If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.

Born, n. a person who talks when you wish him to listen.

With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarters, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.

Never miss a good chance to shut up.

Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak. But experience more than sufficiently teaches that men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg crackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

The liar is no better than the thief, and if his mendacity takes the form of slander he may be worse than most thieves. It puts a premium upon knavery untruthfully to attack an honest man, or even with hysterical exaggeration to assail a bad man with untruth.

A thief is a man in need. A liar is a man in fear.

Many people resented my impatience and honesty, but I never cared about acceptance as much as I cared about respect.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you.

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked.

But what is happiness except for the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads.

If you are ever tempted to look for outside approval, realize that you have compromised your own integrity. If you need a witness, be your own.

You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right.

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.

Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a life.

Let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be.

It's the truth I'm after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

If you can't find the truth right where you are, where else do you think you will find it.

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.

Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.