"Science, my boy, is composed of errors, but errors that it is right to make, for they lead step by step to the truth." (Jules Verne, "A Journey to the Centre of the Earth", 1864)
"Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold." (Lev N Tolstoy, "War and Peace", 1867)
"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" (Sir Arthur C Doyle, "The Sign of Four" , 1890)
"The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them." (Oscar Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Gray", 1890)
"When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." (Arthur C Doyle, "The Sign of Four", 1890)
"True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion." (Lev N Tolstoy, "What is Art?", 1898)
"What is called science today consists of a haphazard heap of information, united by nothing, often utterly unnecessary, and not only failing to present one unquestionable truth, but as often as not containing the grossest errors, today put forward as truths, and tomorrow overthrown." (Leo Tolstoy, "What Is Art?", 1898)
"The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it." (Herbert G Wells, "Scepticism of the Instrument: A Modern Utopia", 1905)
"Mistakes live in the neighborhood of truth and therefore delude us." (Rabindranath Tagore, "Fireflies", 1928)
"Truth is a flower in whose neighborhood others must wither." (Edward M Forster, "Albinger Harvest", 1936)
"No equation, however impressive and complex, can arrive at the truth if the initial assumptions are incorrect." (Arthur C Clarke, "Profiles of the Future", 1962)
"That perfected machines may one day succeed us is, I remember, an extremely commonplace notion on Earth. It prevails not only among poets and romantics but in all classes of society. Perhaps it is because it is so widespread, born spontaneously in popular imagination, that it irritates scientific minds. Perhaps it is also for this very reason that it contains a germ of truth. Only a germ: Machines will always be machines; the most perfected robot, always a robot." (Pierre Boulle, "Planet of the Apes", 1963)
"The mathematicians and physics men have their mythology; they work alongside the truth, never touching it; their equations are false But the things work. Or, when gross error appears, they invent new ones; they drop the theory of waves In universal ether and imagine curved space." (Robinson Jeffers, "The Beginning and the End and Other Poems, The Great Wound", 1963)
"What was that epigram that he had trotted forth too often, about civilization being the distance man placed between himself and his excreta? But it was nearer the truth to say that civilization was the distance man had placed between himself and everything else." (Brian W Aldiss, "The Dark Light Years", 1964)
"You begin to suspect that if there’s any real truth it’s that the entire multi-dimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs." (Douglas Adams, "Fit the Fourth", [episode of "The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy" radio series] 1978)
"The only things that matter are those made of truth and joy, and not of tin and glass." (Richard Bach, :There’s No Such Place as Far Away", 1979)
"The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination." (Douglas N Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", 1979)
"There was no easy way to heaven, or nirvana, or whatever it was that the faithful sought. Merit was acquired solely by one’s own efforts, not with the aid of machines. An interesting doctrine, and one containing much truth; but there were also times when only machines could do the job." (Arthur C Clarke, "The Fountains of Paradise", 1979)
"We see the universe as it is, Father Damien, and these naked truths are cruel ones. We who believe in life, and treasure it, will die. Afterward there will be nothing, eternal emptiness, blackness, nonexistence. In our living there has been no purpose, no poetry, no meaning. Nor do our deaths possess these qualities. When we are gone, the universe will not long remember us, and shortly it will be as if we had never lived at all. Our worlds and our universe will not long outlive us. Ultimately entropy will consume all, and our puny efforts cannot stay that awful end." (George R R Martin, "The Way of Cross and Dragon", 1979)
"The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it." (Frank Herbert, "God Emperor of Dune", 1984)
"I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not 'true' because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself." (Orson Scott Card, "Ender’s Game", [introduction] 1985)
"Here is the truth. What human life is, what it’s for, what we do, is create communities." (Orson Scott Card, "Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus", 1996)
"Everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth." (Orson Scott Card, "The Tales of Alvin Maker: Seventh Son", 1987)
"Love was always a word that covered too much territory, from loving a spouse to loving a hobby or abstract justice, and the emotion-mongers of popular entertainment portrayed it as everlasting and exclusive. In a culture under stress the truth could not be concealed by sentimental fluff. The Greenhouse people learned to appreciate love without glorifying it." (George Turner, "Drowning Towers", 1987)
"Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through." (Douglas Adams, "The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul", 1988)
"Fairy tales lie just as much as statistics do, but sometimes you can find a grain of truth in them." (Sergei Lukyanenko, "The Night Watch", 1998)
"It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth." (Milan Kundera, "Encounter", 2009)
"Because this, for better or worse, is exactly where the truth lies - at the intersection of the forgotten and the ignored, in the neighborhood of all we have tried to forget." (Sara Gran, "City of the Dead: A Claire DeWitt Mystery", 2011)
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