“If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.”

Re: Evolution (24 June 1994) This is derived from a statement of William Blake: "Truth cannot be told, so as to be understood, and not be believ'd."
Variant: If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed." by Terence McKenna?
Terence McKenna photo
Terence McKenna 111
American ethnobotanist 1946–2000

Related quotes

William Blake photo

“Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Source: 1790s, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793), Proverbs of Hell, Line 69

Clarence Darrow photo

“One believes in the truthfulness of a man because of his long experience with the man, and because the man has always told a consistent story. But no man has told so consistent a story as nature.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Why I Am An Agnostic (1929)

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg photo

“Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

J 77
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook J (1789)

James Branch Cabell photo

“You touch on a disheartening truth. People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.”

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 13 : Suggesting Themes of Universal Appeal

John Steinbeck photo
Eino Leino photo
Francois Rabelais photo

“Believe it, if you will, or otherwise, believe it not, I care not which of them you do, they are both alike to me. It shall be sufficient for my purpose to have told you the truth, and the truth I will tell you.”

Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Third Book (1546), Chapter 52 : How a certain kind of Pantagruelion is of that nature that the fire is not able to consume it
Context: I have already related to you great and admirable things; but, if you might be induced to adventure upon the hazard of believing some other divinity of this sacred Pantagruelion, I very willingly would tell it you. Believe it, if you will, or otherwise, believe it not, I care not which of them you do, they are both alike to me. It shall be sufficient for my purpose to have told you the truth, and the truth I will tell you.

Isabel Allende photo
Robert Seymour Bridges photo

“But I can tell — let truth be told —
That love will change in growing old;
Though day by day is nought to see,
So delicate his motions be.”

Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930) British writer

So Sweet Love Seemed, st. 2 (1893).
Shorter Poems (1879-1893)

Related topics