#honesty

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot. ↗

— Czesław Miłosz

#dissent #heroes #honesty #integrity #truth

All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are. ↗

— Mark Haddon

#stupidity #stupidity

Because that’s what unfaithfulness is, isn’t it? A cancer that’s always there in the back of your mind, eating away at the foundations of the relationship. It’s happened once, it could happen again, so you’re always looking for telltale signs or symptoms to show that it’s reappeared... ↗

— Matt Dunn

#relationships #cancer

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