Truthfulness Quotes

I spent hours apart by myself, taking stock of where I stood, mentally, on this my thirtieth birthday. It came to me queerly how, four years ago, I had meant to be a general and knighted, when thirty. Such temporal dignities were now in my grasp, only that my sense of falsity of the Arab position had cured me of crude ambition: while it left me craving for good repute among men. This craving made me profoundly suspect my truthfulness to myself. Only too good an actor could so impress his favorable opinion. Here were the Arabs believing me, Allenby and Clayton trusting me, my bodyguard dying for me: and I began to wonder if all established reputations were founded, like mine, on fraud. ~ T.E. Lawrence

Two things are owed to truthfulness: lasting marriages and short friendships. ~ Robert Breault

It is not the quantity of your thoughts but the quality of your thoughts that make the difference. Thoughts can either be productive or a hindrance. But, when we focus our attention on faithfulness and truthfulness the restoration process begins. ~ Amaka Imani Nkosazana

Truthfulness is the golden thread that binds good lives, good relationships, and our very legacy. ~ John Manning

Sometimes our wants or needs have nothing to do with being ungrateful and everything to do with making a mistake. ~ Shannon L. Alder

In this walk to freedom, we must, without question obtain hearts of honesty and a tongue of truthfulness. ~ The Tru Sum

It is said that the history of peoples who have a history is the history of class struggle. It might be said with at least as much truthfulness, that the history of peoples without history is a history of their struggle against the state. ~ Pierre Clastres

Because the amazing fact is that truth alone will not set you free. Truthfulness will set you free. ~ Ken Wilber

To become a stoic is to endorse the truthfulness of its world view and accept its prescription for how you ought to live, not just to like how it makes you feel. ~ Julian Baggini

Copying is out of the question; only fools and impostors copy. No, the thing is to produce something as good, if possible, out of your own resources. And so begins the strange torture of the blank sheet of paper, where you must open a window that is not the one I spotted just now but one equally insistent in its truthfulness. ~ Julien Green

Beautify your tongues, O people, with truthfulness, and adorn your souls with the ornament of honesty. Beware, O people, that ye deal not treacherously with any one. ~ Bahaullah

But friendship and love cannot survive without truthfulness, nor can a healthy view of ourselves. ~ Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung

Integrity is the glue that holds our way of life together. What our young people want to see in their elders is integrity, honesty, truthfulness, and faith. What they hate most of all is hypocrisy and phoniness ... Let them see us doing what we would like them to do. ~ Billy Graham

To live in high spirits but not recklessly, to be lighthearted without swaggering or rampaging, to show trust and truthfulness but not unconditionally and not naively, and to face uncertainty with imagination instead of fatalism - this is the art of living.
~ David A. Nyberg

I may be a donkey but I can kick the wrong people. ~ Amit Abraham

The chief beauty of this book lies not so much in its literary style, or in the extent and usefulness of the information it conveys, as in its simple truthfulness. ~ Jerome K. Jerome

Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility. ~ Karl Jaspers

Authoritarian managers use power, often in the form of fear, to get people to do something their way. Leaders depend for the most part on influence rather than power, and influence derives from respect rather than fear. Respect, in turn, is based on qualities such as integrity, ability, fairness, truthfulness - in short, on character. Leaders are part of the team, and although they are given organizational authority, their real authority isn't delegated top-down but earned bottom-up. From the outside, a managed team and a led team can look the same, but from the inside they feel very different. ~ Jim Highsmith

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. ~ Pablo Picasso

Who do you want them to think you are? How do you think people see you? Or don't you let them near enough to see. You make up their minds for them. Do you think you succeed in convincing people that you are what you seem to be? You make people meet you on your own territory. You don't help them. You let them verbally hang themselves and then feel better about yourself, your power, your own sense of worth. You have the power to alienate them and if they allow it, you might even manage to make them feel awkward and foolish--foolish for letting you affect them at all. Do you want them to like you? Or are you one of those people who "don't care what people think." You're not living your life for them, so why should you give a fuck what people think? You make people come to you and, when they eventually do, you punish them with your smugness. Nothing ever out of character. ~ Carrie Fisher

Lying is forbidden in Iraq. President Saddam Hussein will tolerate nothing but truthfulness as he is a man of great honour and integrity. Everyone is encouraged to speak freely of the truths evidenced in their eyes and hearts. ~ Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

