George D. Prentice on truth and lies

What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn’t much better than tedious disease.

Some people seem as if they can never have been children, and others seem as if they could never be anything else.

It is in vain to hope to please all alike. Let a man stand with his face in what direction he will, he must necessarily turn his back on one half of the world.

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