“Veracity does not consist in saying, but in the intention of communicating truth.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. IX

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge220

English poet, literary critic and philosopher 1772–1834

Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804–1845) British author and journalist

"That what Everybody Says must be True".
Sketches from Life (1846)

“Truth does not consist in minute accuracy of detail; but in conveying a right impression.”

Henry Alford (1810–1871) English churchman, theologian, textual critic, scholar, poet, hymnodist, and writer

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 603.

“Conversations consist for the most part of things one does not say.”

Cees Nooteboom (1933) Dutch writer

“In fact we say that an intention is good, that is, right in itself, but that an action does not bear any good in itself but proceeds from a good intention.”
Bonam quippe intentionem, hoc est, rectam in se dicimus, operationem vero non quod boni aliquid in se suscipiat, sed quod ex bona intentione procedat. Unde et ab eodem homine cum in diversis temporibus idem fiat, pro diversitate tamen intentione eius operatio modo bono modo mala dicitur.

Peter Abelard (1079–1142) French scholastic philosopher, theologian and preeminent logician

Ethica, seu Scito Teipsum, Bk. 1; translation by D E Luscombe from Peter Abelard's Ethics (1971) p. 53
Context: In fact we say that an intention is good, that is, right in itself, but that an action does not bear any good in itself but proceeds from a good intention. Whence when the same thing is done by the same man at different times, by the diversity of his intention, however, his action is now said to be good, now bad.