#hon

And I said, 'That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all. ↗

— Jack Kerouac

#honesty #narrowness #uncertainty #uncertainty

I am often described to my irritation as a 'contrarian' and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on that occasion I lived up to the title by ridiculing the word in my introduction to the book's first chapter.) It is actually a pity that our culture doesn't have a good vernacular word for an oppositionist or even for someone who tries to do his own thinking: the word 'dissident' can't be self-conferred because it is really a title of honor that has to be won or earned, while terms like 'gadfly' or 'maverick' are somehow trivial and condescending as well as over-full of self-regard. And I've lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like 'Against the Stream,' 'Against the Current,' 'Minority of One,' 'Breaking Ranks' and so forth—all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg's withering remark about 'the herd of independent minds.' Even when I was quite young I disliked being called a 'rebel': it seemed to make the patronizing suggestion that 'questioning authority' was part of a 'phase' through which I would naturally go. On the contrary, I was a relatively well-behaved and well-mannered boy, and chose my battles with some deliberation rather than just thinking with my hormones. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#contrarianism #dissent #dissidents #free-thought #harold-rosenberg

You can't lie to your soul. ↗

— Irvine Welsh

#introspection #honesty

Recall what used to be the theme of poetry in the romantic era. In neat verses the poet lets us share his private, bourgeois emotions: his sufferings great and small, his nostalgias, his religious or political pre-occupations, and, if he were English, his pipe-smoking reveries. On occasions, individual genius allowed a more subtle emanation to envelope the human nucleus of the poem - as we find in Baudelaire for example. But this splendour was a by-product. All the poet wished was to be a human being. When he writes, I believe today's poet simply wishes to be a poet. ↗

— José Ortega y Gasset

#motivation #poetry #romanticism #art

Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#integerity #honesty

You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it. ↗

— Alan Moore

#pretense #truthfulness #honesty

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

#honesty #yates #honesty

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

#honesty

Suddenly this is all too hard. I am tired of putting up walls. I want someone with the strength - and the honesty - to break them down. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#honesty #strength #wall #honesty

It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for any public office. ↗

— H.L. Mencken

#honesty