"Half-truth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the same breath with those who have preceded them, and have left to their degenerate successors a brilliant but unavailing example of youthful conduct. These diatribes may or may not be founded to some extent in truth. At the best, however, their truth is only a half-truth. So long as the world endures, it is probable that young men will have a large allowance of follies, of affectations, of extravagances, and the young men of to-day are certainly not without them. But, in the main, though the task of comparison ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 1, 1890 • Various
... living, that truth which teaches him that life is a task and a duty, and that his true health and soundness and value will depend upon the energy with which he makes the world and his own body with its selfish desires subservient to unselfish ideals. If you mean by the truth that half-truth of man as a sexual creature of flesh and nerves, the child to whom you offer it will be led to ever new questions, and if you go on answering them truthfully as the new fashion suggests, your reservoir will soon be ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... type of mind," I naturally did not argue, but suffered myself to accept his half-truth for the whole—temporarily. I checked him from time to time merely lest he should go too fast for me to follow what seemed a very ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... that the old canons of thought and conduct should be reconsidered. The time comes in the history of all half-truths when they form the great obstacles to the pursuit of truth. But this should not prevent us from recognising the value of the half-truth as a guide to those who first discover it; nor should we fall into the error, common to all reformers, of supposing that they comprehend the whole when they assert the importance of the neglected half. Erasmus had reason ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... of the tiresome half-truth that art is unmoral, the arts require a certain considerable number of moral qualities, and more especially all the arts require courage. The art of drawing, for example, requires even a kind of physical courage. Anyone who has tried to draw a straight line and failed knows that he fails chiefly ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... true, and the truth or half-truth of the statement only renders your case the blacker, O Alpha! Risks are an inevitable part of life. They are part of the fine savour and burden of life, and without the sense of them life is flat and tasteless. And yet you feigned to your women that risk was eliminated from ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... this is a half-truth, and dangerous accordingly. This army has been in existence for over forty years, and has done far more to keep the peace than any other one factor in Europe, except, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... of both Socialism and Anarchism is that all modern wars are due to capitalism, and would cease if capitalism were abolished. This view, to my mind, is only a half-truth; the half that is true is important, but the half that is untrue is perhaps equally important when a fundamental reconstruction of society ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... masterpiece. It would convince her she was the star of all the men, not mine particularly. That was true enough to appease conscience, a half-truth like Louis Laplante's words. So I would rob my foolish avowal of its personal element. A flush suffused the snowy white ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... conclusion that all clairvoyance is accompanied by the condition of sleep, or trance, and that no clairvoyant phenomena are possible unless this psychic condition is first obtained. But this is only a half-truth as we ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... best answer was to pose as people with a mission—certainly Congreve so posed—to reform the world with an exhibition of its follies. An amusing answer, no doubt, of which the absurdity is obvious! It does, however, contain a half-truth. The idea of The Way of the World's reforming adulterers—observe the quotation from Horace on the title-page—is a little delicious; yet the exhibition in a ludicrous light of the thing satirised is surely an end ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... say? No. When you say 'the world is round,' do you mean what you say? No. It is true, but you don't mean it. Now, sometimes a man like your brother really finds a thing he does mean. It may be only a half-truth, quarter-truth, tenth-truth; but then he says more than he means—from sheer ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... a currency in spite of being wholly false upon the face of them for the sake of a half-truth upon another subject which is accidentally combined with the error, one of the grossest and broadest conveys the monstrous proposition that it is easy to tell the truth and hard to tell a lie. I wish heartily ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a half-truth, the element of truth it contains is large enough to make us pause. Put yourself through a good old Presbyterian soul-searching self-examination, and if reading-from-thought-laziness is one of your sins, confess it. No one can ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... non fit," is just as applicable to lawyers and mechanics and engineers as to poets. More failures have been caused by the old idea that a man may make himself what he will, than by any single half-truth that has crept into our common speech and belief. A man may make himself what he will within the limitations ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... whole substance of your magazine articles has been nothing but half-truths, and a half-truth is worse than a lie. You know that it is to gratify your personal spite, and not to help the general public, that you have engaged in your frenzied writings. The public is wiser than you think, although your conceit has blinded you to ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... half-truth. Kami says, when he puts his head on one side,— so, 'Il y a du sentiment, mais il n'y a pas de parti pris.'" He rolled the r threateningly, as ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... martyrdom without being discovered; and had he in the course of examination answered all questions truly, but not given the whole truth, the most important truth, that he was the wrong person, he would have come very near to telling a lie, for a half-truth is often a falsehood. And his defence must have been the justa causa, viz. either that he might in charity or for religion's sake save a priest, or again that the judge had no right to ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... de Longuemare. I am in truth a Regular; but not a Capuchin, as those women would have it. There is the widest difference; I am a monk of the Order of the Barnabites, which has given Doctors and Saints without number to the Church. It is only a half-truth to refer its origin to St. Charles Borromeo; we must account as the true founder the Apostle St. Paul, whose cipher it bears on its arms. I have been compelled to quit my cloister, now headquarters of the Section du Pont-Neuf, and adopt ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... of the value of private property is like the "illusion of dead matter." It is a half-truth projected by the power of malice. The inherent unreality of the illusion of the value of private property can be proved by the simplest examination of the facts. The illusion draws its strength from a false appeal to the genuine ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... great half-truth overcame the other great half-truth. The Christian Infinite, reached by a process of abnegation, a process of being absorbed, dissolved, diffused into the great Not-Self, supplanted the old pagan Infinite, wherein the self like a root threw ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence |
