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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.

Random quote on Honesty

Most quoted on honesty:

Round numbers are always false.

Samuel Johnson

The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray us
In deepest consequence.

William Shakespeare Macbeth (1605)

One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible, and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so.

Franz Kafka

For my part, if a lie may do thee grace,
I'll gild it with the happiest terms I have.

William Shakespeare

But he that sows lies in the end shall not lack of a harvest, and soon he may rest from toil indeed, while others reap and sow in his stead.

J. R. R. Tolkien The Silmarillion (1977)

By Hercules! I have often heard that your piping-hot lie is the best of lies: what the gods dictate, that is right.

Plautus

You will destroy those who speak lies. Jehovah detests violent and deceptive people.

David

Machination is worth more than force.

François Rabelais Pantagruel (1532)

They fool me to the top of my bent. I will come by and by.

William Shakespeare

I tell him, if a clergyman, he lies!
If captains the remark, or critics, make,
Why they lie also—under a mistake.

Lord Byron

The glory which is built upon a lie soon becomes a most unpleasant incumbrance. … How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!

Mark Twain

You lie—under a mistake,
For this is the most civil sort of lie
That can be given to a man's face. I now
Say what I think.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

But Esau's hands suit ill with Jacob's voice.

John Dryden

He seemed
For dignity compos'd and high exploit:
But all was false and hollow.

John Milton

He that departs with his own honesty
For vulgar praise, doth it too dearly buy.

Ben Jonson

Bashful sincerity and comely love.

William Shakespeare

Try how much of the word of God you can understand, and what is more, try how much you can practice. A sincere wish and purpose to do the will of God, will be your best way to know the mind of God.

John Angell James

If I could believe that this was said sincerely, I could put up with anything.

Terence

Straightforwardness without civility is like a surgeon's knife, effective but unpleasant. Candor with courtesy is helpful and admirable.

Yukteswar Giri Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

To seek sincerity above all things is perhaps, at bottom, not to want to be transformed; it is to cling to yourself, to have a morbid love of yourself, just as you are, that is to say, false. It is to refuse release.

Henri de Lubac Paradoxes of Faith (1959)

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