Motivational Quotes

Facts

All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called facts. They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. Who does not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact or two that they lead after them into decent company like so many bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious suggestion, or convenient generalization, or pleasant fancy? I allow no facts at this table.

- Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Best Quotes about Facts

Facts can't be recounted; much less twice over, and far less still by different persons. I've already drummed that thoroughly into your head. What happens is that your wretched memory remembers the words and forgets what's behind them.

Bastos, Augusto Roa

I deal with the obvious. I present, reiterate and glorify the obvious -- because the obvious is what people need to be told.

Carnegie, Dale

Facts are counterrevolutionary.

Hoffer, Eric

We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.

John Dewey

We should keep so close to facts that we never have to remember the second time what we said the first time.

Smith, F. Marion

Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

Roth, Philip

General principles are not the less true or important because from their nature they elude immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it.

Hazlitt, William

It is not the facts which guide the conduct of men, but their opinions about facts; which may be entirely wrong. We can only make them right by discussion

Angell, Norman

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

Adams, John

10.

Facts are facts and will not disappear on account of your likes.

Jawaharlal Nehru

11.

The facts are always friendly, every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true.

Rogers, Carl

12.

Conclusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head that already understands and knows.

Carlyle, Thomas

13.

Delete the adjectives and [you'll] have the facts.

Harper Lee

14.

My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologies. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought -- with these I deal.

Thoreau, Henry David

15.

Facts are the most important thing in business. Study facts and do more than is expected of you.

Ecker, Frederick Hudson

16.

One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways.

Menninger, Karl A.

17.

A fact is like a sack -- it won't stand up if it's empty. To make it stand up, first you have to put in it all the reasons and feelings that caused it in the first place.

Pirandello, Luigi

18.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

19.

The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.

James, William

20.

To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.

Frankfurter, Felix

21.

A concept is stronger than a fact.

Gillman, Charlotte P.

22.

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

Mark Twain

23.

If you get all the facts, your judgment can be right; if you don't get all the facts, it can't be right.

Baruch, Bernard M.

24.

One precedent creates another and they soon accumulate and constitute law. What yesterday was a fact, today is doctrine.

Junius

25.

Where facts are few, experts are many.

Donald R. Gannon

26.

Facts in books, statistics in encyclopedias, the ability to use them in men's heads.

Brackell, Fogg

27.

There is nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

28.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

Russell, Bertrand

29.

Remember son, many a good story has been ruined by over verification.

Bennett, James Gordon

30.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other; given the upper, to find the under side.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

Never forget the facts are important but it's the opinion of the facts that causes comment.

32.

Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

Huxley, Thomas H.

33.

It may be said with a degree of assurance that not everything that meets the eye is as it appears.

Serling, Rod

34.

The sky is not less blue because the blind man does not see it.

Proverb, Danish

35.

The ultimate umpire of all things in life is -- fact.

Laut, Agnes C.

36.

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

A fact in itself is nothing. It is valuable only for the idea attached to it, or for the proof which it furnishes.

Bernard, Claude

38.

Count Hermann Keyserling once said truly that the greatest American superstition was belief in facts.

John Gunther

39.

Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.

Updike, John

40.

Facts are ventriloquists dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.

Huxley, Aldous

41.

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

Faulkner, William

42.

I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called scientific mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.

Ozick, Cynthia

43.

People can refute your facts, but never your feelings.

Bower, Sharon Anthony

44.

The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

45.

It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true.

Vidal, Gore

46.

Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.