Look. Every partisan in every party has to learn one thing: Sometimes your people are wrong. To paraphrase an old retort, saying "My party, right or wrong" is like saying "My Kennedy, drunk or sober." Credibility is earned, and standing up and saying "Fie!" now and then reinforces your truthfulness. ~ James Lileks

One sincere truth from a stranger is more likely to move your life forward...than anything your friends and family may tell you to spare your feelings. ~ Anthon St. Maarten

Lovely eyes in colour, lovely eyes in form - large and tender and quietly thoughtful - but beautiful above all things in the clear truthfulness of look that dwells in their inmost depths, and shines through all their changes of expression with the light of a purer and a better world. ~ Wilkie Collins

Truthfulness is the main element of character. ~ Brian Tracy

If you set yourself to your present task along the path of true reason, with all determination, vigour,and good will: if you admit no distraction, but keep your own divinity pure and standing strong, as if you had to surrender it right now; if you grapple this to you, expecting nothing, shirking nothing, but self-content with each present action taken in accordance with nature and a heroic truthfulness in all that you say and mean - then you will lead a good life. And nobody is able to stop you. ~ Marcus Aurelius

Truthfulness so often goes with ruthlessness. ~ Dodie Smith

Perhaps no one as yet has been truthful enough about what "truthfulness" is. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it. God's saving love in Christ, however, is marked by both radical truthfulness about who we are and yet also radical, unconditional commitment to us. The merciful commitment strengthens us to see the truth about ourselves and repent. The conviction and repentance moves us to cling to and rest in God's mercy and grace. ~ Timothy Keller

Truthfulness is a luxury, perhaps the greatest, and let me assure you, the most expensive luxury in our life - and happy the man who has been able to enjoy it from his very child hood. ~ Friedrich Max Muller

I've been embarrassing myself since about birth. ~ Phil Lester

Never hesitate to tell the truth as you see it. ~ Marty Rubin

The point - the power to hurt - of all figures lies in the truthfulness of their application. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument. ~ John Berger

Today I trust me. I trust in my perceptions. Today I will live my own truth that glows within, a life of no deceptions. ~ Patricia Robin Woodruff

A lie is my attempt to tamper with the truth so that I need not face the truth. Yet as shrewd as I think myself to be, I would be wise to understand that God designed truth as ultimately tamper-proof. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Truthfulness itself is almost medication, even when it's served without advice or insight. ~ Augusten Burroughs

we live now in circumstances that encourage rather than discourage lying; evidence and activity are more easily concealed, and the need to rely on demeanor as an indicator of a person's truthfulness is greater. And our evolutionary history has not prepared us to be very sensitive to the behavioral clues relevant to lying. ~ Clancy Martin

Now you say you have to absolutely truthful. Sincerity is the main thing, and truthfulness is the main thing and don't lie to anybody ... and you'll get ahead. Brother you sure will. You'll get ahead right on that cycle of action, right toward zero! It's a trap not being able to prevaricate ... This makes life more colorful! ~ L. Ron Hubbard

But what I liked in Aberdeen was what I liked generally in Britain: the bread, the fish, the cheese, the flower gardens, the apples. the clouds, the newspapers, the beer, the wollen cloth, the radio programmes, the parks, the Indian restaurants and amateur dramatics, the postal service, the fresh vegetables, the trains, and the modesty and truthfulness of people. ~ Paul Theroux

There is a terrible truthfulness about photography that sometimes makes a thing look ridiculous. ~ George Bernard Shaw

How we all love extreme cases and apocalypses, fires, drownings, stranglings, and the rest of it. The bigger our mild, basically ethical, safe middle classes grow the more radical excitement is in demand. Mild or moderate truthfulness or accuracy seems to have no pull at all. ~ Saul Bellow

A young woman who knows and loves the Book of Mormon, who has read it several times, who has an abiding testimony of its truthfulness, and who applies its teachings will be able to stand against the wiles of the devil and will be a mighty tool in the hands of the Lord. ~ Ezra Taft Benson

He may believe that he can skimp his intellectual labour without wearing his moral natuee thin or that he can break the laws of his moral nature without breaking his intellectual integrity. He may think that he can play fast and loose with his will without weakening his conscience or without impairing the truthfulness of his intellectual processes... For man is a unit. Weakness in one part becomes weakness in every part ~ Charles Franklin Thwing

