Quotes about fact
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“Book! You lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

Source: Moby-Dick or, The Whale

Lie, Books

“It is a scientific fact that your body will not absorb cholesterol if you take it from another person's plate.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

"The Funny Side of 'Beowulf'", The Miami Herald, November 2, 1997.
Columns and articles

Personality, Funny

“Rest easy, real mothers. The very fact that you worry about being a good mom means that you already are one.”

Jodi Picoult book House Rules

Source: House Rules

Moms

“Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory — let the theory go.”

Agatha Christie book The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Source: The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)

“Emptiness which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibilities.”

D.T. Suzuki (1870–1966) Japanese author and philosopher

“In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realtities of the situation, the less clear-cut things become.”

Mary Roach book Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

Source: Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence (1967)
Context: We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood — it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late."

Life, History, Time

“The fact is, I love him. He's the boy I want and one day he'll be MINE.”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

Source: Princess in Training

Love, Boy

“Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

A fragment of Miller's unfinished book on D. H. Lawrence, originally published in the London literary journal Purpose. note: The Wisdom of the Heart (1941)
Source: Creative Death", p. 5

Life

“Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

"Why We Need To Understand Science" in The Skeptical Inquirer Vol. 14, Issue 3 (Spring 1990)
Context: Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a fine balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything — new ideas and established wisdom. We need wide appreciation of this kind of thinking. It works. It’s an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change. Our task is not just to train more scientists but also to deepen public understanding of science.

Way, Knowledge, Thinking, Science

“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.”

John Cage book Silence: Lectures and Writings

Source: Silence: Lectures and Writings

Silence, Time

“It is a little-known fact about covert operations that you will spend a lot of time with people you can’t really trust. They may be traitors and liars. We call them assets or informants. But mostly, in those days, I called him Zach.”

Ally Carter book Only the Good Spy Young

Source: Only the Good Spy Young

People, Time

“Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.”

Werner Heisenberg book The Part and The Whole

Die Quantentheorie ist so ein wunderbares Beispiel dafür, daß man einen Sachverhalt in völliger Klarheit verstanden haben kann und gleichzeitig doch weiß, daß man nur in Bildern und Gleichnissen von ihm reden kann. <br class="br">Der Teil und das Ganze. Gespräche im Umkreis der Atomphysik (1969); also in "Kein Chaos, aus dem nicht wieder Ordnung würde", Die Zeit No. 34 (22 August 1969) http://www.zeit.de/1969/34/kein-chaos-aus-dem-nicht-wieder-ordnung-wuerde/komplettansicht; as translated in Physics and Beyond : Encounters and Conversation (1971)

Understanding

“Remember, any lie you are told, even deliberately, is often a more significant fact than a truth told in all sincerity.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Source: Under the Glacier

Truth, Lie, Sincerity

“The fact is that when you make the other suffer, he will try to find relief by making you suffer more. The result is an escalation of suffering on both sides.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames

Suffering

“The 'private sector' of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector; and the 'public sector' is, in fact, the coercive sector.”

Henry Hazlitt (1894–1993) American journalist

“If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies' territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

People, Time

“The fact is, you don't love me, and you haven't destroyed me. You don't have what it takes to do that.”

Jeannette Walls (1960) American writer and journalist

Love

“When did fact checking and journalism go their separate ways?”

Jon Stewart (1962) American political satirist, writer, television host, actor, media critic and stand-up comedian

Way

“The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind… From the very first he set before the consciousness things which it could not tolerate.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

“Sir, the fact that the book is in a public library brings no comfort. Books are the one element in which I am personally and nakedly acquisitive. If it weren't for the law I would steal them. If it weren't for my purse I would buy them.”

