Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

I'll tell you something that's completely true - you can, as a man, obtain everything you want with the truth. If you lie, first of all you've got to be a very good lying actor, which is tres difficile. And it's going to give you poison inside the body.

I want a language that speaks the truth.

Why lie? I'm not going to be a hypocrite and say the opposite of what I think, like some others do.

Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie: a fault which needs it most, grows two thereby.

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

It is an affront to treat falsehood with complaisance.

There's freedom in being rigorously honest. I lied all my life.

No virtue ever was founded on a lie. The truth, then, at all risks and costs - the truth from the beginning. Make a clean breast to whomsoever you need to make it, and then - face the world.

There is such a thing as a hatred of lies and dissimulation, which is the outcome of a delicate sense of humor; there is also the selfsame hatred but as the result of cowardice, in so far as falsehood is forbidden by Divine law. Too cowardly to lie.

It is better to disappoint people with the truth than to appease them with a lie.

Telling the truth is a beautiful act even if the truth itself is ugly.

It is very difficult to tell the truth.

You can't be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.

Truth does not sit in a cave and hide like a lie. It wanders around proudly and roars loudly like a lion.

A man who lies, thinking it is the truth, is an honest man, and a man who tells the truth, believing it to be a lie, is a liar.

A man who speaks out honestly and fearlessly that which he knows, and that which he believes, will always enlist the good will and the respect, however much he may fail in winning the assent, of his fellow men.

Truth is love's mother, and we all know it is not wise to lie to anyone's mother.

Never chase a lie. Let it alone, and it will run itself to death. I can work out a good character much faster than anyone can lie me out of it

Dogs don't lie and why should I? Strangers come they growl and bark, they know their loved ones in the dark, Now let me, by night or day, Be just as full of truth as they.

I'd rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies.

Onstage, nothing is as important as truth, nothing. As soon as you lie, they know it.

Candor is the only way I know how to do it. I'm way too old to change. At the end of the day, I believe the truth is stronger than any lie that's out there.

So is darkness better than a heartfelt lie?

Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is, and you must bend to its power or live a lie.