
“So very difficult a matter is it to trace and find out the truth of anything by history.”
Parallel Lives, Pericles
2000-09, An Artist’s Ordeal. 2009
“So very difficult a matter is it to trace and find out the truth of anything by history.”
Parallel Lives, Pericles
“It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.”
Source: A Room with a View (1908), Ch.1
Source: Johnny Chiang (2020) cited in " KMT’s Chiang visits human rights park https://taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2020/12/11/2003748529" on Taipei Times, 11 December 2020.
2006 Delaware US Senate race
“Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult.”
Adam Bede (1859)
Context: These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people — amongst whom your life is passed — that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire — for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience. And I would not, even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who could create a world so much better than this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work, that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and the common green fields — on the real breathing men and women, who can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice; who can be cheered and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave justice.
So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of one's best efforts, there is reason to dread. Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin — the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion. Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings — much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.