Quotes about Honesty

The falseness of your own hearts, if you look not to them, may undo you(15).

Truth loves the light and is most beautiful when it is most naked. If you would not teach men, why are you in the pulpit? If you would teach men, why do you not speak so as to be understood?

Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.

Integrity largely has to do with purifying our intentions and a growing honesty about our actual motives.

I guess prophets are those who do not care whether you are ready to hear their message. They say it because it has to be said and because it is true.

Amazing that we made Jesus into the consummate answer giver because that is not what he usually does. He more often leads us right onto the horns of our own human-made dilemmas, where we are forced to meet God and be honest with ourselves. He creates problems for us more than resolves them, problems that very often cannot be resolved by all-or-nothing thinking but only by love and forgiveness.

For some of you, my quoting Jesus is the only way you will trust me; for others, it gives you more reasons to mistrust me, but I have to take both risks. If I dared to present all of these ideas simply as my ideas, or because they match modern psychology or old mythology, I would be dishonest. Jesus for me always clinches the deal, and I sometimes wonder why I did not listen to him in the first place.

Francis's all-night prayer, "Who are you, O God, and who am I?" is probably a perfect prayer, because it is the most honest prayer we can offer.

A.A. is the only group I know that is willing and honest enough to just tell people up front, "You are damn selfish!" Or, "Until you get beyond your massive narcissism you are never going to grow up.

Step 8 is a marvelous tool and technology for very practical incarnation, which keeps Christianity grounded, honest, and focused on saving others instead of just ourselves. "Anyone who claims to be in the light, but hates his brother or sister, is still in the dark" (1 John 2:9). Until religion becomes flesh, it is merely Platonic idealism instead of Jesus radicalism.

You are supposed to struggle with spiritual texts, but when you make the Bible into a quick answer book, you largely remain at your present level of awareness. There are groups who would describe the Bible as an answer book for all of life's problems. The Bible is actually a conflict book. It is filled with seeming contradictions or paradoxes and, if you read it honestly and humbly, it should actually create problems for you!

We cannot heal what we do not first acknowledge.