Immanuel Kant on truth and lies

Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

Whatever, over and above good life-conduct, man fancies that he can do to become well-pleasing to God is mere religious delusion and counterfeit worship of God.

There is … only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats1795–1821Ode on a Grecian Urn, Stanza 5. The final lines of this poem have been rendered in various ways in different editions, some placing the entire last two lines within quotation marks, others only the statement “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” …In context

• Beauty

This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

William Shakespeare1564–1616Hamlet (1600–1), Act I, scene iii.In context

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

Winston Churchill1874–1965