Quotes & Sayings About Lies And Telling The Truth

I would lie of course. I lied a lot and with good reason: to protect the truth - safeguard it like wearing fake gems to keep the real ones from getting stolen or cheapened by overuse. I guarded what truths I possessed because information was not a thing - it was colorless odorless shapeless and therefore indestructible. There was no way to retrieve or void it no way to halt its proliferation. Telling someone a secret was like storing plutonium inside a sandwich bag the information would inevitably outlive the friendship or love or trust in which you'd placed it. And then you would have given it away. — Jennifer Egan

I knew she was not telling me the truth. I asked her again what had happned because I don't like it when she keeps something from me. She's not allowed. Because when she lies, someting inside me changes, and it's like the WHOLE WORLD is one way and I'm the other. Like I can't trust a thing, as if the whole world knows a secret I don't and I'm running around from person to person asking them to tell me but they won't and the more I don't know what is going on the more scared I become and I feel myself drifting farther and farther away from everyone. — Jack Gantos

It's not enough to be able to lie with a straight face; anybody with enough gall to raise on a busted flush can do that. The first way to lie artistically is to tell the truth - but not all of it. The second way involves telling the truth, too, but is harder: Tell the exact truth and maybe all of it ... but tell it so unconvincingly that your listener is sure you are lying. — Robert A. Heinlein

... everyone knew that sin was evil, and that no good could come from evil. But he did feel good; he felt positively marvellous. Consequently, it followed logically that telling lies and defecting from duty could not be sins. The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalisation, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honour, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. — Joseph Heller

To be straight means to be loyal to the truth. — Auliq Ice

It takes extraordinary mental discipline to transmit human experience without perversion. Truth telling is unnatural. Lying is an important aspect of humanity. We lie to other people to prevent hurt feelings and we deceive ourselves in order to protect our noble sense of being a good person. Dishonesty and inaccuracy preserves our quest seeking uninterrupted personal pleasure. I shall eschew pleasure seeking and cultivate precision of mind and moral character that precious truth telling necessitates. Reading and writing, along with observing nature and studious reflection on vivid personal experiences is the process methodology that will bring me closest to discovering inviolate verity of existence and becoming a doyen for all the immaculate truth, beauty, and goodness in this world. — Kilroy J. Oldster

When it's time to confess, you don't know what you're saying. Are you telling the truth, or do you confuse your lies with reality? The question is comical. The answer is lost in the maelstroms of consciousness. It's even impossible to pretend, eventually, that the question wasn't asked. You've been kidding yourself about yourself for so long, you're someone else. Your you is just a fragile fabrication. Every morning, you have to wake up, assemble this busy, dissembling monster, and get him or her on his or her feet again for another round of fantasy. — David Guterson

Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth! — Ursula K. Le Guin

Also, Willie, I dig telling the truth. Words can be twisted but a photo never lies.
Sutton laughs.
What's funny? Photographer says.
Nothing. Except - that's pure horseshit kid. I can't think of anything that lies more than a photo. In fact every photo is a dirty stinking lie because it's a frozen moment - and time can't be frozen. Some of the biggest lies I've ever run across have been photos. Some of them were of me. — J.R. Moehringer

What are you suggesting I do Ralph?'
'I'm suggesting you tell the bloody truth whatever it is. The only place lying leads is trouble.'
"Sometimes that's the only place telling the truth get you, too. — M.L. Stedman

It's not that fact of him telling me he's not going to kill me that assures me I've got some time to breathe. Predo could look me in the eye and tell me whiskey's good and cigarettes are better and I'd still need a drink and a Lucky to believe he's not lying. The man breeds lies. He spawns them asexually, with no need for any assistance. He exhales and lies fill the air. Alone in a room, he mutters lies to himself to keep from falling into the trap of truth-telling. In the day, sleeping in his bed, deep in the safest heart of Coalition headquarters, he dreams in lies. The better to keep his left hand from knowing what betrayals his right has planned.
Stretched on the rack and burned with hot irons, Dexter Predo will be in no danger of revealing the truth. Living so far beyond its borders. — Charlie Huston

The key to getting people to follow you is not telling them the whole truth. It's to make them think you are going to give them everything they want. Give them food, jobs, happiness that had been absent. Promise them a stronger, better country. It's all about the bait. Then once you have them on your side, take away choice. Keep filling them up with false promises and feed them full of lies and propaganda. When — Katherine King

