“He is the freeman whom the truth makes free.”
Source: The Task (1785), Book V, The Winter Morning Walk, Line 733.
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William Cowper174
(1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist 1731–1800Related quotes
“The truth shall make you free, but first it will make you miserable.”
Douglas Preston book Gideon's Sword
Source: Gideon's Sword
“The truth shall make you free, but first it shall make you angry.”
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer
“The truth will set you free — but first it will make you miserable.”
James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)
Attributed without citation to Mark Twain as well as Garfield in recent years, this may have arisen sometime in the 1970s. The earliest discovered citation is a poster in a residential treatment program for alcoholics in Syracuse, New York, [ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/04/truth-free/ described in a 1978 newspaper article]. Another early publication is is found in Pinochet's Chile : An Eyewitness Report, 1980/81 (1981) by Morna Macleod, p. 5
Misattributed
“Before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable.”
Richard Rohr (1943) American spiritual writer, speaker, teacher, Catholic Franciscan priest
Source: Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
“The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism
Source: Little Essays (1921), p. 107
Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 82
“They call Him Emptiness who is the Truth of truths, in Whom all truths are stored!”
Kabir (1440–1518) Indian mystic poet
Songs of Kabîr (1915)
Context: They call Him Emptiness who is the Truth of truths, in Whom all truths are stored!
There within Him creation goes forward, which is beyond all philosophy; for philosophy cannot attain to Him: There is an endless world, O my Brother! and there is the Nameless Being, of whom naught can be said.
Only he knows it who has reached that region: it is other than all that is heard and said.
No form, no body, no length, no breadth is seen there: how can I tell you that which it is?