Quotes about honesty

Good thoughts bear good fruit, bad thoughts bear bad fruit.

— James Allen

Do not do what you would undo if caught.

— Leah Arendt

Honesty is the cornerstone of all success, without which confidence and ability to perform shall cease to exist.

— Mary Kay Ash

Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.

— Stephen Vincent Benet

How desperately difficult it is to be honest with oneself. It is much easier to be honest with other people.

— Edward Frederic Benson

You shall not steal, nor deal falsely, nor lie to one another. [Leviticus 19:11]

— Bible

Honesty is the rarest wealth anyone can possess, and yet all the honesty in the world ain't lawful tender for a loaf of bread.

— Josh Billings

Morality may consist solely in the courage of making a choice.

— Leon Blum

Dishonest people conceal their faults from themselves as well as others, honest people know and confess them.

— Christian Nevell Bovee

The elegance of honesty needs no adornment.

— Merry Browne

No one can earn a million dollars honestly.

— William Jennings Bryan

You've got to be honest; if you can fake that, you've got it made.

— George Burns

Dare to be honest and fear no labor.

— Robert Burns

The easiest thing to be in the world is you. The most difficult thing to be is what other people want you to be. Don't let them put you in that position.

— Leo Buscaglia

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.

— Thomas Carlyle

You can never lose anything that really belongs to you, and you can't keep that which belongs to someone else.

— Edgar Cayce

They're only truly great who are truly good.

— George Chapman

Prefer a loss to dishonest gain; the one brings pain at the moment, the other for all time.

— Chilo

It is a fine thing to be honest, but it is also very important to be right.

— Winston Churchill

A few honest men are better than numbers.

— Oliver Cromwell

There is no twilight zone of honesty in business. A thing is right or it's wrong. It's black or it's white.

— John F. Dodge

To live outside the law, you must be honest.

— Bob Dylan

It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Without adversity a person hardly knows whether they are honest or not.

— Henry Fielding

Successful people have cultivated the habit of never denying to themselves their true feelings and attitudes. They have no need for pretenses.

— David Harold Fink

No such thing as a man willing to be honest --that would be like a blind man willing to see.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Honesty is the best policy.

— Benjamin Franklin

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

— Sigmund Freud

Where is the man who has the strength to be true, and to show himself as he is?

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

There are two great forces in this world -- good and evil; and no man is worth his salt unless he has lost and won battle for a principle.

— A. P. Gouthey

Everybody has a little bit of Watergate in him.

— Billy Graham

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

That which is won ill, will never wear well, for there is a curse attends it which will waste it. The same corrupt dispositions which incline men to sinful ways of getting, will incline them to the like sinful ways of spending.

— M. Henry

Understand this law and you will then know, beyond room for the slightest doubt, that you are constantly punishing yourself for every wrong you commit and rewarding yourself for every act of constructive conduct in which you indulge.

— Napoleon Hill

I would give no thought of what the world might say of me, if I could only transmit to posterity the reputation of an honest man.

— Sam Houston

Just be honest with yourself. That opens the door.

— Vernon Howard

I have found that being honest is the best technique I can use. Right up front, tell people what you're trying to accomplish and what you're willing to sacrifice to accomplish it.

— Lee Iacocca

Act in earnest and you will become earnest in all you do.

— William James

Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom.

— Thomas Jefferson

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

— Immanuel Kant

When you accept yourself completely you do not have to maintain a phony front, drive yourself to achieve or feel insecure if people tune-in to you and what you are doing.

— Ken Keyes Jr.

Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense.

— Steve Landesberg

The true measure of life is not length, but honesty.

— John Lyly

Would you want to do business with a person who was 99% honest?

— Sidney Madwed

People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want.

— David Mamet

There is something greater than wealth, grander even than fame -- manhood, character, stand for success... nothing else really does.

— Orison Swett Marden

If we put the emphasis upon the right things, if we live the life that is worth while and then fail, we will survive all disasters, we will out-live all misfortune. We should be so well balanced and symmetrical, that nothing which could ever happen could throw us off our center, so that no matter what misfortune should overtake us, there would still be a whole magnificent man or woman left after being stripped of everything else.

