world; one must study a great deal and for a long time in order to speak the truth. The wish alone is not enough. To speak the truth one must know what the truth is and what a lie is, and first of all in oneself. And this nobody wants to know.
Those Christians who are very strict in their observances, think a good deal more of the Sabbath than of man, a great deal more of the Bible than of the truth, and ten times more of their creed than of the will of God. Of course, if they heard anyone utter such words as I have just written, they would say he was and atheist.
We know that the gifts which men have do not come from the schools. If a man is a plain, literal, factual man, you can make a great deal more of him in his own line by education than without education, just as you can make a great deal more of a potato if you cultivate it than if you do not; but no cultivation in this world will ever make an apple out of a potato.
Grown-up people do very little and say a great deal.... Toddlers say very little and do a great deal.... With a toddler you cannot explain, you have to show. You cannot send, you have to take. You cannot control with words, you have to use your body.
Note that venerable proverb: Children and fools always speak the truth. The deduction is plain: adults and wise persons never speak it.
There's a great deal of stripping away; in early drafts, I may say the same thing two or three times, and each may be appropriate, but I try to pick the best and improve it. I work on sound a great deal, and I will change a word or two, revise punctuation and line breaks, looking for the sound I want.
I can see that "reap" and "deep," "prayers" and "bears," . . . do rhyme, and so I suppose it is a splendid effort, but if you had written it in plain prose, I could have understood it a great deal better and read it a great deal more easily.
I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.
A Foreign Secretaryand this applies also to a prospective Foreign Secretaryis always faced with this cruel dilemma. Nothing he can say can do very much good, and almost anything he may say may do a great deal of harm. Anything he says that is not obvious is dangerous; whatever is not trite is risky. He is forever poised between the cliche and the indiscretion.
This, more than anything else, is what I have never understood about your people. You can roll dice, and understand that the whole game may hinge on one turn of a die. You deal out cards, and say that all a man's fortune for the night may turn upon one hand. But a man's whole life, you sniff at, and say, what, this naught of a human, this fisherman, this carpenter, this thief, this cook, why, what can they do in the great wide world? And so you putter and sputter your lives away, like candles burning in a draft.
Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever; but, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure, that he may speak it the longer.
A Latin phrase says: De mortuis nil nisi bonum, Speak no ill of the dead. But it is better to say this way: Speak the truth of the living and speak the truth of the dead!
Related Authors
Alan Bennett Quotes
English
Dramatist
Alexandre Dumas Quotes
French
Dramatist
Anton Chekhov Quotes
Russian
Dramatist
David Mamet Quotes
American
Dramatist
Edward Albee Quotes
American
Dramatist
Eugene Ionesco Quotes
French
Dramatist
Friedrich Schiller Quotes
German
Dramatist
Harold Pinter Quotes
English
Dramatist
Jean Racine Quotes
French
Dramatist
John Heywood Quotes
English
Dramatist
Jules Renard Quotes
French
Dramatist
Lillian Hellman Quotes
American
Dramatist
Pierre Corneille Quotes
French
Dramatist
Tennessee Williams Quotes
American
Dramatist
Tom Stoppard Quotes
English
Dramatist
Zora Neale Hurston Quotes
American
Dramatist