Quotes About Honesty

Look, if you don't have a bad attitude and lots of things wrong with you, no serious person is going to be interested. If you feel scared, outraged, confused most of the time, come on over. Have a seat.

I felt that in my strange new friends and in certain new books, I was meeting my other half. Some people wanted to get rich or famous, but my friends and I wanted to get real. We wanted to get deep. (Also, I suppose, we wanted to get laid.) I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously.

good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are.

What I resist is not the truth but when people put a pretty bow on scary things instead of saying, "This is a nightmare. I hate everything. I'm going to go hide in the garage

I did the only thing I know to do. I said it. I told the truth...90% of the time this is the solution. Tell it. Cry if you can. If you can't, sit in a dejected posture hunched over and stay with this a while. It will shift and become less acute.

good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But

So I practice the fifth Get: I get in touch with others. I tell my partner the truth about how crunchy I feel inside, how unevolved or vindictive. Or I pick up the three-hundred-pound phone and tell a close friend. Or I get in the car and head to where one of my precious communities has gathered. This might be a park, my church, my Sunday school room; with hikers, sober people, townsfolk.

Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic—jealousy especially so—but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.

Rilke wrote: "I want to unfold. I don't want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

So as Samuel Beckett admonished us to fail again, and fail better, we try to pray again, and pray better, for slightly longer and with slightly more honesty, breathing more, deeper, and with more attention.

A man ought not be afraid to say he didn't know. Nor a woman.

Ridicule was a better defense than truth.

One renegade can discredit a hundred honest injuns.

The truth doesn't care what we think of it.

I shall ask into my shell only those friends with whom I can be completely honest. I find I am shedding hypocrisy in human relationships. What a rest that will be! The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.

The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.

The truth can be very sharp. But it makes a cleaner wound than lies. It will not fester

Page 134 Florence Nightengale is speaking to William Monk Of course. If you know the truth, it takes a gentler and perhaps a wiser woman than Purdence Barrymore not to speak it aloud. She did not understand the arts of diplomacy. I fear that perhaps I do not either. The sick cannot wait for flattery and coercion to do their work.

You deliberately don't ask the questions to which you would rather not know the answers. You call it trust. You know too late that it is cowardice.

In that moment there was no pretense between them, no lingering vestige of reserve or attempt to escape, no denial. It was final and complete.

the honest friendship where there was no barrier between men and women, where speech was not forever dictated by social ritual rather than true thoughts and feelings, where people worked side by side for a desperate common cause and only courage and skill mattered.

The truth deals only one wound, but suspicions a thousand.

is not the time you spend with someone, it is what happens in that time. I have known people for years, and yet never met the real person inside, if there is one. Others I have spoken with for only an hour or two, and yet what was said had meaning and honesty that will last forever.

Ask her her opinion of anything, and instead of judging what is appropriate to say, she will tell you what she really thinks.