Francesco Guicciardini Quotes

You can make a good living from soothsaying but not from truthsaying.

I mean you last as long as lies.

Truth is often the favorite tool of those who deceive.

For me, the facts in anything are always secondary. You don't lie convincingly with the truth. You lie convincingly with being a good liar.

One ought to have a good memory when he has told a lie.

You can read everybody. It's not even interesting to tell the truth because to some extent it's false.

Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth. Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality. Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.

I’ll lie as much as the next guy when my country’s interests are involved—if I have a chance of being believed..

The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are intentionally bad.

Telling lies is the easy bit, but telling the truth and pretending you are lying is hard.

A little truth seasons a lie like salt.

My own luck has been curious all my literary life; I never could tell a lie that anyone would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.

Magic is the only profession where it's easy to lie about your talent. If you do a trick and you can learn it very quickly, you can fool somebody into thinking you're a great magician.

The world is his who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance,--by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

There wasn't any more truth in over half of what any so-called orator said. If it wasn't a Deliberate Lie, why it was an Exaggerated Falsehood.

Tell the truth or trump-but get the trick.

There is a rule for fantasy writers: The more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets.

One can live in this world on soothsaying but not on truth saying.

To be believed make the truth unbelievable.

Waking up in TRUTH is so much better than living in a lie.

Those who listen to lies lose the ability to hear the truth.

They told us love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end. For the very first time I realize, that this, too, might also be a lie.

Any lie should be as close to the truth as possible.

It takes one minute to tell a lie, and an hour to refute it.

Why can you believe the lie, but not the truth?