Quotes about honesty

The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.

I always tell what I believe. Whether it's true, I'm no more sure than any man.

I have no secret thoughts... Or rather, they're not secret because I've withheld them — if they're unknown, it's because no one asked.

You always back off at the exact moment when you're about to tell the other person exactly what she needs to hear.

In Hell you'd be foolish to count on people displaying high standards of honesty. The same goes for earth.

She had done the usual trick – been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst (if it had not been for Mr Bankes) were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere.

She alone spoke the truth; to her alone could he speak it. That was the source of her everlasting attraction for him, perhaps; she was a person to whom one could say what came into one's head.

It takes a certain amount of courage, he thought, to face yourself and say with candor, I’m rotten. I’ve done evil and I will again. It was no accident; it emanated from the true, authentic me.

The first one has to do with whether a man knows what he is talking about, whether what he says has some basis or not. And my trick that I use is very easy. If you ask him intelligent questions — that is, penetrating, interested, honest, frank, direct questions on the subject, and no trick questions — then he quickly gets stuck. It is like a child asking naive questions. If you ask naive but relevant questions, then almost immediately the person doesn't know the answer, if he is an honest man.

A person talks in such generalities that everyone can understand him and it's considered to be some deep philosophy. However, I would like to be very rather more special and I would like to be understood in an honest way, rather than in a vague way.

No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling. (20 December 1939)

If I had been downright honest with myself, I would have seen very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea. But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing.