Quotes About Integrity

Sincerity is the highest complement you can pay

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know.

Insist on yourself; never imitate.

Do not say things. Who you are thunders over you all the while so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

Doing well is a result of doing good.

When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind.

To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?

I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances.

I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding.

I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.

A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word just as good.

My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practical man relies on the language of the first.

Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it today because it is not of today.

Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs.

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.

Each man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he does not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well - he has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun.

Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.

You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you would not praise an angel.

But when you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world.

Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail.