Frankness Quotes

In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.

~ Samuel Johnson

Look, Miranda, he said, those twenty long years that lie between you and me. I've more knowledge of life than you, I've lived more and betrayed more and seen more betrayed. At your age one is bursting with ideals. You think that because I can sometimes see what's trivial and what's important in art that I ought to be more virtuous. But I don't want to be virtuous. My charm (if there is any) for you is simply frankness. And experience. Not goodness. I'm not a good man. Perhaps morally I'm younger even than you are. Can you understand that?

~ John Fowles

If we’re honest, what makes something impossible is not our fear. Rather, it is our indifference.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

In the guise of frankness many people ruin their world by saying unpleasant things to friends and family. The bad words make them a bad world.

~ Girdhar Joshi

Display politeness and frankness always both in action and conversation. Don’t keep engaging in useless arguments. It scares your dreams away. Talk sensibly.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

The problem with holiness is that once we look into the face of it we are no longer capable of taking that which is odious and filthy and somehow pretending that it’s translucent and clean. In other words, we have to do one of the most revolting things possible; we have to face ourselves.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

He showed the fineness of his nature by being kinder to me after that misunderstanding than before. Nay, the very incident which, by my theory, must in some degree estrange me and him, changed, indeed, somewhat our relations; but not in the sense I painfully anticipated. An invisible, but a cold something, very slight, very transparent, but very chill: a sort of screen of ice had hitherto, all through our two lives, glazed the medium through which we exchanged intercourse. Those few warm words, though only warm with anger, breathed on that frail frost-work of reserve; about this time, it gave note of dissolution. I think from that day, so long as we continued friends, he never in discourse stood on topics of ceremony with me.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Oh yes, I am frequently driven to an enraged frenzy by the blatantly crass actions of others. But to be painfully honest, that anger is much less driven by the reality of their actions and far more fueled by the realization that everything I am is everything that I hate in them.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Being the soothsayer of the tribe is a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

~ Anthon St. Maarten

The barber's assistant asks if I am a Swede. An American? Not that either. A Russian? Well, then, what are you? I love to answer such nationalistically tinted questions with a steely silence, and to leave people who ask me about my patriotic feelings in the dark. Or I tell lies and say that I'm Danish. Some kinds of frankness are only hurtful and boring.

~ Robert Walser

I'm going to be frank, Max...Of course. All cards on the table. But he gave me a poker smile.

~ Alfred Alcorn

A spirit of candor and frankness, when wholly unaccompanied with coarseness, headmired in others, but he could not acquire it himself.

~ Anne Brontë