Don't lies in the end put us on the path to truth? And don't my stories, true or false, point to the same conclusion? Don't they have the same meaning? So, what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in either case, they signify what I have been and what I am? One can sometimes see more clearly in a person who is lying than in one who is telling the truth. Like light, truth dazzles. Untruth, on the other hand, is a beautiful dusk that enhances everything. — Albert Camus

Ugly truths are the biggest source of indigestion in humans. — Raheel Farooq

The wounded child inside many males is a boy who, when he first spoke his truths, was silenced by paternal sadism, by a patriarchal world that did not want him to claim his true feelings. The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others. When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. To be loving we willingly hear the other's truth, and most important, we affirm the value of truth telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love. — Bell Hooks

Truth is like a bright full moon in a dark country sky. Powerful, bright and undeniable. Lies are like clouds that continually try to cover that moon. Sometimes they might be able to cover the moon, but only temporarily. The truth will always outshine the clouds. — Alex Haditaghi

Lies, greed, pettiness, and ugly emotions ensnare a person. We are free people whom construct our own cages that we allow to suppress our vital instinct to live a wholesome life. Truth telling demands an awareness of what sins cage a person in. Truthfulness also commands that a person fess up to the role that he or she played in scripting unpleasant scenes in a tarnished personal history. — Kilroy J. Oldster

It meant nothing. Some people are like that: everything comes out like a lie. Not that they're brilliant liars, just that they're useless at telling the truth. You get left with no way to tell what's the real fake and what's the fake one. — Tana French

Telling one lie almost always requires another, and before the storyteller knows it, they will be caught inside of their own web. — Jenna Alatari

When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better. — Bell Hooks

An unconscious, gentle process whereby people who want to be loving attempt to be so by telling little white lies, by withholding some of the truth about themselves and their feelings in order to avoid conflict. Pseudocommunity is conflict-avoiding; true community is conflict-resolving. — M. Scott Peck

He sat watching the people go by, wondering how a thing of this sort could have come about, I must have let myself get mixed up in something horrible, he thought ... Probably she's the one who did it; I have no control of myself or anything that's happened. So now I'm waking up. I'm awake, he thought ... I've been destroyed and now that I'm awake all I can do is realize it ... The shock of getting up there and telling that account made me see. Mixture of lies and bits of truth. Woven together. Unable to see where each starts. — Philip K. Dick

If we're going to die there's no harm in telling me pretty lies, In the end it won't matter, and I'll die happy."
"I have no intention of letting either of us die. And then where would the lies get us?"
"If you manage to keep us alive then I promise I'll forget. Just tell me you care about me. If we're going to die then how important is the truth?"
"It's because we might die that the truth is particularly important,And telling you that I care about you is a waste of time. I wouldn't have crossed the ocean, come out of hiding and tracked you down if
you didn't matter to me."
"Then come up with a better lie. Tell me you love me."
"You don't need lies, Chloe,I do love you." he said. — Anne Stuart

It's the best way of telling the truth; it's a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that ... [it's] delight in, and play with, language; also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet. — Julian Barnes

I don't care what you meant to do. I really don't.
I only care about what you actually do. That's important. The rest of it is just a bunch of bull shit.
--- Grace. — Christian Kiefer

The man breeds lies. He spawns them asexually, with no need for any assistance. He exhales and lies fill the air. Alone in a room, he mutters lies to himself to keep from falling into the trap of truth-telling. In the day, sleeping in his bed, deep in the safest heart of Coalition headquarters, he dreams in lies. The better to keep his left hand from knowing what betrayals his right has planned. — Charlie Huston

I continue to marvel at the reluctancy of people to look into the mirror and see all the darkness that's within them: all the deceit, the dishonesty, the insincerity, the lack, the need, the want, the lies ... they would rather look upon the mural of themselves that they've painted on the wall, and stare at that inanimate portrait of beauty, all the while telling themselves that it is the mirror image of them! This is a falsity, this is unreal! It is only when you turn to the unveiled mirror and bravely face your light and your darkness at once, that you will be able to see the true image of you! How can you pull the thorns from your skin if you are too afraid to open your eyes and look at them? You must open your eyes first, look at the thorns where they are piercing your flesh, and only then can you pull them out! — C. JoyBell C.

