Without Guile Quotes & Sayings

I have thrown the petty respectable life with all is comforts behind me after the effort to broaden and beautify it has destituted me and drained my stamina. All right--let me throw it behind without guile, without hoping either for a return to it or for a constant absence. After all, it did not request my efforts. The normal live body hopes for the respect and love of others, and enough of the world to bestow largesse. He hopes and he abandons hope by turn. In the first there is fire to live, but in the second there is greater peace. — Harry Partch

But some most worthless persons are in the habit of carrying about the name of Jesus Christ in wicked guile, while yet they practice things unworthy of God, and hold opinions contrary to the doctrine of Christ, to their own destruction, and that of those who give credit to them, whom you must avoid as ye would wild beasts. — Ignatius Of Loyola

Ll the merry little elves can go hang themselves
My faith is as cold as can be
I'm stacked high to the roof, and I'm not without proof
If you don't believe me, come see.
You think i'm blue I think so too
In my words you'll find no guile
The game's gotten old The deck's gone cold
And i'm gonna have to put you down for a while
The game's gotten old The deck's gone cold
I'm gonna have to put you down for a while
-Bob Dylan, Huck's Tune — Bob Dylan

Don't come back till you have him! the Ticktockman said, very quietly, very sincerely, extremely dangerously.
They used dogs. They used probes. They used cardioplate crossoffs. They used teepers. They used bribery. They used stiktytes. They used intimidation. They used torment. They used torture. They used finks. They used cops. They used search&seizure. They used fallaron. They used betterment incentive. They used fingerprints. They used the Bertillon system. They used cunning. They used guile. They used treachery. They used Raoul Mitgong, but he didn't help much. They used applied physics. They used techniques of criminology.
And what the hell: they caught him. — Harlan Ellison

Depression is seductive: it offends and teases, frightens you and draws you in, tempting you with its promise of sweet oblivion, then overwhelming you with a nearly sexual power, squirming past your defenses, dissolving your will, invading the tired spirit so utterly that it becomes difficult to recall that you ever lived without it ... or to imagine that you might live that way again. With all the guile of Satan himself, depression persuades you that its invasion was all your own idea, that you wanted it all along. It fogs the part of the brain that reasons, that knows right from wrong. It captures you with its warm, guilty, hateful pleasures, and, worst of all, it becomes familiar. All at once, you find yourself in thrall to the very thing that most terrifies you. Your work slides, your friendships slide, your marriage slides, but you scarcely notice: to be depressed is to be half in love with disaster. — Stephen L. Carter

You're a poster boy for sincerity. You have all the guile of a lamb. — Dean Koontz

Beauty is a luster which love bestows to guile the eye. Therefore it may be said that only when the brain is without love will the eye look and see no beauty. — Jack Vance

Up the coast of the New World, the ship bearing ten million bananas ground out its course, every minute the waste heaving brokenly around it more brilliant as the moon rose off the starboard bow and moved into the sky with effortless guile , unashamed of the stigmata blemishing the face she showed from the frozen fogs of the Grand Banks to the jungles of Brazil where along the Rio Branco they knew her for a girl who loved her brother the sun; and the sun, suspicious, trapped her in her evil passion by drawing a blackened hand across her face, leaving the marks which betrayed her and betray her still. — William Gaddis

Ask yourself what a man without guile might do to your body in the dark. — Nenia Campbell

The most dangerous physicians are those born actors who imitate born physicians with a perfectly deceptive guile. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Dont shave,I like it..It helps with one of my new fantasies."
"Yeah ?"Zack shifted a little to the center on top of him for maximum pleasure."What new fantasy is that ?"
Lucy grinned,the sleepiness in her smile melting into guile."The one about the innocent schoolteacher and the vicious,uncivilized cop.Want to play ?"
"Sure."Zack ran his hands up her back."Who do you want to be ?"
"I,of course will be the innocent schoolteacher"Lucy batted her eyes at him.
"Which makes me the cop.All right you have the right to remain naked."
Lucy laughed. — Jennifer Crusie

