Quotes about Honesty

The foundation stones for a balanced success are honesty, character, integrity, faith, love and loyalty.

You must never doubt the one you love.
But they might not be telling you the truth.
Never mind that. You tell them the truth.
What do you mean?
You can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own.
So what should I say?
When?
When I love someone?
You should say it.

Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, to discover what is already there.

So don't ask yourself what people want. Ask instead, What is true? What really inspires me, excites me? What will really help people and take away their confusion and suffering? It's sort of a funny, crazy way to go, but I think it's the only way to bring water to the wasteland Joseph Campbell described. When I read something truthful, something real, I breathe a deep sigh and say, "Fantastic - I wasn't mad or alone in thinking that, after all!" So often we are left to our own devices, struggling in the dark with this external and internal propaganda system. At that point, for someone to tell us the truth is a gift. In a world where people all around us are lying and confusing us, to be honest is a great kindness.

An uncomfortable feeling is not an enemy. It’s a gift that says, "Get honest; inquire." We reach out for alcohol, or television, or credit cards, so we can focus out there and not have to look at the feeling. And that's as it should be, because in our innocence we haven't known how. So now what we can do is reach out for a paper and a pencil, write thought down, and investigate.

The voice within is what I'm married to. All marriage is a metaphor for that marriage. My lover is the place inside me where an honest yes and no come from. That's my true partner. It's always there.
And to tell you yes when my integrity says no is to divorce that partner.

If you are a warrior, decency means that you are not cheating anybody at all. You are not even about to cheat anybody. There is a sense of straightforwardness and simplicity. With setting-sun vision, or vision based on cowardice, straightforwardness is always a problem. If people have some story or news to tell somebody else, first of all they are either excited or disappointed. Then they begin to figure out how to tell their news. They develop a plan, which leads them completely away from simply telling it. By the time a person hears the news, it is not news at all, but opinion. It becomes a message of some kind, rather than fresh, straightforward news. Decency is the absence of strategy. It is of utmost importance to realize that the warrior’s approach should be simple-minded sometimes, very simple and straightforward. That makes it very beautiful: you having nothing up your sleeve; therefore a sense of genuineness comes through. That is decency.

Responsibility to self simply means to acknowledge inner truth—our imperfections and our power, our beauty.

I work in the margins.  The margins are where you'll find the nice people.  You'll find real friends.  You'll find honesty. You'll find integrity.  You'll find relationships that will last you for a lifetime and will be there to support you in the bad times, which are the only relationships that matter anyway.  Relationships that are all about power and money aren't worth having.

A human being who shows some singular or distinctive indications of being anomalous, of actually being capable of uncompromising honesty with himself, is worth investigating and listening to or reading or challenging or raising questions with; but in the marketplace of the Many, all the multitudes of signs and treasure-maps will only convince a discerning individual that the X that marks "buried treasure" is the last place in the world to waste one's time digging for buried treasure--cunning and perceptive people who really have treasure buried someplace will convey tacitly to other cunning and perceptive people that the best place to bury treasure is in those places where no naive or simplistic mentality would ever think of looking.

Tzu Chang asked Confucius about jen. Confucius said, "If you can practice these five things with all the people, you can be called jen."

Tzu Chang asked what they were.

Confucius said, "Courtesy, generosity, honesty, persistence, and kindness.
If you are courteous, you will not be disrespected;
if you are generous, you will gain everything.
If you are honest, people will rely on you.
If you are persistent you will get results.
If you are kind, you can employ people."

Truth is Evidence of Love and Nothing Can Destroy the Power of Trusting and Loving Unconditionally.

Non-Indian writers usually say "Great Spirit," "Mother Earth," "Two-Legged, Four-Legged, and Winged." Mixed-blood writers usually say "Creator, "Mother Earth," "Two-Legged, Four- Legged, and Winged." Indian writers usually say "God," "Mother Earth," "Human Being, Dog, and Bird."

'Always speak the truth - think before you speak - and write it down afterwards.'
'I'm sure I didn't mean - ' Alice was beginning, but the Red Queen interrupted her impatiently.
'That's just what I complain of!  You should have meant!  What do you suppose is the use of child without any meaning?  Even a joke should have some meaning - and a child's more important than a joke, I hope.

The one thing worse than a knee-pad Tory is a chickenshit liberal. The type that can not say "shit" even when his mouth is full of it.

"Freedom is for honest people. No man who is not himself honest can be free – he is his own trap.”

 You can tell a person, not by what they say they are gratitude for, but how they respect what they claim to be grateful for."
Original quote contributed by Veronica Davina from her Mom, Mrs. Donna Priscott

A positive sandwitch is better than negative chicken.

Wear your Mona Lisa Smile, and hold all your mystery.

"To have integrity one must be consistently honest and trustworthy in everything one does...When you have integrity, people know you will do what you know is right...Its knowing what you have to do without someone telling you to do it. It is the core of a person's-and a company's- reputation."

When I first got the job, blacks wanted me to get on white people and women wanted me to get on men. I just wanted to tell the truth.

You can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own.

The foundation stones for a balanced success are honesty, character, integrity, faith, love and loyalty.

"This life is yours. Take the power to choose what you want to do and do it well. Take the power to love what you want in life and love it honestly. Take the power to walk in the forest and be a part of nature. Take the power to control your own life. No one else can do it for you. Take the power to make your life happy."

We need an honest bottom line. Today that bottom line is vastly subsidized. If anyone of us were paying the full cost of oil our bottom lines would be very different. If you internalize the cost of oil, look at the cost of the war in the Middle East or the cost of global warming for future generations, if you internalize those external costs and what you pay, that bottom line would look very different, what ever business you are in. If we somehow put a value on species extinction and factor that into our costs that bottom line would look very different. IF we put any resource depletion into costs our bottom line would change. So what we have is a dishonest market that does not take into account all the costs when it establishes its prices. We need an honest marketplace before we can let the market work for sustainability rather than against it as it works today.

Love tells you when you've got spinach in your teeth.

speak frankly, and the world franks with you

I think a real writer simply has to think in other terms. Not, "Will I get in this magazine? Will I get the NEA next year?" but whether or not this work is something he would do if a gun was held to his head and somebody was going to pull the trigger as soon as the last word of the last paragraph of the last page was finished. Now if you can write out of the sense that you're going to die as soon as the work is done, then you will write with urgency, honesty, courage, and without flinching at all, as if this were the last testament in language, the last utterance you could ever make to anybody. If a work is written like that, then I want to read it. If somebody's writing out of that sense, then I'll say, "This is serious. This person is not fooling around. This work is not a means to some other end, the work is not just intended for some silly superficial goal, this work is the writer saying something, because he or she feels that if it isn't said, it will never be said." Those are the writers I want to read. And there are not many twentieth-century writers like that [nor twenty-first century writers either!--SMdM].

“What is uttered from the heart alone, Will win the hearts of others to your own.”

He that is false to his first oath will be false to his second as well.