Quotes About Honesty

Du, dem ich's nicht sage, daß ich bei Nacht weinend liege, dessen Wesen mich müde macht wie eine Wiege. Du, der mir nicht sagt, wenn er wacht meinetwillen: wie, wenn wir diese Pracht ohne zu stillen in uns ertrügen? Sieh Dir die Liebenden an, wenn erst das Bekennen begann, wie bald sie lügen.

Gefährlich und schlecht sind nur jene Traurigkeiten, die man unter die Leute trägt, um sie zu übertönen; wie Krankheiten, die oberflächlich und töricht behandelt werden, treten sie nur zurück und brechen nach einer kleinen Pause um so furchtbarer aus; und sammeln sich an im Innern und sind Leben, sind ungelebtes, verschmähtes, verlorenes Leben, an dem Man sterben kann.

It is quite rare to encounter a truly creative and productive person who resides in his own stillness or simply in the midst of his melody, close to the honest beating of his heart!

I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false.

So now they're shaking in their boots and looking for someone to give them the answer they want to hear. Not the truth, but some lie that will protect them from the truth

The truth is the light and the light is the truth.

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth.

My God, boy! You're black and living in the South—did you forget how to lie?

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied, not even I. I've never been more loved than when I tried to 'justify' and affirm someone's mistaken beliefs.

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest.

Perhaps the truth was always a lie.

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied—not even I. On the other hand, I've never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to "justify" and affirm someone's mistaken beliefs; or when I've tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear.

It is too often the case in political concerns, that men state facts not as they are, but as they wish them to be; and almost every man, by calling to mind past scenes, will find this to be true.

Be silly. Be honest. Be kind.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.

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

Be good to your work, your word, and your friend.

Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.

Your actions speak so loudly, I can not hear what you are saying.

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

I wish to say what I think and feel today, with the proviso that tomorrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

Speak your latent conviction. . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.