A dispassionate conceptual development of the typology of violence must by definition ignore its traumatic impact. Yet there is a sense in which a cold analysis of violence somehow reproduces and participates in its horror. A distinction needs to be made, as well, between (factual) truth and truthfulness: what renders a report of a raped woman (or any other narrative of a trauma) truthful is its very factual unreliability, its confusion, its inconsistency. If the victim were able to report on her painful and humiliating experience in a clear manner, with all the data arranged in a consistent order, this very quality would make us suspicious of its truth. ~ Slavoj Zizek

At a time of global instability we have become distanced from each other and the environment.
We have lost the immediacy, comfort and truthfulness of the literal and actual, and need to find alternative ways to consume and connect.
Hygge describes a way of being that introduces humanity and warmth in our homes, schools, workplaces, cities and nations. ~ Louisa Thomsen Brits

I really like the stuff that is very absurd and very real at the same time. I think Anton Chekhov is the greatest comedy writer of all time. I think he would make a great addition to The Office staff. If you look through Chekhov plays there is a lot of awkward pauses in there. His mixture of pathos, absurdity, truthfulness and whimsy is just mixed together perfectly. ~ Rainn Wilson

What matters," said the prince at last, "is that you have a child's trusting nature and extraordinary truthfulness. Do you know that a great deal can be forgiven you for that alone? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Forgiveness is the only lethal weapon which can destroy all evil. ~ Abraham Varghese

On the one hand, we may tell the truth, regardless of consequences, and on the other hand we may mellow it and sophisticate it to make it humane and tolerable. ~ H.L. Mencken

Politeness responses you with the cheers of truthfulness. ~ Jeswant Gembali

You realize that you want official interference into other people's lives but not into your own. You also realize that your truthfulness has become dangerously flexible. ~ Julian Barnes

Unattended hurt, anger, and bitterness can destroy even the best marriage. Lean honestly into every hard place, each tender spot, because truthfulness hurts for a minute but silence is the kill shot. ~ Jen Hatmaker

The eye speaks with an eloquence and truthfulness surpassing speech. It is the window out of which the winged thoughts often fly unwittingly. It is the tiny magic mirror on whose crystal surface the moods of feeling fitfully play, like the sunlight and shadow on a still stream. ~ Henry Theodore Tuckerman

It's hard to remember who you were when you're constantly pretending to be someone you're not. ~ Amy Ewing

Revive your inner spirit! Break free from all things weighing you down, grab hold of your strong rope and lift yourself out of hopelessness! ~ Amaka Imani Nkosazana

Oh, I remember, I remember all those moments! And I want to add, too, that when such young creatures, such sweet young creatures want to say something so clever and profound, they show at once so truthfully and naively in their faces, "Here I am saying something clever and profound now" - and that is not from vanity, as it is with any one like me, but one sees that she appreciates it awfully herself, and believes in it, and thinks a lot of it, and imagines that you think a lot of all that, just as she does. Oh, truthfulness! It's by that they conquer us. How exquisite it was in her! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In the sphere of natural investigation, as in poetry and painting, the delineation of that which appeals most strongly to the imagination, derives its collective interest from the vivid truthfulness with which the individual features are portrayed. ~ David Hume

Women in the world will have been beaten or raped in their lifetime and everyday violence requires that women always be alert to this possibility. A crone is a woman who has found her voice. She knows that silence is consent. This is a quality that makes older women feared. It is not the innocent voice of a child who says, "the emperor has no clothes," but the fierce truthfulness of the crone that is the voice of reality. Both the innocent child and the crone are seeing through the illusions, denials, or "spin" to the truth. But the crone knows about the deception and its consequences, and it angers her. Her fierceness springs from the heart, gives her courage, makes her a force to be reckoned with. ~ Jean Shinoda Bolen

hypocrisy; rejecting what you firmly have in your fist ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze of itself; it has to be created between people. This is true in political situations. The quality and depth of the politics evolving from a group depends in large part on their understanding of honor. Much of what is narrowly termed "politics" seems to rest on a longing for certainty even at the cost of honesty, for an analysis which, once given, need not be re-examined ... It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. ~ Adrienne Rich

The statistics reveal a failure of nerve on the part of many Christians. They seem to be simply unable to muster the strength necessary to develop a tenacious commitment to the truthfulness of Scripture. ~ Douglas Groothuis

Strict and literal truthfulness was a trivial game and might even be a disagreeable neurotic affliction. ~ Saul Bellow

You have the power to shape your life the way you want it to be. Every though, every word, every action guides you with a purpose. And that purpose is to fulfill your destiny. Some may say you're just a dreamer. But everything imagined began with a dream. ~ Amaka Imani Nkosazana