Baseball is about homecoming. It is a journey by theft and strength, guile and speed, out around first to the far island of second, where foes lurk in the reefs and the green sea suddenly grows deeper, then to turn sharply, skimming the shallows, making for a shore that will show a friendly face, a color, a familiar language and, at third, to proceed, no longer by paths indirect but straight, to home. — A. Bartlett Giamatti

E wear the mask that grins and lies,
it hides our cheeks and shades our eyes-
this debt we pay to human guile;
with torn and bleeding hearts we smile. — Paul Laurence Dunbar

Some women, it seemed, were entirely without guile and bestowed their affections with hardly a moment's conscious thought. Others set out to implement a campaign of military thoroughness, with branched contingency trees and fallback positions, all to 'catch' a desirable man. The word 'desirable' was the giveaway, she thought. The poor jerk wasn't actually desired, only 'desirable' - a plausible object of desire in the opinion of those others on whose account this whole sorry charade was performed. Most women, she thought, were somewhere in the middle, seeking to reconcile their passions with their perceived long-term advantage. — Carl Sagan

It's worse than treachery. He's using force. Is that worse than guile? — Pamela Dean

And having thus chosen our course, without guile, and with pure purpose, let us renew our trust in GOD, and go forward without fear, and with manly hearts.
Abraham Lincoln, in an address to congress
July 4th, 1861 — Abraham Lincoln

I'm giving you that chance now. (Stryker)
It's too late. Too many centuries have passed. There was a time when I lived only to hear a kind word from your lips. But that ship sank under an assault of bitterness that no amount of charm or guile will recover. (Zephyra) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

And then the sly arch-lover that he was, he said the subtlest thing of all: that the lover was nearer the divine than the beloved; for the god was in the one but not in the other - perhaps the tenderest, most mocking thought that ever was thought, and source of all the guile and secret bliss the lover knows. — Thomas Mann

How? It's obvious. You told me yourself, Lou is like your Bertha - she's an automaton, playing her role, the same role, with me, with you, with one man after the other. The particular man is incidental. She seduced both of us in the same way, with the same female deviousness, the same guile, the same gestures, the same promises!" "And yet this automaton controls you. She dominates your mind: you worry about her opinion, you pine for her touch." "No. No pining. No longer. What I feel now is rage. — Irvin D. Yalom

It may be a union in name, but they fight each other tooth and nail. The lowly squabble over trifles. The great wage secret wars for power and wealth, and they call it government. Wars of words, and tricks, and guile, but no less bloody for that. The casualties are many. — Joe Abercrombie

It will be a sad day for the world when the Oriental gent realizes that Western bumbling is only Eastern guile in a different idiom. Well, a lot of it, anyway. — Kyril Bonfiglioli

Twas a still, calm night and the moon's pale light
Shone over hill and dale
When friends mute with grief stood around the deathbed
Of their loved, lost Lily Lyle.
Heart as pure as forest lily
Never knowing guile,
Had its home within the bosom
Of sweet Lily Lyle. — Flora Thompson

...it was the business of such men as were prudent and wise to deceive the people in matters of religion, and in that very thing not only to worship, but also to imitate the demons, whose greatest lust is to deceive. For just as the demons cannot possess any but those whom they have deceived with guile, so also men in princely office, not indeed being just, but like demons, have persuaded the people in the name of religion to receive as true those things which they themselves knew to be false; in this way, as it were, binding them up more firmly in civil society, so that they might in like manner possess them as subjects. — Augustine Of Hippo

She looked at me with gentle indignation. She was what we have after sixty million years of the Cenozoic. There were a lot of random starts and dead ends. Those big plated pea-brain lizards didn't make it. Sharks, scorpions and cockroaches, as living fossils, are lasting pretty well. Savagery, venom and guile are good survival quotients. This forked female mammal didn't seem to have enough tools. One night in the swamps would kill her. Yet behind all that fragility was a marvelous toughness. A Junior Allen was less evolved. He was a skull-cracker, two steps away from the cave. They were at the two ends of our bell curve, with all the rest of us lumped in the middle. If the trend is still supposed to be up, she was of the kind we should breed, accepting sensitivity as a strength rather than a weakness. But there is too much Junior Allen seed around. — John D. MacDonald

