Alexander Pushkin Quotes

A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

If you search for truthfulness, you might as well be blind.

Since I wasn't able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell.

People like to say that the conflict is between good and evil. The real conflict is between truth and lies.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Truths are illlusions which we have forgotten are illusions.

But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian's lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man's truths - if other men had truths - and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.

The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.

The truth is still the truth whether or not you believe it. Can we say the same about lies? No, lies only exist because we believe them. If we don't believe in lies, they simply disappear.

A lie was something that hadn't happened but might just as well have.

You can't really pretend something is rosier than it is and expect people to buy it.

Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments.

That which is cannot be true.

Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?

I realize that nothing's as it seems.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.

I am not honest.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

Truth is always a delusion.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.