Thomas a Kempis Quotes

One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.

Clarity and consistency are not enough: the quest for truth requires humility and effort.

If you shut the door to all errors, truth will be shut out.

The scientist is a lover of truth for the very love of truth itself, wherever it may lead.

Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can.

You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.

I hope that I am generous and tolerant, but certainly on the intellectual side I think that there are discoverable truths, and some things that are closer approximations to the truth than others.

Truth is always served by great minds, even if they fight it.

A philosopher goes where the truth leads and has no patience with mere emotion.

We must never forget that higher knowledge has to do with revering truth and insight and not with revering people.

The real searcher after truth will not receive the old because it is old, or reject the new because it is new. He will not believe men because they are dead, or contradict them because they are alive. With him an utterance is worth the truth, the reason it contains, without the slightest regard to the author. He may have been a king or serf - a philosopher or servant, - but the utterance neither gains nor loses in truth or reason. Its value is absolutely independent of the fame or station of the man who gave it to the world.

A man ceases to be an honest doubter the moment he refuses one way of getting at the truth because he does not like that way.

An open mind is not an end in itself but a means to the end of finding truth.

Some minds remain open long enough for the truth not only to enter but to pass on through by way of a ready exit without pausing anywhere along the route.

For scholarship - if it is to be scholarship - requires, in addition to liberty, that the truth take precedence over all sectarian interests, including self-interest.

Opinions are made to be changed - or how is truth to be got at?

You can't take sides when you know the earth is round.

The pursuit of truth does not permit violence on one's opponent.

A lot of journalism wants to have what they call objectivity without them having a commitment to pursuing the truth, but that doesn't work. Objectivity requires belief in and a commitment toward pursuing the truth - having an object outside of our personal point of view.

Attempting to get at truth means rejecting stereotypes and cliches.

The greatest friend of truth is Time, her greatest enemy is Prejudice, and her constant companion is Humility.

As scientists, we need to not be afraid of the truth.

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.

Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get.