“We must not make a false faith by hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest achievement of the human intellect.”

Insisting that genuine faith must confront rather than suppress doubt · Per Amica Silentia Lunae, Anima Hominis

• Belief
• Faith
• Truth

“The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality.”

Expressing Yeats's belief that artistic identity can emerge through an opposing self · Per Amica Silentia Lunae, Anima Hominis

• Art
• Identity
• Truth

“I believe the fault comes from a too-sweet sense of the freedom of being true with you, telling you all, hiding nothing.”

Connecting intimacy with the freedom to speak without concealment · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 15 June 1846

• Communication
• Freedom
• Truth

“You speak out, you,—I only make men and women speak—give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me.”

A striking description of his dramatic method of revealing truth through imagined voices · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 13 January 1845

• Poetry
• Style
• Truth

“In fact I have long left off thinking that logic proves anything—it doesn't, you know.”

A characteristically playful scepticism about the limits of formal reasoning · Letter to Robert Browning, 18 April 1845

• Humour
• Mind
• Truth

“Wherever there is insincerity in a book there can be no morality.”

Making sincerity fundamental to his conception of ethical writing · Essay, Immorality in Authorship

• Books
• Morality
• Truth

“Morality in literature is, I think, far more intimately connected with the principle of sincerity of sight than any writer has yet had the courage to point out.”

Connecting literary morality primarily with honesty of perception · Essay, Immorality in Authorship

• Literature
• Morality
• Truth

“Realism, properly so called, is truth, and truth is always beautiful.”

Linking genuine realism with artistic truth rather than mere literal detail · Essay, Society’s Looking-glass, 1862

• Art
• Beauty
• Truth

“There is so much high talent, truth, and simplicity, that when I put it all together, it left the impression of sublimity on my mind.”

Her response to reading the life and character of Hannah More · Letter to a relative, Baden-Baden, 6 June 1836

• Books
• Simplicity
• Truth

“Let the Portmans go to Ireland; but as you know nothing of the manners there, you had better not go with them. You will be in danger of giving false representations.”

Advising a young novelist to write from genuine knowledge and observation · Letter to Anna Austen, 10 August 1814

• Experience
• Truth
• Writing

“It will never be painted, and no actor will ever seize it. And to describe it, I think I must go back and be with them.”

Expressing his conviction that truthful witness required renewed proximity to soldiers' suffering · Letter to Susan Owen, 31 December 1917

• Duty
• Truth
• War

“My dear, except in one or two of my letters, you will find nothing so perfectly truthfully descriptive of war. Now you see why I have always extolled Poetry.”

Arguing that poetry can communicate the lived truth of war more powerfully than other media · Letter to Mary Owen, 29 August 1917

• Poetry
• Truth
• War

“This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.”

Rejecting conventional heroic language as inadequate to the realities of war · Unfinished preface, 1918

• Poetry
• Truth
• War

“We deny that poetry is fiction; its merit and its power lie alike in its truth.”

Insisting that poetry communicates truths rather than mere invention · Essay, On the Ancient and Modern Influence of Poetry

• Literature
• Poetry
• Truth

“The true story of my life will never be written. But whatever you do, don't envy it.”

A candid warning against idealising another person's outward life · Letter to Mrs. Condict, 14 February 1877

• Life
• Suffering
• Truth

“There is nothing duller than the habitual liar, who is so from the mere love of falsehood.”

A concise judgement on how habitual dishonesty diminishes character · Essay, Truth and the White Lie: A Conversation, 1895

• Character
• Morality
• Truth

“One peril he cannot escape—that of misrepresenting human nature.”

Arguing that even invented worlds must remain truthful about human behaviour · Essay, Historical Novels, in Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Humanity
• Literature
• Truth

“No man has ever yet succeeded in painting an honest portrait of himself in an autobiography, however sedulously he may have set to work about it.”

Questioning whether deliberate self-description can ever escape self-conscious distortion · Ponkapog Papers, Leaves from a Note Book (1903)

• Identity
• Truth
• Writing

“The ring of a false coin is not more recognizable than that of a rhyme setting forth a simulated sorrow.”

Insisting that manufactured emotion in poetry is readily distinguishable from genuine feeling · Essay collection, Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Emotion
• Poetry
• Truth

“If you were to go to India and look with an unprejudiced eye, you would see that the system of Government is rotten to the core.”

A strikingly early expression of his opposition to injustice under British rule in India · Letter to Laurence Binyon, October 1887

• Justice
• Politics
• Truth

“The author's own experience is here but briefly told and these writings are based upon actual facts”

Insisting that the anger in his writing arose from lived experience rather than abstraction · Foreword to Plea of the Negro Soldier and a Hundred Other Poems, 1908

• Experience
• Truth
• Writing

“I am a great believer in new light, but let us always remember that the source of light is the same, and keep our eyes open to see it growing brighter and brighter until noon.”

Original: Yr wyf fi yn gredwr mawr mewn goleuni newydd, ond dewch i ni gael cofio o hyd, mai yr un yw ffynhonnell goleuni, a chadw'n llygaid yn agored i'w weled yn myned fwy—fwy hyd hanner dydd. — Welcoming new understanding while retaining a sense of an enduring spiritual source · Sermon, Sul y Blodau, 31 March 1903 (Welsh)

• Faith
• Hope
• Truth

“There is something very beautiful in this cutting and covenant: first the commandments into tablets, then the laws into your palm, and finally the covenant deep into your heart.”

Original: Y mae rhywbeth yn brydferth iawn yn y torri a'r cymodi yma. Torri'r gorchmynion ar lechau i ddechreu, torri'r deddfau ar dor dy law yn nês ymlaen; torri'r cytundeb i ddyfnder dy galon yn y diwedd. — Tracing moral commitment from outward inscription towards inward conviction · Sermon, Cyfamod Duw a Dyn (Welsh)

• Faith
• Morality
• Truth

“It is not right because He gave it to us; He gave it to us because it is right.”

Original: Dyw hi ddim yn iawn am ei fod Ef wedi ei rhoi i ni, ond y mae Ef wedi ei rhoi i ni am ei bod yn iawn. — Placing moral truth before mere obedience to authority · Sermon, Ceisio Teyrnas Dduw, July 1886 (Welsh)

• Faith
• Morality
• Truth