At the end of the day, acting is all about telling lies. We are professional imposters and the audience accept that. We've made this deal that we tell you a tale and a pack of lies, but there will be a truth in it. You may enjoy it, or it will disturb you. — Pete Postlethwaite

It's strange how what drives us may abandon us midstream, how what tickles our ears with lies one moment may tell us truths that knock us on our emotional ass the next.
After all, it is an unbelievably real world, with Darwin scribbling his thoughts into books and telling us what monkeys we are. Each of us explores possibility, hungry for sustaining adoration, yet we know enough to render ourselves helpless.
We strive and strain, bellow and believe, we learn, and everything we learn tells us the same thing: life is one great meaningful experience in a meaningless world. Brilliance has many parts, yet each part is incomplete.
We live, heal and attempt to piece together a picture worth the price of our very lives.
The picture I saw presented demonic executioners, who crippled those daring to look and consumed souls without defense. They're everywhere. Some are people we know. Others are the great fears and addictions of our lives. — Christopher Hawke

When you are scanning for lies and you can't decide if a person is telling the truth or lying, it's in your best interests to always go with your gut feeling. — Brian Night

Out of respect for the love of liberty shown by the Chinese people, and also in the belief that the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse, I offer to tell you, free of charge, the truth about Bangalore.
"By telling you my life's story.
"See, when you come to Bangalore, and stop at a traffic light, some boy will run up to your car and knock on your window, while holding up a bootlegged copy of an American business book wrapped carefully in cellophane and with a title like:
TEN SECRETS OF BUSINESS SUCCESS!
or
BECOME AN ENTREPRENEUR IN SEVEN EASY DAYS!
"Don't waste your money on those American books. They're so yesterday.
"I am tomorrow. — Aravind Adiga

Lies can be wrung out of a witness as easily as truth. Yes, after a few hours with the Enquiry's ... instruments, I am sure she will be willing to swear that she had swallowed an antidote, or indeed that she had flown to the moon if that would make the pain stop. But, here and now, you can see she is telling the truth. There was no betrayal. There was no poison. There was no murder. — Frances Hardinge

Such is the lunacy and unfairness of the system. Huver's witnesses, the ones testifying on behalf of the State, are cloaked with legitimacy, as if they've been sanctified by the authorities. Cops, experts, even snitches who've been washed and cleansed and spruced up in nice clothes, all take the stand and tell lies in a coordinated effort to have my client executed. But the witnesses who know the truth, and are telling it, are discounted immediately and made to look like fools. — John Grisham

Loving Felix she'd acquired from him a certain arrogance, telling so many lies she'd acquired a zest for lies and quite preferred them to the truth. For a lie had to be invented, "truth" was common property. — Joyce Carol Oates

i)
We are hard on each other
and call it honesty,
choosing our jagged truths
with care and aiming them across
the neutral table.

The things we say are
true; it is our crooked
aims, our choices
turn them criminal.

ii)
Of course your lies
are more amusing:
you make them new each time.

Your truths, painful and boring
repeat themselves over & over
perhaps because you own
so few of them

iii)
A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon?

iv)
Does the body lie
moving like this, are these
touches, hairs, wet
soft marble my tongue runs over
lies you are telling me?

Your body is not a word,
it does not lie or
speak truth either.

It is only
here or not here. — Margaret Atwood

But those are lies!" Imweshi turned with a frigid smile. "Of course they are! But who cares? Does it matter to them?" She gestured toward the window. "Who are they going to believe? Us? We well-fed, clean, healthy, wealthy, coach-riding Kyn? Perhaps you with all your savage finery can convince them that the mechanical beasts that draw this carriage are something other than dark sorcery. What will you say to them, my truth-telling Wielder? Will your truth feed them, clothe them, give them warm homes? What would they rather hear: that Lojar Vald and his kind have driven them halfway into their graves out of greed and selfish ambition, that the promises of another life are mere manipulations to ensure their subservience, or that a small group of backward barbarians are the only thing between them and their salvation? If you stood in their place, who would you believe?" The carriage crested a hill and left the foundries and the empty-eyed Humans behind. Tarsa — Daniel Heath Justice

