All Quotes By Tag: Honesty

“Knowledge is responsibility, which is why people resist knowledge.”

“A sign of a lover of wisdom is his delight in not running his mouth about things he doesn’t know.”

“When God takes out the trash, don’t go digging back through it. Trust Him.”

“I cannot encourage any fabrication even for the sake of making people feel good. If I were to fabricate consciously and knowingly, I would not only be ordaining myself their enemy, but also ordaining myself God’s enemy.”

“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.”

“So what else can I tell you?” I asked. “I mean, to get you to reveal Lily to me.”She triangled her fingers under her chin. “Let’s see. Are you a bed wetter?””Am I a…?””Bed wetter. I am asking if you are a bed wetter.”I knew she was trying to get me to blink. But I wouldn’t.”No, ma’am. I leave my beds dry.””Not even a little drip every now and then?””I’m trying hard to see how this is germane.””I’m gauging your honesty. What is the last periodical you read methodically?””Vogue. Although, in the interest of full disclosure, that’s mostly because I was in my mother’s bathroom, enduring a rather long bowel movement. You know, the kind that requires Lamaze.””What adjective do you feel the most longing for?”That was easy. “I will admit I have a soft spot for fanciful.””Let’s say I have a hundred million dollars and offer it to you. The only condition is that if you take it, a man in China will fall off his bicycle and die. What do you do?””I don’t understand why it matters whether he’s in China or not. And of course I wouldn’t take the money.”The old woman nodded.”Do you think Abraham Lincoln was a homosexual?””All I can say for sure is that he never made a pass at me.””Are you a museumgoer?””Is the pope a churchgoer?””When you see a flower painted by Georgia O’Keefe, what comes to mind?””That’s just a transparent ploy to get me to say the word vagina, isn’t it? There. I said it. Vagina.”

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

“In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic. But I do not repine, for I am a subject of it only by force of arms.”

“Truth builds trust.”

“The human body is the best work of art.”

“She wanted to cause him pain for taking a place in her heart she wouldn’t have given him if she’d known the truth.”

“The fact that Ridge has been honest in his conversations with me is not something he did wrong. The fact that he has feelings for me also isn’t wrong, when you know exactly how much he’s fought those feelings. People can’t control matters of the heart, Warren. They can only control their actions, which is exactly what Ridge did. He lost control once for ten seconds, but after that, every single time temptation reared its ugly head, he walked in the other direction. The only thing Ridge has done wrong is fail to delete his messages, because by doing so, he failed to protect Maggie. He failed to protect her from the harsh truth that people don’t get to choose who they fall in love with. They only get to choose who they stay in love with.” I look up at the ceiling and blink back tears. “He was choosing to stay in love with her, Warren. Why can’t she see that? This will kill him so much more than it’s killing her.”

“Friends ask you questions; enemies question you.”

“The greatest thing a father can do for his children is to respect the woman that gave birth to his children. It is because of her that you have the greatest treasures in your life. You may have moved on, but your children have not. If you can’t be her soulmate, then at least be thoughtful. Whom your children love should always be someone that you acknowledge with kindness. Your children notice everything and will follow your example.”

“You want to take me to a movie?” I asked. “Well, not really,” he said. “What I really want is for you to be my girlfriend. But I thought saying that might scare you off.”