Honesty Quotes

We only confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no big ones.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Honesty is the best policy -- when there is money in it.

Mark Twain

If we put the emphasis upon the right things, if we live the life that is worth while and then fail, we will survive all disasters, we will out-live all misfortune. We should be so well balanced and symmetrical, that nothing which could ever happen could throw us off our center, so that no matter what misfortune should overtake us, there would still be a whole magnificent man or woman left after being stripped of everything else.

Orison Swett Marden

There is something greater than wealth, grander even than fame -- manhood, character, stand for success... nothing else really does.

Orison Swett Marden

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Virginia Woolf

The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.

Ernest Hemingway

Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.

W. H. Auden

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.

Thomas Carlyle

I have found that being honest is the best technique I can use. Right up front, tell people what you're trying to accomplish and what you're willing to sacrifice to accomplish it.

Lee Iacocca

If a man of this century was committed to honesty, committed to his highest integrity in all matters

Wulf Zendik, from first novel Ze

It is annoying to be honest to no purpose.

Ovid

A man is sorry to be honest for nothing.

Ovid

He that jokes confesses.

Italian Proverb

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Willia

No man is so exquisitely honest or upright in living, but that ten times in his life he might not lawfully be hanged.

Michel de Montaigne

If you can't get to be uncommon through going straight, you'll never get to do it through going crooked. [...] live well and die happy.

Charles Dickens

Nothing resembles an honest man more than a cheat.

Proverb

A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.

Oscar Wilde

It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

Oscar Wilde

Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control.

Don Marquis