They keep telling you this: Have faith! But which faith? That is the crucial question! Here is a good faith you can have: Every truth can be changed through our own intelligence! Trust human mind, trust science, and this is a golden faith! Your salvation lies in here, definitely in no other place! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

If God does not exist, and if religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without ... let men believe in the lies of religion since they cannot do without them, and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among themselves. Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men, and atheism becomes a guarded, esoteric doctrine - for if the illusions of religion were to be discredited, there is no telling with what madness men would be seized, with what uncontrollable anguish. — Irving Kristol

Very occasionally, very vaguely, English schoolboys are told not to tell lies, which is a totally different thing. I may silently support all the obscene fictions and forgeries in the universe, without once telling a lie. I may wear another man's coat, steal another man's wit, apostatize to another man's creed, or poison another man's coffee, all without ever telling a lie. But no English school-boy is ever taught to tell the truth, for the very simple reason that he is never taught to desire the truth. — G.K. Chesterton

All they're trying to do is tell you what they're like, and what you're like - what's going on - what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies. "The truth against the world!" - Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The problem in today's society is that the truth is in short supply and people love soft lies more than hard truths — Rassool Jibraeel Snyman

If there was twenty ways of telling the truth and only one way of telling a lie, the Government would find it out. It's in the nature of governments to tell lies. — George Bernard Shaw

All of us can lie but it is not a must that we should lie. — Auliq Ice

Most of us avoid telling the truth because it's uncomfortable. We're afraid of the consequences - making others feel uncomfortable, hurting their feelings, or risking their anger. And yet, when we don't tell the truth, and others don't tell us the truth, we can't deal with matters from a basis in reality. We've all heard the phrase that "the truth will set you free." And it will. The truth allows us to be free to deal with the way things are, not the way we imagine them to be or hope them to be or might manipulate them to be with our lies. The truth also frees up our energy. It takes energy to withhold the truth, keep a secret, or keep up an act. — Jack Canfield

THE MYTH OF THE GOOD OL BOY AND THE NICE GAL
The good of boy myth and the nice gal are a kind of social conformity myth. They create a real paradox when put together with the "rugged individual" part of the Success Myth. How can I be a rugged individual, be my own man and conform at the same time? Conforming means "Don't make a wave", "Don't rock the boat". Be a nice gal or a good ol' boy. This means that we have to pretend a lot.
"We are taught to be nice and polite. We are taught that these behaviors (most often lies) are better than telling the truth. Our churches, schools, and politics are rampant with teaching dishonesty (saying things we don't mean and pretending to feel ways we don't feel). We smile when we feel sad; laugh nervously when dealing with grief; laugh at jokes we don't think are funny; tell people things to be polite that we surely don't mean."
- Bradshaw On: The Family — John Bradshaw

I look at the human sciences as poetic sciences in which there is no objectivity, and I see film as not being objective, and cinema verite as a cinema of lies that depends on the art of telling yourself lies. If you're a good storyteller then the lie is more true than reality, and if you're a bad one, the truth is worse than a half lie. — Jean Rouch

Trust grows when people see leaders translate their personal integrity into organizational fidelity. At the heart of fidelity lies truth-telling and promise-keeping. — Max De Pree

Whatever we had is over. It died the minute I walked downstairs and realized the world I'd always known was a lie.- Blaire Wynn — Abbi Glines

Telling lies is a really terrible thing. These days, lies and silence are the two greatest sins in human society you might say. In reality, we tell lots of lies, and we often break into silence. However, if we were constant;y talking year-round, and telling only the truth truth would probably lose some of its value. — Haruki Murakami

You can't build a future if you do not know who you are. You can't become who you are meant to be if you can't tell the truth about who you are, what you have, and everything about your life. The truth is the absolute essence to your success, while lies are the absolute essence to your failures. — Suze Orman

War is like art. It paints a picture mixed with lies and truths in order to help one find something absolute. It brings out imagination. It brings out intelligence. It brings out illumination. The art is worth dying for. The struggle is worth the reward, because even if cause looks futile now, the idea behind it has the power to bring liberation. Although it can be considered a necessary evil, it is a remissible good. War is like art, for it paints a picture of truth. — Lionel Suggs

If you tell me the truth, the truth I'll proclaim.
If you tell me a lie, you'll be fair game. — Belva Rae Staples

