Life & Wisdom Quote by Laura Riding

Riding’s line reads like advice, but it’s really a dare: stop performing insight and start risking accuracy. The first clause punctures the common writerly fantasy that you need a grand subject before you can speak. “Though that make little to tell” is almost austere in its refusal of fireworks. She’s saying the smallest, most defensible truth beats the most elaborate, audience-pleasing narrative.

The subtext is ethical, not decorative. “Tell it to your truest” doesn’t mean “be sincere” in the greeting-card sense; it means speak to the strictest inner listener, the one who won’t let you smuggle in convenient exaggerations or borrowed poses. Riding’s poetry-era context matters here: as a modernist adjacent figure who later grew famously suspicious of poetry’s seductions, she treats language as both instrument and trap. Style can be a costume; “truest” is an attempt to strip it off.

The second half flips the usual sequence of knowledge and speech. We tend to think we know first, then articulate. Riding argues the opposite: truth-telling is a generator of thought. “The truer you speak, the more you will know to tell” suggests that accuracy is productive, that discipline in wording reveals new material. It’s a rebuke to verbosity and a method for discovery: speak precisely, and reality yields more detail. In an era thick with manifestos and aesthetic swagger, Riding offers a quieter radicalism - not self-expression, but self-interrogation as craft.