Honesty Quotes
By count, Shakespeare is far ahead of the next writers, Solomon, George Herbert and Mark Twain. The sourced lines lean toward sincerity, not honesty as such, and they are not what a poster would use. Wilde, in The Critic as Artist (1891), says a little sincerity is a dangerous thing and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. Martin Luther King Jr., in Strength to Love (1963), says nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. Shaw’s remark that there is no love sincerer than the love of food appears here and under Food.
The only flagged entry is “It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver,” credited to Machiavelli and marked misattributed.
Most quoted on honesty:
If there is a punishment for telling the truth, then many people will tell lies.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair; the rest is in the hands of God.
An experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often quite picturesque liar.
Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie:
A fault, which needs it most, grows two thereby.
And he that does one fault at first
And lies to hide it, makes it two.