That space the Evil One abstracted stood From his own evil, and for the time remained Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed, Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge . — John Milton

Integrity also means avoiding any communication that is deceptive, full of guile, or beneath the dignity of people. "A lie is any communication with intent to deceive," according to one definition of the word. Whether we communicate with words or behavior, if we have integrity, our intent cannot be to deceive. — Stephen R. Covey

In time I came to realise my playmates were chosen for their dullness, their lack of guile or cunning. Friends with sharper minds would have sharpened my own thoughts, made me consider that this pleasant life of luxury and plenty was in reality nothing more than an ornate cage, and I a slave within it. — Anthony Ryan

What if history was a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory experiment, and the boys his ace in the hole? What if history was not a reasonable citizen, but a madman full of paranoid guile and these boys his agents, his big surprise! His own revenge? — Ralph Ellison

Women have tongues of craft, and hearts of guile,
They will, they will not; fools that on them trust;
For in their speech is death, hell in their smile.
[It., Femmina e cosa garrula e fallace:
Vuole e disvuole, e folle uom chi sen fida,
Si tra se volge.] — Torquato Tasso

The embrace of essential beastliness, made scientific and respectable by a reading of Darwin that may or may not have done justice to his intentions, thrilled and enthralled Western thought in certain quarters and in fact still does enthrall persons and groups that experience live in society as a barely tolerable constraint on a kind of freedom they consider a birthright. This freedom appears to have most of the essential features of a war of each against all, whether a hot war that compels them to go armed to Starbucks or to church or a cold war that makes a virtue of craftiness and guile, the ability to loot and wreck the national economy without getting caught. — Marilynne Robinson

Let us renew our trust in god, and go forward without fear. — Abraham Lincoln

When I was younger, I was impressed by those who were educated, accomplished, successful, and applauded by the world. But over the years, I have come to the realization that I am far more impressed by those wonderful and blessed souls who are truly good and without guile. — Dieter F. Uchtdorf

The author now leaves him in the hands of his readers: not as a hero, not as a man to be admired and talked of, not as a man who should be toasted at public dinners and spoken of with conventional absurdity as a perfect divine, but as a good man, without guile, believing humbly in the religion which he has striven to teach, and guided by the precepts which he has striven to learn. — Anthony Trollope

To be without guile is to be free of deceit, cunning, hypocrisy, and dishonesty in thought or action. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

When a teacher of the future comes to point out to the youth of America how the highest rewards of intellect and devotion can be gained, he may say to them, not by subtlety and intrigue; not by wire pulling and demagoguery; not by the arts of popularity; not by skill and shiftiness in following expediency; but by being firm in devotion to the principles of manhood and the application of morals and the courage of righteousness in the public life of our country; by being a man without guile and without fear, without selfishness, and with devotion to duty, devotion to his country. — Elihu Root

As parents know, little children are, by their nature, without guile. They speak the thoughts of their minds without reservation or hesitance as we have learned as parents when they embarrass us at times. They do not deceive. They set an example of being without guile. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

He was a foe without hate; a friend without treachery; a soldier without cruelty; a victor without oppression, and a victim without murmuring. He was a public officer without vices; a private citizen without wrong; a neighbor without reproach; a Christian without hypocrisy, and a man without guile. He was a Caesar, without his ambition; Frederick, without his tyranny; Napoleon, without his selfishness, and Washington, without his reward. — Benjamin Harvey Hill

Now is the time for guts and guile — Elizabeth Taylor

Her little hands, Crumb. Her little paws, like a child's. She has no guile in her. And she never speaks. And if she does I hate to bend my head to hear what she says. And in the pause I can hear my heart. Her little bits of embroidery, her scraps of silk, her halcyon sleeves, she cut out of the cloth some admirer gave her once, some poor boy struck with love for her...and yet she has never succumbed. Her little sleeves, her seed pearl necklace...she has nothing...she expects nothing...' A tear at last sneaks from Henry's eye, meanders down his cheek and vanishes into the mottled grey and ginger of his beard. — Hilary Mantel

Life is impermanent and in the face of that impermanence, cavort! Look death in the eye, tell him you're as cute as a button, flash a little deviant guile his way, and tell him to go feast on somebody's else's sweet flesh. — Nancy Milford

Jim: By the way Artie. How are you going to escape?
Artie: Oh, the usual way. Guile.. cunning ... trickery.
Wild Wild West Season 3
Night of the Arrow — Wild Wild West TV

Venetia had no guile, and no affectations; she knew the world only by the books she had read; experience had never taught her to doubt the sincerity of anyone who did her a kindness. — Georgette Heyer

These two qualities of leadership [Integrity and Sincerity] were part of God's law's for the Israelites (Deuteronomy 18:13). God wants His people to show a transparent character, open and innocent of guile.
A prominent businessman once replied to a question: "If I had to name the one most important quality of a top manager, I would say personal integrity." Surely the spiritual leader must be sincere in promise, faithful in discharge of duty, upright in finances, loyal in service, and honest in speech. — J. Oswald Sanders

Soldiering was about fighting. It was about killing people before they killed you. It was about having your way by force and guile in a dangerous world, taking a shit in the woods, living in dirty, difficult conditions, enduring hardships and risks that could - and sometimes did - kill you. It was ugly work. Which is not to say that certain men didn't enjoy it, didn't live for it. Garrison was one of those men. He embraced its cruelty. He would say, this man needs to die. Just like that. Some people needed to die. — Mark Bowden

It was a difficult time to be Irish, a difficult time to be twenty-one years of age and a difficult time to be a man who was attracted to other men. To be all three simultaneously required a level of subterfuge and guile that felt contrary to my nature. — John Boyne

Babies are endlessly fascinating to look at and I'm obsessed about their complete and utter lack of guile. — Minnie Driver

Of all the guile! How can you be objective? You have no perspective! You're only 16! — David Paul Kirkpatrick

The generous abundance of her passion, without guile or trickery, was like a white flame which penetrated and found response in depths of his own sensuous nature that had never yet been reached. — Kate Chopin

Nothing is taken at face value anymore, everything must be dissected. Perhaps it is the rise of advertisement over church and state. Things once spoken were spoken with strength and authority. Now they are spoken with stealth and with guile. They are spoken not to the rational mind but to the sub-conscious, the mind within the mind. — James Rozoff

Buffett was a billionaire who drove his own car, did his own taxes, and still lived in a home he had bought in 1958 for $31,500. He seemed to answer to a deeply rooted, distinctly American mythology, in which decency and common sense triumphed over cosmopolitan guile, and in which an idealized past held firm against a rootless and too hurriedly changing present. — Roger Lowenstein

Our world is full of temporary promises and guile. It is necessarily so. We are not evil people, this is just how we survive. There are only a few steps that separate success from failure. Understand this and you will not suffer from disillusionment as often as I did. — Amy Tan

Merlin is really at the forefront, in that regard. We get a glimpse into the dark, Machiavellian corridors of power. I like the fact that, although he has powers, his powers are almost in his political guile as much as what he relies on, in darker forces. — Joseph Fiennes

I want to be a guileless rook to discolor the blackness of all crafty human hearts — Munia Khan

He did not really mind that none of the delegates had spoken to him before leaving. But he was crushed by his failure to get them to recognize what he had long known: that without power, a people must use cunning and guile. Or were cunning and guile, based on superior understanding of a situation, themselves power? Certainly, most black people knew and used this art to survive in their everyday contacts with white people. It was only civil rights professionals who confused integrity with foolhardiness. "Faith — Sheree Thomas

Give me that warm feeling,
That makes me believe again.
Give me that soft answer,
The kind you gave me way back when.
Give me some true kindness,
That brightens the sky again.
Give me the best that's in you,
And encouragement now and then.
Dust off those long-lost manners!
Bury ambition and guile!
Unfurl those lovely banners
Of virtue and laughter and style!
Give me that warm feeling,
Take off that impersonal glove.
Remember, remember we're dealing
With that fair and rare thing called love! — Alec Wilder

It was called 'We Wear the Mask', by Paul Laurence Dunbar. I transcribed the first stanza and then started jotting down my reaction to it.

