If you cannot be honest with yourself, there is no hope of being honest with anyone else.

Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

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?

The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow eating agony of a lie is never lost.

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in the newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.

All limitations are self-imposed.

Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it’s holy ground. There’s no greater investment.

If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.

I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.

Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility.

The true profession of a man is to find his way to himself.

It is of particular value to learn to like yourself. Since you must spend so much time with yourself you might as well get some satisfaction out of the relationship.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.

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.

The truth has no defense against a fool determined to believe a lie.

Everything you said should be true but not everything true should be said.

You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It is the funniest joke in the world.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.