Quotes About Honesty

It's a great country: you can say whatever you like so long as it is strictly true--nobody will ever take you seriously.

Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophants, courtiers, servitors, entertainers. Shakespeare was a sychophant; however, he was and is also a very good poet, and so we continue to read him.

It's a great country: you can say whatever you like so long as it is strictly true—nobody will ever take you seriously.

All men at heart, she thought—at bottom should I say?—are really queer. The way ballplayers pat one another on the fannies, running onto the field or coming out of the huddle. The Greek quarterback and the nervous center. Queer as clams. Though of course none would have the decency or honesty or nerve to admit it.

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.

Sincerity doesn't mean anything. A person can be sincere and be more destructive than a person who is insincere.

This sect (the Encyclopaedists) propagate with much zeal the doctrine of materialism, which prevails among the great and the wits; we owe to it partly that kind of practical philosophy which, reducing Egotism to a system, looks upon society as a war of cunning; success the rule of right and wrong, honesty as an affair of taste or decency: and the world as the patrimony of clever scoundrels.))

we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and be real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot sticks to us … And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors. RAINER MARIA RILKE

During relaxation we drop our guard. Particularly in conversation. Relaxed conversation leads to openness. And in openness we often reveal what should never be revealed.

Integrity means wholeness, unity; the idea of integrity as a value is the idea of a life lived as a whole rather than as a series of disconnected episodes.

Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.

Honest men have very little fun in life. It's a well-known fact.

We make money the old-fashioned way. We earn it.

Speak Truth to Power.

Even your closest friends won't tell you.

Nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest.

Love, she said, should be said more slowly, and ran from the house. Words could not catch her as such. Honesty is so slow, that is the trouble.

If you add to the truth, you subtract from it.

Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.

If you mess up, 'fess up.

A man may smile and bid you hail Yet wish you to the devil; But when a good dog wags his tail, You know he's on the level.

Bachelor: the only man who has never told his wife a lie.

Open rebuke is better than secret love.Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.

You don't make up for your sins in church, you do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.