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, -
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

I used to wear masks so subtle I barely noticed them. A compliment to my mother after a dismal meal, a smile at my best friend when she sang out of tune, a forced laugh at my uncle's bad jokes. I wore small masks that came and went, like fleeting expressions.

I am stuck inside the mask I wear now. I want to rip it off. I want to show my scars to the world, to unveil the ugliness that breathes inside me. I want to be unashamed. I want to be unafraid. But every day the mask gets tighter, and I suffocate a little more.

I stopped writing. — Catherine Doyle

White people in his experience were far more transparent. The most hateful rarely bothered to conceal their hostility, and when for some reason they did try to hide their feelings, they generally exhibited all the guile of five-year-olds, who cannot imagine that the world sees them other than as they wish to be seen. — Matt Ruff

What man so wise, what earthly wit so ware,
As to descry the crafty cunning train,
By which deceit doth mask in visor fair,
And cast her colours dyed deep in grain,
To seem like truth, whose shape she well can feign,
And fitting gestures to her purpose frame,
The guiltless man with guile to entertain? — Edmund Spenser

Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile,
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while ... — William Butler Yeats

And Bethod means to make war on this? He must be mad."
"Bethod, for all his waste and pride, understands the Union. They are jealous of one another, all those people. It may be a union in name, but they fight each other tooth and nail. The lowly squabble over trifles. The great wage secret wars for power and wealth, and they call it government. Wars of words, and tricks, and guile, but no less bloody for that. The casualties are many. Behind those walls they shout and argue and endlessly bite one another's backs. Old squabbles are never settled, but thrive, and put down roots, and the roots grow deeper with the passing years. It has always been so. They are not like you, Logen. A man here can smile, and fawn, and call you friend, give you gifts with one hand and stab you with the other. You will find this a strange place. — Joe Abercrombie

I am of you," said Kip."I am Guile as much as you are. True, I have a scrap of decency, but only a scrap. How do you think you can treat a Guile with such disregard and get away with it? Because I am you. I'm as cold as you, I'm as smart as you, and when you push me, I'm as evil and cruel as you. I have a thin film of goodness floating on the top of my Guile, grandfather, but I don't know how senile you must be to miss just how thin it is. — Brent Weeks

And my heart shifted a bit in my chest as I said to him with no guile whatsoever, "I won't tell anyone unless you say so." The weight of that jeweled knife and belt seemed to grow. "I wish I had been there to stop it. I should have been there to stop it." I meant every word. Lucien squeezed our linked arms as we rounded a hedge, the house rising up before us. "You are a better friend to me, Feyre," he said quietly, "than I ever was to you. — Sarah J. Maas

Our duty is to rise in the bright daylight, openly, beating the drums. The cause for which we are ready to give our necks does not fear the light, and to attack the enemy by guile would not suit it. A Pole has always despised ambushes, and God forbid that he should change. We shall not fail to have enough strength to defeat our enemies if we do not fail to have the spirit of sacrifice and love. — Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont

Contrary to popular wisdom, bullies are rarely cowards.
Bullies come in various shapes and sizes. Observe yours. Gather intelligence.
Shunning one hopeless battle is not an act of cowardice.
Hankering for security or popularity makes you weak and vulnerable.
Which is worse: Scorn earned by informers? Misery endured by victims?
The brutal May have been molded by a brutality you cannot exceed.
Let guile be your ally.
Respect earned by integrity cannot be lost without your consent.
Don't laugh at what you don't find funny.
Don't support an opinion you don't hold.
The independent befriend the independent.
Adolescence dies in its fourth year. You live to be eighty. — David Mitchell

The same tantalizing guile and sublime skill ... [The series is] reinforced in its claim to be one of the major literary works of this century ... Only two other writers that this reviewer can think of have each created an entire, discrete and compelling world, a totally believable entity which one might wish to inhabit, and they are Joyce and Proust. It is not pretentious to place Patrick O'Brian in the first canon of literature ... — Kevin Myers

Once in a stately passion I cried with desperate grief
'Oh Lord, my heart is black with guile, of sinners I am chief'
Then stooped my guardian angel and whispered from behind
'Vanity my little man, you're nothing of the kind'
— James Thomson