One of the truest statements you will come across is this: Truth is vitally important. We either live by truth, or live by lies. There would be many millions of words written on the vital need for truth, and the importance of absolutes. Trying to get just some of them together in one brief article is a big ask, but it is worth a try.
These are simply a few of the many quotes I have collected on this topic over the years. Some of them have the source included. Most are penned by Christians, but not all. There is a mix of old and new here. And to be able to fit 70 quotes (by 53 authors) into a short article, I have mainly featured quite short quotes. I present them alphabetically by author.
“If the world is against truth, then I am against the world.” Athanasius of Alexandria
‘It is impossible to overestimate the importance of these three elements in the Christian life. Truth. Righteousness. Love. We need them all. Love without righteousness is immorality. Righteousness without doctrine is legalism. Doctrine without love is a bitter orthodoxy. All three of these elements must be present in the life of any true and growing Christian.’ James Montgomery Boice, The Epistles of John
“Dear friends, we must buy truth even if the price is ever so dear. Every parcel of truth is precious, as the filings of gold. We must either live it, or die for it.” Thomas Brooks
“A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God’s truth is attacked and yet would remain silent.” John Calvin
“If I am afraid to speak the truth lest I lose affection, or lest the one concerned should say, ‘You do not understand’, or because I fear to lose my reputation for kindness; if I put my own good name before the other’s highest good, then I know nothing of Calvary love.” Amy Carmichael
“We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.” G. K. Chesterton
“Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.” G. K. Chesterton
“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.” G. K. Chesterton
“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.” Winston Churchill
“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” Winston Churchill
“Without truth there is no love.” Jonathan Cahn
“Relatively few contemporary Christians are prepared to suffer for the faith, because the therapeutic society that has formed them denies the purpose of suffering in the first place, and the idea of bearing pain for the sake of truth seems ridiculous.” Rod Dreher, Live Not By Lies
“Truth is the agreement of our ideas with the ideas of God.” Jonathan Edwards
“We must have faith that truth is luminously powerful, so that if we bear witness to the truth about, say, marriage and the sanctity of human life—lovingly, civilly, but also passionately and with determination—and if we honor the truth in advancing our positions, then even many of our fellow citizens who now find themselves on the other side of these issues will come around.” Robert George, Conscience and Its Enemies
“If you tell any lie long enough, often enough, and loud enough, people will come to believe it.” Joseph Goebbels
“Since the truth may not be what we would prefer. It is revealing that so many people today express approval by saying, ‘I’m comfortable with that,’ and disapproval by saying, ‘I’m not comfortable with that.’ Comfort is important when it comes to furniture and headphones, but it is irrelevant when it comes to truth.” Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics
“Truth matters supremely because in the end, without truth there is no freedom. Truth, in fact, is not only essential to freedom; it is freedom, and the only way to a free life lies in becoming a person of truth and learning to live in truth. Living in truth is the secret of living free.” Os Guinness, Time for Truth
“As human beings we are by nature truth-seekers; as fallen human beings we are also by nature truth-twisters.” Os Guinness, Time for Truth
“As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has reminded us, just as a shout in the mountain can start an avalanche, so a word or stand for truth that does God’s work in God’s way in God’s time can have an incalculable effect.” Os Guinness, et. al., No God But God
“The temple of truth has never suffered so much from woodpeckers on the outside as from termites within.” Vance Havner
“Therefore, faithful Christian, seek the truth, listen to the truth, learn the truth, love the truth, tell the truth, defend the truth even to death.” Jan Hus
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” Aldous Huxley
“Falsehood and not truth has grown strong in the land.” Jeremiah in Jeremiah 9:3
“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Jesus in John 8:32
“I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.” John in 3 John 1:4
“Men have more need to know unwelcome truths than welcome truths; that is why the prophets more often mention unwelcome ones.” Peter Kreeft, Summa Philosophica
“At the heart of postmodernism lies a patent self-contradiction. It expects us to accept, as absolute truth, that there are no absolute truths.” John Lennox, Against the Flow
“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.” C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
“The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes.” C. S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. II
“The great difficulty is to get modern audiences to realize that you are preaching Christianity solely and simply because you happen to think it true; they always suppose you are preaching it because you like it or think it good for society or something of that sort.” C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics” in God in the Dock
“How many legs would a dog have if you called a tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” Abraham Lincoln.
