Quotes About Honesty

I love the truth. It's the facts I'm not a fan of.

A moment of choice is a moment of truth. It's the testing point of our character and competence.

if falsehood is your nature, then only by falsehood can you be true.

Am I telling the truth? I think I am a truthful man. From moment to moment I believe myself sincere, but sometimes looking back I can see I've been mistaken, even that I've lied.

A true thing, poorly expressed, is a lie.

It is a little theory of mine that has much exercised my mind lately, that most of the problems of this silly and delightful world derive from our apologising for those things which we ought not to apologise for, and failing to apologise for those things for which apology is necessary.

It is easier to hide a hundred mountains from a jealous wife than one mistress.

I'm all right, I told her. This is a lie, when you're twelve. And all the other years, too.

Common sense is a very poor guide to scientific insight for it represents cultural prejudice more often than it reflects the native honesty of a small boy before the naked emperor.

If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.

Friends don't spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.

A man who can't bear to share his habits is a man who needs to quit them.

If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.

The most important things are the hardest to say

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on both of us.

Only children tell the whole truth, you know. That's what makes them children.

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

Small children are great accepters. They don't understand shame, or the need to hide things.

And this wasn't lying, not really. It was leaving out.

There were people who lied for gain, people who lied from pain, people who lied simply because the concept of telling the truth was utterly alien to them . . . and then there were people who lied because they were waiting for it to be time to tell the truth.

Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of regard.

Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as enemies and equals?

A man who lies about beer makes enemies

This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit.