This is the law: The purpose of fighting is to win. There is no possible victory in defense. The sword is more important than the shield and skill is more important than either. The final weapon is the brain. All else is supplemental.
The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow eating agony of a lie is never lost.
- Topic: Honesty, Truth
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from John Steinbeck
It is a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it.
Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day; it helps. Then, when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
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When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.
When whole races and peoples conspire to propagate gigantic mute lies in the interest of tyrannies and shams, why should we care anything about the trifling lies told by individuals?
Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.
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.
Truly, to tell lies is not honorable; but when the truth entails tremendous ruin, to speak dishonorably is pardonable.
None of us knows what might happen even the next minute, yet still we go forward. Because we trust. Because we have Faith.
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
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.
Everything you say should be true but not everything true should be said.
