Honesty is everything. It’s the foundation for our daily interaction with friends and colleagues. If the secret ingredient of honesty is missing, problems start to arise. It’s not always easy to know when someone is lying to you. However, you’ll develop a pretty good feeling about a person’s authenticity over time. There are people you can trust – people who have the confidence to tell you what they think, even if it’s uncomfortable. And then there are people who are nothing but dishonest. It’s not so much about people who are occasionally telling white lies but more so about those who are scrupulously manipulating others. To highlight the importance of honesty and the gift of being surrounded by honest individuals with integrity, the following list of honesty quotes was created. Enjoy reading. You may also like our list about powerful respect quotes.
Have you ever wondered how your life would change if you decided to be honest with every person you meet? This does not necessarily mean you have to be brutally honest and hurt other people’s feelings. It simply means that you are speaking the truth in a constructive, possibly even loving manner. What do you think would happen if you are honest about absolutely everything?
“Hypocrites get offended by the truth.”
Jess C. Scott
If you chose to be constructively honest, do you think people would give you a hard time? Do you think people would avoid you for telling the truth? Do you think being honest and telling the truth is more difficult than speaking your mind?
None of these questions can be answered with a general answer. When it comes to honesty, it largely depends on the person you’re dealing with. Numerous people even appreciate honesty – if it is constructive. They understand the value of someone who’s honest with them and does not beat around the bush. Self-confident people who are eager to grow as professionals and human beings likely fall under this category.
These are the honesty quotes that celebrate speaking the truth
At the same time, everyone appreciates honesty. Many people feel challenged by the truth and are likely to take offense by virtually anything that contrasts their opinions and views.
115 Inspirational Honesty Quotes
The beautiful aspect about honesty is the people have been battling with the very same questions for centuries. These individuals also had to ask themselves if they valued honesty and truth so much that it wouldn’t matter to them if people could deal with it or not. Luckily for us, many of these interesting individuals have put their thoughts to paper. In the following collection of honesty quotes, you can find quite a number of reasons why telling the truth is so important. Even more so, these powerful statements will encourage you to appreciate the true value of giving constructive criticism and being honest.
Here’s our collection of wise and powerful honesty quotes:
1.
“Honesty is the first chapter of the book wisdom.”
Thomas Jefferson
2.
“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
Winston Churchill
3.
“One word of truth outweighs the world.”
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
4.
“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
5.
“Honesty is more than not lying. It is truth telling, truth speaking, truth living, and truth loving.”
James E. Faust
6.
“Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people.”
Spencer Johnson
7.
“It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”
Noël Coward
8.
“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters”
Albert Einstein
9.
“If we are not ashamed to think it, we should not be ashamed to say it.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero
10.
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
Oscar Wilde
11.
“To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful.”
Edward R. Murrow
12.
“And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.”
Khaled Hosseini
13.
“Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway.”
Kent M. Keith
14.
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
Virginia Woolf
15.
“Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.”
George R.R. Martin
16.
“You can’t lie to your soul.”
Irvine Welsh
17.
“The real things haven’t changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful.”
Laura Ingalls Wilder
18.
“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs.”
Leo Tolstoy
19.
“Don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
Franz Kafka
20.
“Truth never damages a cause that is just.”
Mahatma Gandhi
21.
“It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”
George Washington
22.
“You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it.”
Alan Moore
23.
“If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.”
Abraham Lincoln
24.
“Living with integrity means: Speaking your truth, even though it might create conflict or tension.”
Barbara De Angelis
25.
“Don’t ever regret being honest. Period.”
Taylor Swift
26.
“If you’re not honest with yourself, life will never be honest with you.”
Leigh Brackett
27.
“Honesty, like any inclination, can become a ruling passion, a monomania almost.”
Sena Jeter Naslund
28.
“I could never be a politician, I have a problem of too often being honest.”
Carl R White
29.
“Boastfulness and excessive pride do not equate at all with humility and honesty, credibility and integrity.”
Angelica Hopes
30.
“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.”
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
31.
“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world would do this, it would change the earth.”
William Faulkner
32.
“Before speaking, consult your inner-truth barometer, and resist the temptation to tell people only what they want to hear.”
Wayne W. Dyer
33.
“Don’t assume, ask. Be kind. Tell the truth. Don’t say anything you can’t stand behind fully. Have integrity. Tell people how you feel.”
Warsan Shire
34.
“If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.”
Marcus Aurelius
35.
“Anything is better than lies and deceit!”
Leo Tolstoy
36.
“The trouble with most of us is that we’d rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.”
Norman Vincent Peale
37.
“Better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.”
Khaled Hosseini
38.
“Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?”
John Steinbeck
39.
“If an offense comes out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.”
Thomas Hardy
40.
“It takes strength and courage to admit the truth.”
Rick Riordan
41.
“It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie.”
Victor Hugo
42.
“But I suppose the most revolutionary act one can engage in is… to tell the truth.”
Howard Zinn
43.
“Truth builds trust.”
Marilyn Suttle
44.
“People can tell you to keep your mouth shut, but that doesn’t stop you from having your own opinion.”
Anne Frank
45.
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
Abraham Lincoln
46.
“Do not consider me now as an elegant female intending to plague you, but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart.”
Jane Austen
47.
“Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.”
Albert Einstein
48.
“You don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.”
Anne Lamott
49.
“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
John F. Kennedy
50.
“Aim not at being clever but at being true.”
Marty Rubin
51.
“Honesty: The best of all the lost arts.”
Mark Twain
52.
