Quotes About Honesty

Flannery O'Connor quote: "The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people's feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.

Sharing difficult truths might come with a cost — the need to face them — but there's also a reward: freedom. The truth releases us from shame.

Do you think I'm a bad person?" she'd ask, and I'd assure her that everyone who comes to therapy worries that what they think or feel might not be "normal" or "good," and yet it's our honesty with ourselves that helps us make sense of our lives with all of their nuances and complexity. Repress those thoughts, and you'll likely behave "badly." Acknowledge them, and you'll grow.

Honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.

more real in his life is allowing him to let others be more real too.

Above all, I didn't want to fall into the trap that Buddhists call idiot compassion — an apt phrase, given John's worldview. In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people's feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty.

Is Boyfriend unhappy with something in the relationship that he's afraid to tell me about? I ask him calmly, my voice softer now, because I'm mindful of the fact that Very Angry People aren't Very Approachable.

The people who are watching us--the people who really see us--don't care about the false self, about the show we're putting on.

The truth comes with a cost: the need to face reality.

doorknob disclosures.

Write,' she said, 'as if you'll never be read. That way you'll be sure to tell the truth.

I remember reading once that some fellows use language to conceal thought; but it's been my experience that a good many more use it instead of thought.

When you make a mistake, don't make a second one -- keeping it to yourself. Own up. The time to sort out rotten eggs is at the nest. The deeper you hide them in the case the longer they stay in circulation, and the worse impression they make when they finally come to the breakfast table.

Beginning before you know what you want to say and keeping on after you have said it lands a merchant in a lawsuit or the poorhouse, and the first is a shortcut to the second.

Never threaten, because a threat is a promise to pay that it isn't always convenient to meet, but if you don't make it good it hurts your credit. Save a threat till you're ready to act, and then you won't need it.

When the tongue lies, the eyes tell the truth.

Honesty is not only a gift to other people--it's a gift to yourself.

It's the rare person whose outside matches up with who they are inside.

It was easier to break promises when they weren't voiced.

There is little I can expound on when the truth is spoken.

There's no such thing as mostly. It's either true or it ain't.

That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It's like painting scenery.

Anyone who ever had a heart, He wouldn?t turn around and break it. Anyone who ever played a part, he wouldn?t turn around and fake it. Sweet Jane