Quotes About Honesty

We tell the real truth of our life by the stories we repeatedly tell.

Being idolized and being torn down felt oddly similar. They both made me feel alone. Friendship and trust should be earned, and when you're famous, people seem to want to give them to you whether you've earned them or not, and it felt dishonest to me. Fame was not real. It was all a projection—fame made me a blank canvas that people projected their love, lust, troubles, self-worth, and desire upon. Fame and power do not change us, they amplify us.

Reality wins, and I'd rather see the truth than stay in love with a fantasy.

At school, at home, in bars, I was an emotional contortionist, alternating between awkward self-aggrandizing and trying to win favor so as to fit in. When I wrote, I let myself be dead honest, flaws and all. But I was myself, I felt real. I went inside myself when a pen was in my hand and enjoyed that space in there.

I hope the teacher doesn't say, 'Write an essay about your summer vacation.' If she does, I'll leave the paper blank. Else I'll have to lie. Say eviction is the best vacation. Hearing Ma weeping and Pa wheezing, cracking his knuckles while Leda sucks her pacifier, double-time, and Ray holds my hand. I never lie. I won't. It's better to keep quiet.

What you don't see with your eyes, don't witness with your mouth.

A half-truth is a whole lie.

Do not be wise in words - be wise in deeds.

Truth is the safest lie.

What you don't see with your eyes, don't invent with your mouth.

Your friend has a friend don't tell him.

What a terrible man, I thought, worse than a traitor. At least a traitor betrays people by telling the truth. Uncle Zhu tried to save himself by telling lies.

He loves to communicate, so if you let him know it's safe to be honest, he will tell you what he really thinks and feels.

Never go behind someone's back. If you need to meet with people other than the person you're currently working with, make sure you find a valid reason for it and, if possible, engage your current contact in setting it up.

In the primitive simplicity of their minds they are more easily victimized by a large than by a small lie, since they sometimes tell petty lies themselves but would be ashamed to tell big ones.

It seems to me unthinkable that a man with his background of slander, abuse, innuendo, expediency and resort to all the most devious political devices should ever occupy an office which we have tried for generations to exalt in the esteem of young people and the world

To write something down is to make a fossil record of a mind. Stories are full of power and force; they seethe with meaning, with truths and lies, evasions and honesty. Speech often has far more weight and urgency than writing. But most words, once spoken, are forgotten, while writing lasts, a point observed early in the seventeenth century by an English vicar named Samuel Purchas.

One Republican said, "I felt that Bryan was the first politician I had ever heard speak the truth and nothing but the truth," even though in every case, when he read a transcript of the speech in the newspaper the next day, he "disagreed with almost all of it.

She wasn't the type to stab you in the back. She stabbed you right there in the front so you could watch all the blood gushing out.

If you tell someone a secret, and ask them to keep it secret, you are asking them to display a discretion you are unable to display yourself.

It's amazing […] how perfectly honest people who would starve rather than steal sixpence, will steal books without compunction.

I am moved by a person's honest actions and how they treat those around them. These are the qualities I look for in those I wish to have close to me.

The trustworthiness of science comes not from certainty, but from its very openness about its uncertainty, always calling into question what we currently understand and being prepared to replace that knowledge with a deeper understanding if something better comes along. In other walks of life, this attitude might be regarded as fickle. But not in science. Scientific progress depends on scientists' unwavering commitment to the qualities of honesty and doubt.

You can't fake it when you're alone with God, you know.