“Selflessness. Humility. Truthfulness. These are the three marks of an honorable man.”
Suzy Kassem
53.
“Your feelings wouldn’t get hurt if you were honest with yourself”
Tye Lewis
54.
“Remember this: Seek the Truth. Once you find it hold on to it. Fight for it. Stand up for the truth even if you’re standing alone.”
Sara Francis
55.
“Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence.”
Ayn Rand
56.
“As long as you’re honest and you articulate what you believe to be true, somebody somewhere will become your enemy whether you like it or not.”
Criss Jami
57.
“Confidence in others’ honesty is no light testimony of one’s own integrity.”
Michel de Montaigne
58.
“Proclaim the truth and do not be silent through fear.”
St. Catherine of Siena
59.
“To me, it’s worth getting offended by someone if it means I can trust that every word is their true opinion.”
Sarah Glidden
60.
“If you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything.”
Gordon A. Eadie
61.
“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.”
Frederick Douglass
62.
“Isn’t strength the ability to renounce every lie in your heart?”
Bisco Hatori
63.
“Truth can only be seen by those with truth in them. He who does not have truth in his heart, will always be blind to her.”
Suzy Kassem
64.
“Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.”
Marcus Aurelius
65.
“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”
Lillian Hellman
66.
“When a man is penalized for honesty he learns to lie.”
Criss Jami
67.
“You should not honor men more than truth.”
Plato
68.
“I would rather be damned by my honesty than caged by my lies.”
Omega Maverick
69.
“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.”
Mark Twain
70.
“The line between honesty and dishonesty is a narrow, shifting one and usually lets those get by that are the most subtle and already have more than they can use.”
Clarence Darrow
71.
“Honesty is a very expensive gift, Don’t expect it from cheap people.”
Warren Buffett
72.
“I’m not mean, I’m honest. Nobody is ever straightforward. But sometimes people need to hear the truth.”
Jessica Warman
73.
“Honesty is always the best policy, even when it’s not the trend.”
Sean Covey
74.
“Staying silent is like a slow-growing cancer to the soul and a trait of a true coward. There is nothing intelligent about not standing up for yourself.”
Shannon L. Alder
75.
“Dishonesty goes very far indeed to make a man of no value—a thing to be thrown out in the dust-hole of the creation, like a bit of broken basin, or dirty rag.”
George MacDonald
76.
“The armor of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.”
E.M. Forster
77.
“I think honesty is the most heroic quality one can aspire to.”
Daniel Radcliffe
78.
“To tell the truth is very difficult, and young people are rarely capable of it.”
Leo Tolstoy
79.
“Don’t be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you.”
Dale Carnegie
80.
“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”
Mark Twain
81.
“No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.”
François de La Rochefoucauld
82.
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
Marcus Aurelius
83.
“The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”
Nadine Gordimer
84.
“Anybody who says they are a good liar obviously is not, because any legitimately savvy liar would always insist they’re honest about everything.”
Chuck Klosterman
85.
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
Flannery O’Connor
86.
“Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.”
Edward Abbey
87.
“No one believes a liar. Even when she’s telling the truth.”
Sara Shepard
88.
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
Henry David Thoreau
89.
“Integrity is doing what is right and truthful, and doing as you say you would do.”
Roy T. Bennett
90.
“Lies sound like facts to those who’ve been conditioned to mis-recognize the truth.”
DaShanne Stokes
91.
“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
David Foster Wallace
92.
“Unfortunately, in today’s world a liar seems to be more reliable than a truthful honest man.”
Munia Khan
93.
“You are honest enough by nature to be able to see and judge your own self clearly – and that is a great thing. Never lose that honesty – always be honest with yourself.”
Enid Blyton
94.
“When you walk a life of honesty, you live a life of truth.”
Therese Benedict
95.
“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”
Winston S. Churchill
96.
“You’re only responsible for being honest, not for someone else’s reaction to your honesty.”
Kelli Jae Baeli
97.
“Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you.”
Stephanie Klein
98.
“Be bad, but at least don’t be a liar, a deceiver!”
Leo Tolstoy
99.
“I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy.”
George Washington
100.
“Friends are honest with each other. Even if the truth hurts.”
Sarah Dessen
101.
“Early in my career… I had to choose between honest arrogance and a hypercritical humility… I deliberately choose an honest arrogance, and I’ve never been sorry.”
Frank Lloyd Wright
102.
“No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is vicious.”
Henry Adams
103.
“Acquaint yourself with your own ignorance.”
Isaac Watts
104.
“The main trouble with being an honest man was that it lost you all your illusions.”
James Jones
105.
“Most often people seek in life occasions for persisting in their opinions rather than for educating themselves.”
André Gide
106.
“If you are honest with yourself, your life will be so much more pleasant.”
Jessica Zafra
107.
“Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.”
Thomas Carlyle
108.
“A liar should have a good memory.”
T.M. Logan
109.
“There’s more to honesty than an arrangement of words. They say faeries can’t lie, but you lie in your intentions, your attitude, your demeanor —”
Cassandra Clare
110.
“The liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.”
George Bernard Shaw
111.
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
Oscar Wilde
112.
“The truth cuts like the sharpest knife I’ve ever known.”
Tomi Adeyemi
113.
“In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.”
Robert McKee
114.
“Honest differences are often a healthy sign of progress.”
Mahatma Gandhi
115.
“One of the few things in life that cannot possibly do harm, in the end, is the honest pursuit of the truth.”
Peter Kreeft
I hope you enjoyed this collection of inspirational quotes about honesty.
Stay victorious!
