George Eliot quote about truth from Adam Bede - Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth
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Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth
 George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859). copy citation

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Author George Eliot
Source Adam Bede
Topic truth difficulty
Date 1859
Language English
Reference
Note
Weblink http://www.gutenberg.org/files/507/507-h/507-h.htm

Context

“The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin—the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion. Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings—much harder than to say something fine about them which is NOT the exact truth.
It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise. I find a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous homely existence, which has been the fate of so many more among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world-stirring actions.” source

Meaning and analysis

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