Quotes About Honesty

There is no law that sermons shall be the preacher's own, but there is an eternal law against all manner of humbug. Pardon the word.

However strange it may well seem, to do one's duty will make anyone conceited who only does it sometimes. Those who do it always would as soon think of being conceited of eating their dinner as of doing their duty. What honest boy would pride himself on not picking pockets?

It is one of the poorest of human weaknesses that a man would be ashamed of saying he has done wrong instead of so ashamed of having done wrong that he cannot rest till he has said so. For the shame cleaves fast until the confession removes it.

To give truth to him who loves it not is to only give him more multiplied reasons for misinterpretation.

But may not one sometimes make a mistake without being able to help it?' 'Yes. But so long as he is not after his own ends, he will never make a serious mistake.

Perhaps you have had more friends than you are aware of. You owe something to the man, for instance, who, with his outspoken antagonism, roused you first to a sense of what was lacking to you. I hope I shall be grateful to God for it some day, returned Wingfold. I cannot say that I feel much obligation to Mr. Bascombe. And yet when I think of it,—perhaps—I don't know—what ought a man to be more grateful for than honesty?

The man whose vision is weak, but who, as far as he sees, and desirous to see farther, does the thing he sees, is a true man. If a man knows what is, and says it is not, his knowing does not make him less than a liar.

To the honest soul it is a comfort to believe that the truth will one day be known, that it will cease to be supposed that he was and did as dull heads and hearts reported of him. Still more satisfactory will be the unveiling where a man is misunderstood by those who ought to know him better—who, not even understanding the point at issue, take it for granted he is about to do the wrong thing, while he is crying for courage to heed neither himself nor his friends, but only the Lord.

To confess uprightness in one of the opposite party seemed to most men to involve treachery to their own.

No man can lie FOR God, however he may try it, for God is lovelier than all the imaginations of all his creatures can think.

but it is not that I do not think you a Christian; it is that I want you to be a downright real Christian, not one that is but trying to feel as a Christian ought to feel. I have lost so much precious time in that way!

She who is even once unjust can not complain if the like is expected of her again.

it wasn't that I'd grown any braver as I got older - the reverse if anything

Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolucionary act.