Quotes About Candour

Tony Blair is an extremely popular figure in North America. His memoir is refreshing, both for its candour and vivid portrayal of political life.

I'm halfway through Patti Smith's memoir 'Just Kids,' which is heart-stoppingly vivid. It drips with beauty and hope and devastating candour. I don't want it to end.

Do not sit dumb in company; it will be ascribed either to pride, cunning, or stupidity: give your opinion modestly, but freely; hear that of others with candour; and ever endeavour to find out, and to communicate truth.

How attracted to one another we had been; how light she felt on my lap; how exciting it always was; how, even though we weren't having full sex, all the elements of it--the lust, the tenderness, the candour, the trust--were there anyway. And how part of me hadn't minded not going the whole way...This acceptance of less than others had was also due to fear, of course: fear of pregnancy, fear of saying or doing the wrong thing, fear of an overwhelming closeness I couldn't handle.

The young man turned to him with a disarming candour which instantly put him on his guard.

I'm not dripping with charisma like many of my friends are. But I do have candour, which is close.

In a nation distracted by faction, there are, no doubt, always a few, though commonly but a very few, who preserve their judgment untainted by the general contagion. They seldom amount to more than, here and there, a solitary individual, without any influence, excluded, by his own candour, from the confidence of either party, and who, though he may be one of the wisest, is necessarily, upon that very account, one of the most insignificant men in the society.

Truth is, I'll never know all there is to know about you just as you will never know all there is to know about me. Humans are by nature too complicated to be understood fully. So, we can choose either to approach our fellow human beings with suspicion or to approach them with an open mind, a dash of optimism and a great deal of candour.

As we talk with candour, we open the doors to new possibilities and new areas of cooperation in advance in democracy, in combating terrorism, in energy and environment, science and technology and international peacekeeping.

Another intense relationship was kept under wraps. No letters to Judge Lord were published for half a century, and by that time the renunciatory legend was so firmly established that Emily's delight in the Judge's visits and her candour about desire have been underplayed.

Apparently too much candour can become tedious, or so Lady Emma tells me.

How can a man's candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind—impetuous, arm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian.

Far down the corridor a slim figure in white approaches, dwarfed by the smoky distance; her nun-like cap floating, her scarlet cape, the "cape of pride," slipped round her narrow shoulders. How intent and silent They are! I watched this one pass with a look half reverence, half envy. One should never aspire to know a Sister intimately. They are disappointing people; without candour, without imagination. Yet what a look of personality hangs about them....

I think what kids who like heavy music are really looking for is the honesty and candour of it.

The eyes of the Englishman were open and stared back with frank candour. Except for the irises, which were of flecked grey so that they seemed smoky like the hoar mist on a winter's morning. It took Rodin a few seconds to realize that they had no expression at all. Whatever thoughts did go on behind the smoke-screen, nothing came through, and Rodin felt a worm of unease. Like all men created by systems and procedures, he did not like the unpredictable and therefore the uncontrollable.

The infirmity of art was the candour of affection, the grossness of pedigree the refinement of sympathy; the ugliest object in fact as a general thing were the bravest, the tenderest mementoes, and, as such, figured in glass cases apart, worthy doubtless of the home but not worthy of the temple – dedicated to the grimacing, not to the clear-faced gods. She

She was the oddest combination of contradictions he'd ever met -innocence and sensuality, candour and diplomacy, anxiety and utter fearlessness. He hadn't even begun to figure out how her mind worked. But she was damn well going to live long enough for him to try.

Affectation, or coldness, or stupid, coarse-minded misapprehension of one's meaning are the usual rewards of candour.

I am pleased that you are so fully convinced of my candour, for to know that you suspected me of a deficiency in this virtue would grieve and mortify me beyond expression. I do not derive any merit from the possession of it, for in me it is constitutional. Yet I think where it is possessed it will rarely exist alone, and where it is wanted there is reason to doubt the existence of almost every other virtue.

The trouble is I don't like the pop music which it's all right to like. You can have a bit of Pink Floyd shoved in between your symphonies and your Dame Janet Baker — that shows a refreshing breadth of taste or at least a refreshing candour.

But the prioress continued to express pleasure in Dame Alice's common sense, candour, and lack of imagination, so Dame Alice continued to manifest common sense and lack of imagination.

Would that we might spare the reader what is to come and say to him in so many words, Orlando died and was buried. But here, alas, Truth, Candour, and Honesty, the austere Gods, who keep watch and ward by the inkpot of the biographer, cry No!

There was about him a candour, and gentleness, which made the women trust him. He understood.

Affectation of candour is common enough—one meets with it everywhere. But to be candid without ostentation or design—to take the good of everybody's character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad—belongs to you alone.