"People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.

If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway.

If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway.

The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway.

For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."
— Mother Teresa

"We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend."
— Robert Louis Stevenson

"Truth never damages a cause that is just."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Honesty is the first chapter of the book wisdom."
— Thomas Jefferson

"Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you."
— Ernest Hemingway

"There's one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he's crooked."
— Mark Twain

"Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are not as they ought to be."
— Ambrose Bierce (The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary)

"…if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone."
— Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)

"The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.

But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial -- notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit."
— Harry G. Frankfurt (On Bullshit)

"Honesty may be the best policy, but it’s important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy."
— George Carlin

"Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?"
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

""The real things haven't changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most
of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong."


"
— Laura Ingalls Wilder

"“I hope I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.”"
— George Washington

"Falsehood is never in words; it is in things."
— Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)

"What a fool honesty is."
— William Shakespeare (The Winter's Tale)

"There are honest people in the world, but only because the devil considers their asking prices ridiculous."
— Peter S. Beagle (A Fine and Private Place)

"As I have said, the first thing is to be honest with yourself. You can never have an impact on society if you have not changed yourself... Great peacemakers are all people of integrity, of honesty, but humility."
— Nelson Mandela

"Simple, genuine goodness is the best capital to found the business of this life upon. It lasts when fame and money fail, and is the only riches we can take out of this world with us."
— Louisa May Alcott (Little Men)

"Like the he-man movie stars who turn out to be queer . . . or the silent-film actors whose voices sound terrible recorded--the audience only wants a limited amount of honesty. [ellipses original]"
— Chuck Palahniuk

"Honest people don't hide their deeds."
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

"And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of a neighbor’s pocket? No, it’s not as easy as that. If that were all, I’d say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren’t. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea. That presupposes the ability to think. Thinking is something one doesn’t borrow or pawn."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"Fat realized that one of two possibilities existed and only two; either Dr. Stone was totally insane – not just insane but totally so – or else in an artful, professional fashion he had gotten Fat to talk; he had drawn Fat out and now knew that Fat was totally insane."
— Philip K. Dick (VALIS)

"Keep your heart clear
And transparent,
And you will
Never be bound.
A single disturbed thought
Creates ten thousand distractions."
— Ryokan

"I think humans are only capable of small moments of honesty. Then they get tired and back away. It's something to foster, this ability to keep it for longer. How to keep being honest and aware."
— Laura Pritchett (Sky Bridge: A Novel)

"I had rather do and not promise than promise and not do"
— Arthur Warwick

""To be true to yourself is to be yourself.""
— Amy harley

"No legacy is so rich as honesty."
— William Shakespeare

"Sincerity is the fulfillment
of our own nature,
and to arrive at it we need
only follow our own true Self.
Sincerity is the beginning
and end of existence;
without it, nothing can endure.
Therefore the mature person
values sincerity above all things."
— Tzu-Ssu

"Wer sich selbst belügt und seine eigenen Lügen anhört, kommt schließlich soweit, dass er keine Wahrheit mehr, weder in sich noch außer sich, zu erkennen vermag [...]"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"So much for Objective Journalism. Don't bother to look for it here--not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms."
— Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72)

"The truth is everything in the end. It is the greatest power in the world to make all people equal. If everyone knows what the truth is, no one can use lies to separate those people and turn them against one another."
— Mel Odom (The Quest for the Trilogy: A Rover Novel of Three Adventures)

"Craigengelt, you are either an honest fellow in right good earnest, and I scarce know how to believe that; or you are cleverer than I took you for, and I scarce know how to believe that either."
— Walter Scott (Bride of Lammermoor)

"The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do."
— E. V. Lucas

"Wohlgeachtet ist der Mann, dessen Maß Rechtschaffenheit ist, und dessen Wandel sich danach richtet."
— Ptahhotep

"If a man asks me for my loyalty...I will give him my honesty.
If a man asks me for my honesty...I will give him my loyalty!"
— John Boyd

"Who would appreciate such candor? No one. None of us really likes honesty. We prefer deception –but only when it is unabashedly flattering or artfully camouflaged. Groups seem to need to believe that they are superior to others and that they have a purpose greater than just passing along their genes to the next generation. Individuals seem to need similar delusions – about who they are and why they do what they do. They need heroes, however fraudulent… Studies show that people are more likely to accept the opinion of a confident con man than the cautious view of someone who actually knows what he is talking about. And professionals who form overconfident opinions on the basis of incorrect readings of the facts are more likely to succeed than their more competent peers who display greater doubt.

What’s more, deception works best, according to studies by psychologists, when the person doing the deceiving is fool enough to be deceived, too; that is, when he believes his own lies. That is why incompetent leaders – who are naïve enough to fall for their own guff – are such a danger to civilized life. If they are modern leaders, they must also delude themselves into thinking they know how to make the world a better place. Invariably, the answers they propose to problems are ones that bubble up from their own vanity, the essence of which is to make the rest of the world look just like them!"
— William Bonner (Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics)

"Seit wir den Glauben und damit die Wahrheit verloren haben, liegt zwischen Heuchelei und Ehrlichkeit der letzte Unterschied, der uns bleibt."
— Juli Zeh (Spieltrieb.)