“We cannot help it if the truth offends people, but we must always make sure that it is the truth that is offending them and not us.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones
“I would rather be divided by truth than united with error.” Martin Luther
“Peace if possible, truth at all costs.” Martin Luther
“Error does not become Truth because it is widely accepted; Truth does not become error, even when it stands alone!” John MacArthur
“The man who loves you the most is the one who tells you the most truth about yourself.” Robert Murray M’Cheyne
“Indeed, truth cannot be stated clearly at all without being set over against error. Thus a large part of the New Testament is polemic; the enunciation of evangelical truth was occasioned by the errors which had arisen in the churches.” J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism
“Controversy for the sake of controversy is a sin: controversy for the sake of truth is a Divine command.” Walter Martin
“It is not ‘unloving’ to tell the truth. It is not ‘divisive’ to point out error. It is not ‘an option’ to stand against evil, it is a divine command.” Walter Martin
“People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.” Malcolm Muggeridge
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” Flannery O’Connor
“The truth will set you free. But first it will make you miserable.” John Ortberg, Who Is This Man?
“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” George Orwell
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.” George Orwell
“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” George Orwell
“Truth is treason in an empire of lies.” George Orwell
“God loves to honor the needle of truth in a haystack of error.” J. I. Packer, Keep in Step With the Spirit
“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the Truth, we cannot know it.” Blaise Pascal
“They exchanged the truth about God for a lie.” Paul in Romans 1:25
“How fearful will be the doom of those who, from a determination to curry favour with men, deliberately withheld those portions of the truth most needed by their hearers.” A. W. Pink
“It is not love and it is not friendship if we fail to declare the whole counsel of God. It is better to be hated for telling the truth than to be loved for telling a lie… It is better to stand alone with the truth than to be wrong with a multitude.” Adrian Rogers
“Never let us be guilty of sacrificing any portion of truth on the altar of peace.” J. C. Ryle
“Christianity is not just a series of truths but Truth – Truth about all of reality.” Francis Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto
“Truth carries with it confrontation. Truth demands confrontation; loving confrontation, but confrontation nonetheless.” Francis Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster
“A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.” Roger Scruton
“What the world needs most is a voice that courageously speaks the truth, not when the world is right, but a voice that speaks the truth when the world is wrong.” Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
“One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn, quoting an old Russian proverb
“Truth – empirical facts or compelling logic – is an enemy of dogmas, and one dealt with as an enemy by small but growing number of intellectuals.” Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society
“Jesus’ life was a storm of controversy. The apostles, like the prophets before them, could hardly go a day without controversy. Paul said that he debated daily in the marketplace. To avoid controversy is to avoid Christ. We can have peace, but it is a servile and carnal peace where truth is slain in the streets.” R. C. Sproul
“Truth seldom goes without a scratched face, for men love her not.” Charles Spurgeon
“Long ago I ceased to count heads. Truth is usually in the minority in this evil world.” Charles Spurgeon
“To pursue union at the expense of truth is treason to the Lord Jesus Christ.” Charles Spurgeon
“He who does not hate the false does not love the true; and he to whom it is all the same whether it be God’s word or man’s, is himself unrenewed at heart.” Charles Spurgeon
“Of course, it’s the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.” Margaret Thatcher
“The true follower of Christ will not ask, ‘If I embrace this truth, what will it cost me?’ Rather he will say, ‘This is truth. God help me to walk in it, let come what may!’” A. W. Tozer
“The real truth is always subversive.” Dissident Czech novelist Zdenek Urbanek
“Those who claim that truth is a matter of perception and opinion are proclaiming this as more than a matter of perspective and opinion. They would like us to believe that this definition is objectively true, even as they deny the existence of objective truth.” J. Warner Wallace, Cold-Case Christianity
“Truth is meant to wound.” Paul Washer
“Good works are seldom offensive in the modern world; it is a belief in TRUTH that is troublesome.” David Wells
