HONESTY A commentary of the times is that the word honesty is now preceded by old-fashioned.
Larry Wolters
A frank talk is good soap for hearts.
Arabian Proverb
A guileless mind is a great treasure; it is worth any price.
A. W. Tozer (1897–1963)
An honest man is not the worse because a dog barks at him.
Danish Proverb
To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of a thousand.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
Candor is always a double-edged sword; it may heal or it may separate.
Wilhelm Stekel
Candor is the brightest gem of criticism.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)
Friends, if we be honest with ourselves, we shall be honest with each other.
George Macdonald (1824–1905)
He has but one word.
Honesty consists of the unwillingness to lie to others; maturity, which is equally hard to attain, consists of the unwillingness to lie to oneself.
Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986)
Honesty has a beautiful and refreshing simplicity about it. No ulterior motives. No hidden meanings. An absence of hypocrisy, duplicity, political games, and verbal superficiality. As honesty and real integrity characterize our lives, there will be no need to manipulate others.
Charles R. Swindoll (1934– )
Honesty is a fine jewel, but much out of fashion.
Sir Thomas Fuller (1608–1661)
Honesty is looking painful truths in the face.
Aubrey Thomas De Vere (1814–1902)
Honesty is often in the wrong.
Lucan (39–65)
Honesty is praised, but left to shiver.
Juvenal (c. 60–c. 127)
Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom.
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
How desperately difficult it is to be honest with oneself. It is much easier to be honest with other people.
Edward White Benson (1829–1896)
I hope I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.
George Washington (1732–1799)
I love you more today than yesterday. Yesterday, you really got on my nerves!
Openness is to wholeness as secrets are to sickness.
Barbara Johnson
People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty.
Richard J. Needham
Princes and lords are but the breath of kings,
An honest man’s the noblest work of God.
Robert Burns (1759–1796)
“Real isn’t how you are made” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. . . . When you are Real, you don’t mind being hurt. . . . It doesn’t happen all at once. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out, and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all because once you are real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
Margery Williams
Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
Some of the finest cheating in the world has been done under the guise of honesty.
Henry H. Crane
The more honesty a man has, the less he affects the air of a saint.
Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801)
[Jesus] knows we are sinners and there will be people that we do not like and that do not like us. The issue as a Christian is not to pretend that we love everything that moves and breathes. That would be phony and hypocritical. Jesus does not tell us to pretend they are friends either. Rather he asks that we acknowledge the fact that they are enemies without pretense and yet to respond to them with love, not hate or bitterness.
Rebecca Manley Pippert