Logic!" said the Professor half to himself. "Why don't they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is
telling the truth. You know she doesn't tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth. — C.S. Lewis

If there is the truth to be told to the young, is the truth of not to lie. — Auliq Ice

Harris: Yes. In fact, self-deception might have paid evolutionary dividends in other ways. Robert Trivers argues, for instance, that people who can believe their own lies turn out to be the best liars of all - and an ability to deceive rivals has obvious advantages in the state of nature. Now, clearly many things may have been adaptive for our ancestors - such as tribal warfare, rape, xenophobia - that we now deem unethical and would never want to defend. But I'm wondering if you see any possibility that a social system that maximizes truth-telling could be one that fails to maximize the well-being of all participants. Is it possible that some measure of deception is good for us? — Sam Harris

I love you, and because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies. — Pietro Aretino

I hated [the commercial art studio] because advertising is telling lies, basically, making crap goods look terrific, and I felt I was so privileged to be an artist anyway, why was I prostituting myself on doing this sort of rubbish? So when I left there, I suppose after about five or six years, I then went to the other extreme and started telling to me what seemed to me at the time the ultra-truth about the world around me - social life, and the politicians, and so forth. — Gerald Scarfe

Lyra learns to her great cost that fantasy isn't enough. She has been lying all her life, telling stories to people, making up fantasies, and suddenly she comes to a point where that's not enough. All she can do is tell the truth. She tells the truth about her childhood, about the experiences she had in Oxford, and that is what saves her. True experience, not fantasy - reality, not lies - is what saves us in the end. — Philip Pullman

I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she'd tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you're ever going to. Look around. It's all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain. — Janet Fitch

So much was so easy. Glamour was second nature. It was just making folk see what they wanted to see. Fooling folk was as simple as singing. Tricking folk and telling lies, it was like breathing.
But this? Convincing someone of the truth that they were too twisted to see? How could you even begin? — Patrick Rothfuss

You will never let go of the past by ignoring the most painful thing the person you loved has done to you. When you begin to minimize it, second guess yourself and others, ignore it or even pretend it didn't happen you cheat yourself out of healing. Naturally, your mind would rather believe the lies you are telling it, rather than accept the truth. The soul has a way of protecting itself from trauma, but if left in denial there is no growth or change. Healing requires going to that place you avoid and asking yourself why you are so afraid to accept the reality of what happened to you? Why have you minimized it like this person has wanted you to? What is it about your self esteem that allows you to continue being a doormat? — Shannon L. Alder

Lies hold civilization together. If people ever seriously begin telling each other what they really think, there'd be no peace. Good-bye to tact. Good-bye to being polite. Good-bye to showing tolerance for other people's buffooneries. The fact that we claim to admire Truth is probably the biggest lie of all. But that's part of the charade, part of what makes us human, and we do not even think about it. In effect, we lie to ourselves. Lies are only despicable when they betray a trust. — Jack McDevitt

Truth is like beauty; it lies in the mind of the beholder — Bangambiki Habyarimana

The truth you speak doth lack some gentleness
And time to speak it in. You rub the sore
When you should bring the plaster. — William Shakespeare

In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth, even though it be covertly, and by snatches. — Herman Melville

To tell you the truth. I am a wild and passionate novelist. I am therefore easily given over to telling wild and passionate lies. — Val Edward Simone

Supervisors routinely fabricated statistics on agricultural production and industrial output because they were so fearful of telling their own bosses the truth. Lies were built upon lies, all the way to the top, so it is in fact conceivable that Kim Il-sung himself didn't know when the economy crashed — Barbara Demick

First of all, you have to keep unmasking the world about you for what it is: manipulative, controlling, power-hungry, and, in the long run, destructive. The world tells you many lies about who you are, and you simply have to be realistic enough to remind yourself of this. Every time you feel hurt, offended, or rejected, you have to dare to say to yourself: 'These feelings, strong as they may be, are not telling me the truth about myself. The truth, even though I cannot feel it right now, is that I am the chosen child of God, precious in God's eyes, called the Beloved from all eternity, and held safe in an everlasting belief. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

And whose fault was it that the boy swallowed down lies, when no one would feed him the truth? — Lois McMaster Bujold