“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky book Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment (1866)
"Rousseau & the origins of liberalism," https://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/rousseau-the-origins-of-liberalism-2988 The New Criterion (October 1998).
“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky book Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment (1866)
Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy
Source: His Dark Materials, The Subtle Knife (1997), Ch. 4 : Trepanning
Context: Lyra sighed; she had forgotten how roundabout Scholars could be. It was difficult to tell them the truth when a lie would have been so much easier for them to understand.
“It is not truth that is validated by a proof, but one’s understanding of it.”
Raheel Farooq Pakistani writer
Why I Am a Muslim: And a Christian and a Jew (2020)
Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist
Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 8, “Science and Religion: Scientists Just Do Science” (pp. 136-137; minor grammatical errors corrected silently)
“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer
As quoted in Angels in the workplace: stories and inspirations for creating a new world of work (1999) by Melissa Giovagnoli
Attributed
Abraham Maslow book Motivation and Personality
Source: Motivation and Personality (1954), p. 123.