The dignity of history consists in reciting events with truth and accuracy, and in presenting human agents and their actions in an interesting and instructive form. The first element in history, therefore, is truthfulness; and this truthfulness must be displayed in a concrete form. ~ Daniel Webster

The truth is always stronger in the end if people stand up and fight for it. ~ Helen Steele

Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Satyagraha means insistence on what one knows to be the truth. The insistence implies the exercise of free will as the need of social obligation. If one is content to know the truth himself, he does not become a votary of Satyagraha. A Satyagrahi should not only know the truth but should insist upon it in social relations. So Satyagraha is activation of truthfulness. ~ Goparaju Ramachandra Rao

He knew he was reeling down in Mary's estimation and he wanted her to love him and to admire him. At the same time there was a fine steel wire of truthfulness in him that cut off the heads of fast-traveling lies. ~ John Steinbeck

These practices - non-killing, truthfulness, non-stealing, chastity, and non-receiving - are to be practised by every man, woman, and child; by every soul, irrespective of nation, country, or position. ~ Swami Vivekananda

On stage you can get away with a lot more in the sense of emotion and truthfulness. But the camera is the eye of God. It sees everything. ~ Cindy Busby

In a world starving for validity, the truth, when spoken at the right moment, can be one of the purest and most helpful forms of charity. ~ Lamine Pearlheart

This is a major, wide-ranging, and comprehensive book. A philosophical investigation that is also a literary and historical study, Truth and Truthfulness asks how and why we have come to think of accuracy, sincerity, and authenticity as virtues. Bernard Williams' account of their emergence is as detailed and imaginative as his defense of their importance is spirited and provocative. Williams asks hard questions, and gives them straightforward and controversial answers. His book does not simply describe and advocate these virtues of truthfulness; it manifests them. ~ Alexander Nehamas

Uplift & Inspire, do not be envious of others success. You are given the same hours in a day. Make it worthwhile! Instead of focusing on what someone else is doing, pay attention to how you're living and make the best of life ~ Amaka Imani Nkosazana

To me, it's worth getting offended by someone if it means I can trust that every word is their true opinion. ~ Sarah Glidden

It is not perhaps a question of truthfulness; it is rather a natural incapacity to think for herself, to take cognizance of herself in her own brain, and not in the eyes and in the lips of others; even when the ingenuously write into little secret diaries, women think of the unknown god reading
perhaps
over their shoulders. With a similar nature, a woman, to be placed in the first ranks of men, would require even higher genius than that of the highest man; that is why, if the conspicuous works of men themselves, the finest works of women are always inferior to the worth of the women who produced them. ~ Remy De Gourmont

Lack of truthfulness doesn't weaken a story if you can get enough people to believe the lie. ~ Orson Scott Card

That is the bizarre thing about the good news: who knows how you will really hear it one day, but once you have heard it, I mean really HEARD it, you can never UNHEAR it. Once you have read it, or spoken it, or thought it, even if it irritates you, even if you hate hearing it or cannot find it feasible, or try to dismiss it, you cannot UNREAD it, or UNSPEAK it, or UNTHINK it.
It is like a great big elephant in a tiny room. Its obvious presence begins to squeeze out everything else, including your own little measly self. Some accept it easily, some accept it quickly, and some are struck with the mystical reality of it right away. These people have no trouble bringing the unseen into the realm of the seen. But others of us fight the elephant; we push back on it, we try to ignore it, get it to leave the room, or attempt to leave the room ourselves. But it does not help. The trunk keeps curling around the doorknob. The hook is there. It may snooze or loom or rise and recede, but regardless of the time passed or the vanity endured, the idea keeps coming back, like a cosmic boomerang you just cannot throw away. I did not realize this was part of the grace of it all-such relentless truthfulness. ~ Carolyn Weber

I refer to the awesome experience of Joseph Smith when he beheld God the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ, in the spring of 1820. There has been no event more glorious, more controversial, nor more important in the story of Joseph Smith than this vision. It is possibly the most singular event to occur on the earth since the Resurrection. Those who do not believe it happened find it difficult to explain away. Too much has happened since its occurrence to summarily deny that it ever took place. . . .

