The classical commentaries on the Yoga Sutras refuse to let truthfulness stand alone. Ahimsa, nonviolence, precedes satya in the list of yamas, and Vyasa's commentary draws the consequence explicitly: speech is for the benefit of beings, and a truth spoken to wound is not the virtue Patanjali enjoins. The stock example, repeated for centuries, is the traveler fleeing bandits: a witness who truthfully reports the fugitive's hiding place has satisfied the dictionary and betrayed the vow, because the disclosure delivers a person to harm.
The Mahabharata dramatizes the same tension at scale. Yudhishthira, the epic's embodiment of truthfulness, is induced to speak a technically qualified falsehood to break his teacher Drona, and the epic treats the moment as a genuine moral wound rather than a clever solution, the cost of truth and the cost of victory laid side by side.
Later Hindu ethics formalized the balance in the maxim satyam bruyat priyam bruyat, speak the truth, speak it pleasantly, and never a truth that is unpleasant merely to hurt, nor a pleasant lie. The yogic satya is therefore narrower and harder than blunt honesty: it demands correspondence with fact, restraint of exaggeration, and a constant check that the speaking itself does no violence, all three at once.