Harold J. Laski (1893–1950) British academic

Books, Law, Personality

“Among the problems with shame was that it in fact did not make you shorter or quieter or less visible. You just felt like you were.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Enshrined

Problem

“Warriors of the light are not perfect. Their beauty lies in accepting this fact and still desiring to grow and to learn.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

(1997)
Source: Warrior of the Light

Beauty, Light, Learning, Perfection

“But I always worked harder when I was up against something, or when someone assumed I couldn't succeed. That's what drove me, all those nights studying. The fact that so many figured I couldn't do it.”

Sarah Dessen book This Lullaby

Source: This Lullaby

Study, Night

“With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not.”

Sara Gruen book Water for Elephants

Source: Water for Elephants

Secret

“I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.”

Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) German theoretical physicist

Das Naturgesetz und die Struktur der Materie (1967), as translated in Natural Law and the Structure of Matter (1981), p. 34

Mathematics, Idea, Thinking, Sense

“There is no such thing as a fact. There is only how you saw the fact, in a given moment. How you reported the fact. How your brain processed that fact. There is no extrication of the storyteller from the story.”

Jodi Picoult book Small Great Things

Source: Small Great Things

“Anyone who imagines they can work alone winds up surrounded by nothing but rivals, without companions. The fact is, no one ascends alone.”

Lance Armstrong book It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life

Source: It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life

Imagination, For Team

“Small facts lead to great knowing.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Wise Man's Fear

Source: The Wise Man's Fear

“For you can't hear Irish tunes without knowing you're Irish, and wanting to pound that fact into the floor.”

Jennifer Armstrong (1961) American children's writer

Source: Becoming Mary Mehan

“Trying to forget really doesn't work. In fact, it's pretty much the same as remembering. But I tried to forget anyway, and to ignore the fact that I was remembering you all the time.”

Rebecca Stead (1968) American children's writer

Time, Forgetting

“And the worst thing was, there were no mirrors out there in the wild, so the princess was left wondering whether she in fact was still beautiful… or if the fall had changed the story completely.”

Scott Westerfeld book Pretties

Source: Pretties

Beauty, Change, Princess

“It is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct.”

Michio Kaku book Hyperspace

Source: Hyperspace (1995), Ch.12 Colliding Universes

“Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.”

Edward Hallett Carr What Is History?

Source: What Is History?

Study

“There are those who know and those who don't know. And for every ten thousand who don't know there's only one who knows. That's the miracle of all time--the fact that these millions know so much but don't know this.”

Carson McCullers book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Time

“Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Source: Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

“Why do we embroider everything we say

with special emphasis

when all we really need to do

is simply say what

needs to he said?

Of course

the fact is

that there is very little that needs

to be said.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: sifting through the madness for the word, the line, the way: New Poems

“Because I'm not, in fact, depressed, Prozac makes me manic and numb - one of the reasons I slice my arm in the first place is that I'm coked to the gills on something utterly wrong for what I have.”

Marya Hornbacher (1974) American journalist

Source: Madness: A Bipolar Life

“and now, all these years later, it seem to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended”

Stephen King book Wizard and Glass

Source: Wizard and Glass

Heart

“If you have a choice between extra makeup or extra weapons always take the weapons. Just the fact that you're debating between those two choices proves that you're going to need the weapons more.”

Laurell K. Hamilton A Kiss of Shadows

Source: A Kiss of Shadows

“The atmosphere of the place soothed her automatically; the rich lantern lights, the sheer scent of paper and leather, and the fact that everywhere she looked, there were books, books, beautiful books.”

Genevieve Cogman (1972) novelist and game designer

Source: The Invisible Library

Books, Beauty, Light

“Knowing a person isn't like knowing a string of facts. It's more like… a feeling.”

Sophie Kinsella (1969) British writer

Source: The Wedding Girl

Feeling, Personality

“She was forced to consider the startling fact that the love of her life might not actually be someone with whom she could spend a lifetime.”

Jodi Picoult book The Tenth Circle

Source: The Tenth Circle

Love, Life

“With no fact as a referent, what is normative is purely a matter of preference.”

