Ay, sir; to be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.
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:
There is no liar like the one who lies to himself. He has a fool indeed for an audience.
Dishonor waits on perfidy. A man should blush to think a falsehood; it is the crime of cowards.
Deceit is this world's passport: who would dare,
However pure the breast, to lay it bare?
Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.
It is vain to find fault with those arts of deceiving, wherein men find pleasure to be deceived.
He will lie, sir, with such volubility, that you would think truth were a fool.