— Orison Swett Marden

To many a man, and sometimes to a youth, there comes the opportunity to choose between honorable competence and tainted wealth. The young man who starts out to be poor and honorable, holds in his hand one of the strongest elements of success.

— Orison Swett Marden

Some persons are likable in spite of their unswerving integrity.

— Don Marquis

Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control.

— Don Marquis

There is one way to find out if a man is honest; ask him! If he says yes you know he's crooked.

— Groucho Marx

Honesty is the most single most important factor having a direct bearing on the final success of an individual, corporation, or product.

— Ed Mcmahon

If honesty did not exist, we ought to invent it as the best means of getting rich.

— Gabriel Riqueti Mirabeau

No man is so exquisitely honest or upright in living, but that ten times in his life he might not lawfully be hanged.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

When we are not honest, we are cut off from a significant resource of ourselves, a vital dimension that is necessary for unity and wholeness.

— Clark Moustakas

People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty.

— Richard J. Needham

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate now knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

— Henri Nouwen

Honest men are the soft easy cushions on which knaves repose and fatten.

— Thomas Otway

A man is sorry to be honest for nothing.

— Ovid

It is annoying to be honest to no purpose.

— Ovid

The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful must take himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable, renascent errors.

— Charles Peguy

Honesty is for the most par less profitable than dishonesty.

— Plato

An honest man's the noblest work of God.

— Alexander Pope

Nothing resembles an honest man more than a cheat.

— French Proverb

A thread will tie an honest man better than a chain a rogue.

— Scottish Proverb

No one is wise or safe, but they that are honest.

— Sir Walter Raleigh

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

— Cardinal De Richelieu

I grew up in New York, and I have that in me, that be-honest-at-all-costs, don't b.s. me attitude. I say, If you've got something to say about me, say it to my face. And then we'll either talk about it or fight about it.

— Tim Robbins

To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education.

— John Ruskin

Honesty prospers in every condition of life.

— Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance.

— William Shakespeare

Honesty is the best policy. If I lose mine honor, I lose myself.

— William Shakespeare

We must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

— George Bernard Shaw

Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.

— Sophocles

Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is doing a public service.

— Leslie Stephen

Each time you are honest and conduct yourself with honesty, a success force will drive you toward greater success. Each time you lie, even with a little white lie, there are strong forces pushing you toward failure.

— Joseph Sugarman

Oh for someone with a heart, head and hand. Whatever they call them, what do I care, aristocrat, democrat, autocrat, just be it one that can rule and dare not lie.

— Lord Alfred Tennyson

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.

— Henry David Thoreau

Honesty is the best policy -- when there is money in it.

— Mark Twain

If you follow only one rule, let it be this one: Be yourself. The really strong boy-girl relationships are based on what people really are, not on what they pretend to be.

— Source Unknown

Look a man in the eye and say what you really think, don't just smile at him and say what you're supposed to think.

— Source Unknown

On this mounting the scaffold to be beheaded: I pray you Master Lieutenant, see me safely up, and for my coming down, let me shift for myself. To the executioner: Pick up thy spirits, Man, and be not afraid to do thy office; my neck is very short; take heed, therefore thou strike not awry, for saving of thy honesty.

— Source Unknown

There is no right way to do something wrong.

— Source Unknown

Honesty is a question of right or wrong, not a matter of policy.

— Source Unknown

An honest man is the best thing on the sod; but a mother and her babe is the noblest work of God.

— Source Unknown

Honesty shines like a light through your eyes.

— Source Unknown

I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.

— George Washington

You can't make wrong work.

— Gerald Waterhouse

Honesty is the best policy; but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man.

— Richard Whately

Be prepared and be honest.

— John Wooden

Honest hearts produce honest actions.

— Brigham Young

Truth and honesty are quite different. What a person believes to be true always follows when honesty leads the way. But truth can be asserted when one is being dishonest as well.

— Eric Parslow

If you love someone, be brave enough to tell them, otherwise, be brave enough to watch them be loved by someone else.

— Source Unknown