"Since no one was with Joseph when this great vision took place in the wooded grove near Palmyra, a testimony concerning its reality can come only by believing the truthfulness of Joseph Smith's own account or by the witness of the Holy Ghost, or both. I have such a conviction. It is a sure conviction that lies deep in my soul. As a special witness of the same Christ who appeared with the Father and instructed the boy Joseph Smith, I bear witness of the truthfulness of the magnificent First Vision near Palmyra. I declare this in all soberness and in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. ~ James E. Faust

No matter what stage we are at in our spiritual journey, whether we are beginners or have been traveling a spiritual path for years or decades; and no matter how awakened or asleep we are, there is always absolute truthfulness - the oneness and nothingness - which is our true nature. Our true nature doesn't need any explanation or demonstration to know itself. It just knows because knowing is part of its nature. This true nature resides in everyone. This is the meaning of the statement that everyone is already enlightened. ~ Ilchi Lee

If you are seeking liberation, my son, shun the objects of the senses like poison. Practise tolerance, sincerity, compassion, contentment and truthfulness like nectar. ~ Ashtavakra

Creation of effective public opinion depends on the cultivation of true courage, born of truthfulness and nonviolence. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

It's simply impossible for me to filter my thoughts and feelings. I tell it from my point of view. I'm an open book. ~ Lori Lesko

The people who enlighten us are the ones who tell us their secrets. ~ Marty Rubin

You might even ask me to apply my 'theory' to myself and explain what damage I had suffered a long way back and what its consequences might be: for instance, how it might affect my reliability and truthfulness. I'm not sure I could answer this, to be honest. ~ Julian Barnes

[Philosophers] are not honest enough in their work, although they make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic ... ; while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of "inspiration" most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

A man may be accomplished in art, literature, and science, and yet, in honesty, virtue, truthfulness, and the spirit of duty, be entitled to take rank after many a poor and illiterate peasant. ~ Samuel Smiles

Truthfulness is composed of justice and courage. ~ Ibn Hazm

One believes in the truthfulness of a man because of his long experience with the man, and because the man has always told a consistent story. But no man has told so consistent a story as nature. ~ Clarence Darrow

Western Civilization is in the crisis it is because we have sacrificed more profound values than the immediate and quantifiable consequences we tend to associate with the pursuit of our material interests. Among these are peace; liberty; respect for property, contracts, and the inviolability of the individual; truthfulness and the development of the mind; integrity; distrust of power; a sense of spirituality; and philosophically-principled behavior. But when our culture becomes driven by material concerns, these less tangible values recede in importance, and our thinking becomes dominated by the need to preserve the organizational forms that we see as having served our interests. ~ Butler Shaffer

If you search for truthfulness, you might as well be blind. ~ Billy Joel

The truthfulness of 'The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism' is in doubt largely because of uncertainty about its authorship, and, as we have seen, a nearly identical ambiguity surrounds the Appendix. The parallel is significant. Two psychologically oriented critics, Murray Sperber and J. Brooks Bouson, have each pointed out strong resemblances between O'Brien's manipulation of Winston and Orwell's manipulation of the reader. I believe these resemblances extend to the book's handling of its two principal documents. Just as O'Brien plays upon Winston's desire for certain knowledge about Oceania's social and political structure, leading him on with the possibly spurious 'Goldstein' tract, so the story's narrator draws the truth-seeking reader into an Appendix whose truth value cannot be determined. ~ Richard K. Sanderson

Look at the truth from how it stands, not where it comes from. The truth is still the truth no matter whether it is spoken by an Indian, an American, a Chinese, an European, an African or an Australian! ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Truth and Truthfulness is an ambitious work, and its journeys into history give it a breadth unusual in these days of increased academic specialization ... William's book combines real history and fictional constructs to tell a revealing story that makes us reconsider the meaning of familiar concepts. ~ Julian Baggini

In any given situation there will always be more dumb people than smart people. We ain't many! ~ Ken Kesey

Photography is a medium of inescapable truthfulness. The camera doesn't know how to lie. ~ Janet Malcolm

As much as I appreciate people putting me in the category of these very acrobatic belters, I feel like my strength is my ... interpretation and my truthfulness with songs, and I don't want young people to think it's all about the high notes that they have to hit. ~ Idina Menzel

Take care of problems at home and don't let them build up on you; you won't be at your best. I have felt this personally in my life and can attest to the truthfulness of these words. ~ Cameron West

Character is far more important than intellect in making a man a good citizen or successful at his calling- meaning by character not only such qualities as honesty and truthfulness, but courage, perseverance and self-reliance. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

And the strongest trust is built by the smallest actions, the keeping of the little promises. It is the constant truthfulness, the continued dependability, the remembrance of minor things, which most inspire confidence and faith. ~ Walter Wangerin Jr.