Quotes about Honesty

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.

The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies…

I have become so pessimistic that these days I'd even choose the truth over friendship.

If you want a person's faults, go to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know.

"O' course I came to look arter you, my darlin'," replied Mr. Weller; for once permitting his passion to get the better of his veracity.

Truthfulness is the main element of character.

Guard your integrity as a sacred thing; nothing at last is sacred except the integrity of your own mind.

You will have many ups and downs in life, but what is most important is that you remain "true to yourself." Then, as Shakespeare said, "thou can'st not then be false to any man.

Edmund Way Teale in his 1950 book Circle of the Seasons understood the dilemma better: It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.

Tom Paine wrote in The Age of Reason: Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

she had wondered if any of his Christianity was true. Had it all been a cover? A way to network and look honest? Or had he truly loved Jesus, but found ways to compartmentalize the sin in his life as so many others did?