Elizabeth Barrett Browning Quotes

terminological inexactitude

When you take somebody's quote out of context, which happens all the time, nobody's ever going to go and do the research on their own and figure out that you got it wrong.

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion.

It is perhaps being economical with the truth.

A lie should be trampled on and extinguished wherever found.

A liar begins with making falsehood appear like truth, and ends with making truth itself appear like falsehood.

A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently.

After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.

Things are not always as they seem; the first appearance deceives many.

An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains.

When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.

Image is what people perceive my life to be. It's nothing like the truth.

Errors, to be dangerous, must have a great deal of truth mingled with them. It is only from this alliance that they can ever obtain an extensive circulation.

We live in such a gullible world. Anything that's written, anything that's posted, anything picture that is interpreted one way is taken as truth.

What makes me furious, not just because we're in an interview, but I don't like when writers take your words and put them somewhere else, in the wrong context in their own article about you.

There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.

It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.

To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

The most bizarre thing I've ever read about myself is that I was dead. That was kind of weird to read that I'm dead - mostly because I was reading it.

There are three kind of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.