Ravi Zacharias (1946) Indian philosopher

2000s
Source: [The Real Face of Atheism, 2004, 9780801065118, 3293056M, http://books.google.com/books?id=0SD0mYaYz3sC&pg=PA56&dq=%22with+no+fact%22, 56]

“It is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry 'I could have thought of that' is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.”

Douglas Adams book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Source: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Cry

“A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon?”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Love, Truth

“Most of the Peacekeepers turn a blind eye to the few of us who hunt because they're as hungry as we are for fresh meat as anyone. In fact, they're among our best customers.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

“Graves are for the living, not the dead. It gives us something to concentrate on instead of the fact that our loved one is rotting under the ground.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Guilty Pleasures

Source: Guilty Pleasures

Love, Dead

“The key to seeing the world's soul, and in the process wakening our own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination is illusion.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

Source: Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality

World, Soul, Imagination, Thinking

“As a matter of fact, she has refused to marry me.”
“So when's the wedding?” Ramsey asked.”

Julie Garwood (1946) American writer

Source: Ransom

Wedding

“Many of our problems in US maternity care stem from the fact that we leave no room for recognizing when nature is smarter than we are.”

Ina May Gaskin (1940) American midwife

Source: Birth Matters: A Midwife's Manifesta

Nature, Problem, Maternity

“The fact that I’m silent doesn’t mean I have nothing to say.”

Jonathan Carroll (1949) novelist, short story writer

“Any time some well-meaning person forces you to demonstrate you have no talent and rubs your nose in the fact you're a failure at the only dream you ever had, take another drink.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Diary

Source: Diary

Dreams, Failure, Drink, Time

“He was on me before my brain processed the fact that he was coming for me.”

Karen Marie Moning book Darkfever

Source: Darkfever

“We deny the parts of ourselves that we deem unacceptable rather than accepting the fact that we're all less than perfect.”

Richard Carlson (1961–2006) Author, psychotherapist and motivational speaker

Source: Don't Sweat the Small Stuff ... and it's all small stuff: Simple Ways to Keep the Little Things from Taking Over Your Life

Parting, Perfection

“raking a hand through his hair, he forced his attention to the text she'd left on the coffee table, refusing to dwell on the disconcerting fact that a part of him had taken one look at the lass in such proximity to his bed and said simply: Mine”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: The Dark Highlander

Coffee, Parting

“As far as we know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift-or curse, perhaps-of awareness about our own mortality. Everything here eventually dies; we're just the lucky ones who get to think about this fact every day.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Thinking

“Spook: No, I'm not troubled. In fact, I actually think everything is going to be all right. Finally.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Hero of Ages

Thinking

“In fact, the truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Source: The Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays

Truth, Communication

“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

World

“I'm not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest

Source: Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest

Fate, Feeling

“If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast

Books, Light, Chance

“I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.”

Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) film, stage, and television actress

Positive

“The only trap I must beware not to fall into, is to think that each day is the same as the next. In fact, each morning brings with it a hidden miracle, and we must pay attention to this miracle.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: Warrior of the Light

Thinking

“I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

Source: I Am No One You Know: Stories

Water, Time

“The fact that I can plant a seed and it becomes a flower, share a bit of knowledge and it becomes another's, smile at someone and receive a smile in return, are to me continual spiritual exercises.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

Smile, Exercises, Flowers, Knowledge

“The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.”

Marge Piercy (1936) American novelist and poet

Love

“It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them.”

Henry James book Hawthorne

Hawthorne, ch. VI: England and Italy.

People, World, Thinking

“The fact that everybody in the world dreams every night ties all mankind together.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Book of Dreams (1961) Foreword
As misquoted in Night and Day (1989) by Jack Maguire, p. 221; Maguire does not cite his source, so this widely quoted variant appears to be an erroneous paraphrase of this published statement. It is not a direct quote from some other statement by Kerouac.
Variant: All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.

World, Dreams, Night

“Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight — how to get from shore to food and back again.”

