Quotes About Honesty

Be as you wish to seem, an ancient had said. It was good advice. Because acting brave and being so are very much the same thing.

The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.

Full revelation, she couldn't help feeling, was something which was considered a virtue only among the reckless or the cruel.

A little bird whispers in my ear: Be fair! Nobody, no country, has a monopoly of untruth.

Straight answers were beyond the powers of Rashid Khalifa, who would never take a short cut if there was a longer, twistier road available.

Honesty is not the best policy in life. Only, perhaps, in art.

It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish … to do otherwise is to legitimize it. Outside The Whale ( Granta , 1984)

O, Need's a funny fish: it makes people untruthful. They all suffer from it, but they will not always admit.

Is the truth too poor a thing for us? Is any man innocent of embellishing it at times, or even of abandoning it entirely?

These are the times we live in, in which men hide their truths, perhaps even from themselves, and live in lies, until the lies reveal those truths in ways impossible to foretell.

Every one of the world's great religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain -- from cosmology to psychology to economics -- has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture. Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.

The only angels we need invoke are those of our better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed, and faith , which is surely the devil's masterpiece.

Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected.

By lying, we deny others a view of the world as it is. Our dishonesty not only influences the choices they make, it often determines the choices they can make—and in ways we cannot always predict. Every lie is a direct assault upon the autonomy of those we lie to.

The core of science is not a mathematical modeling--it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.

The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathetical modeling; it is intellectual honesty. It is time we acknowledge a basic feature of human discourse: when considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn't.

Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.

Honest people are a refuge: You know they mean what they say; you know they will not say one thing to your face and another behind your back; you know they will tell you when they think you have failed—and for this reason their praise cannot be mistaken for mere flattery.

One of the worst things about breaking the law is that it puts one at odds with an indeterminate number of other people. This is among the many corrosive effects of having unjust laws: They tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie so as to avoid being punished for behavior that is ethically blameless.

Honesty is a gift we can give to others. It is also a source of power and an engine of simplicity.

To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.

we do our friends no favors by pretending not to notice flaws in their work, especially when those who are not their friends are bound to notice these same flaws.

When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives—about how they appear, their reputations, or their prospects in the world.

A wasteland of embarrassment and social upheaval can be neatly avoidedby following a single precept in life: Do not lie