Richard Bach book Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Source: Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)

Food, Learning

“Fortune favors the brave," I told her. It also kills the stupid, but I decided to keep that fact to myself.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Breaks

Stupidity

“True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.”

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist

Source: The Name of the Rose (Everyman's Library

Truth, Idea, Learning

“The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Idea

“Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.”

Herman Melville book Moby-Dick

Source: Moby-Dick

Faith, Memory

“The real poetry and beauty in life comes from an intense relationship with reality in all its aspects. Realism is in fact the ideal we must aspire to, the highest point of human rationality.”

Robert Greene book The 50th Law

Source: The 50th Law

Life, Beauty, Reality

“Trying to forget really doesn't work. In fact, it's pretty much the same as remembering.”

Rebecca Stead book When You Reach Me

Source: When You Reach Me

Forgetting

“The fact that he was willing to sacrifice his own face in order to keep mine from getting bashed in”

Meg Cabot book Teen Idol

Source: Teen Idol

“The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives…”

Walker Percy book The Moviegoer

Source: The Moviegoer

Happiness, People, Reading

“How do you tell an adult that maybe everything wrong in the world stems from the fact that she's stopped believing the impossible can happen?”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Between the Lines

World

“The mere suggestion of fame and fortune casts a glamour all its own. It is rather alarming how quickly people will turn someone else's fiction into fact in order to support their own fictions of themselves.”

Libba Bray book Rebel Angels

Source: Rebel Angels

People, Support

“It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible — incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.”

Marilynne Robinson book Housekeeping

Source: Housekeeping

World

“The Facts were right there waiting for me, hidden in old books written by people who weren't afraid to be honest”

Ernest Cline book Ready Player One

Source: Ready Player One

People, Books, Waiting

“Never call anyone a baboon unless you are sure of your facts.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

“But some characters in books are really real--Jane Austen's are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are not giving one thought to the real facts of marriage.”

Dodie Smith book I Capture the Castle

Source: I Capture the Castle

Men, Marriage, Books, Waiting

“It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. He'd had to make his way alone, and no one—not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses — ever makes it alone.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: Outliers: The Story of Success

Way, Star

“In life we often look to others for simple, but difficult answers, despite the fact that we have those answers ourselves.”

James Frey book The Final Testament of the Holy Bible

Source: The Final Testament of the Holy Bible

Life

“I’m not an idiot! I’m just twelve. I’m a twelve-year-old girl and neither of those facts are my fault.”

Ally Carter book All Fall Down

Source: All Fall Down

Girl

“The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Age, History, Change

“Were-Hunters are different from humans. (Ravyn)
You mean other than the fact that you live for several hundred years, can turn into animals, time travel, and wave your hand to make freaky stuff happen? (Susan)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Dark Side of the Moon

Travel, Time, Animals

“What could I do! Facts are such horrid things!”

Jane Austen book Lady Susan

Source: "Lady Susan", Letter XXXII (1871)

“Inside each of us resides the truth, I began, the absolute truth. But sometimes the truth is hidden in a hall of mirrors. Sometimes we believe we are viewing the real thing, when in fact we are viewing a facsimile, a distortion.”

Garth Stein The Art of Racing in the Rain

Source: The Art of Racing in the Rain

Truth

“The important thing is that man is lost in time, in the moment that immediately precedes him - which only attests, by reflection, to the fact that he is lost in the moment that follows”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Time

“The basic fact is that no, this isnt ideal. Very few things are. Sometimes, you have to manufacture your own history. Give fate a push, so to speak.
-Heidi”

Sarah Dessen book Along for the Ride

Source: Along for the Ride

Fate, History

“I am ignoring you. In fact, I think you are a figment of my imagination.”

Bruce Coville (1950) American writer

Source: Dark Whispers

Imagination, Thinking

“As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

"The Will to Believe" p. 10 http://books.google.com/books?id=Moqh7ktHaJEC&pg=PA10 <br class="br">1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)