Quotes About Honesty

Definitions

"Honesty is not knowing what you feel. It is really feeling what you know.

Directives

"Your task is to take the steps to Knowledge and to have the honesty to realize that without this greater guidance within you, your decisions will be weak, predicated on weak assumptions, on shifting desires, on momentary attractions and most importantly based upon the grinding reality of fear that so pervades your life and other people’s lives that it goes almost unnoticed except when it is expressing itself in extreme ways."

"Review all your relationships, seeking a deeper response from yourself, a deeper honesty, a deeper reckoning. Not playing life for its advantages, but penetrating life for its real truth and direction. Not being a coward. Not being a fool. Not being a slave to the wishes of others or to your own cultural conditioning. This is honesty. And honesty brings you back to the freedom journey, to the unfinished business of your life, to the core activities and essential pursuits that are before you and the work that must be done on your inner life and your outer life to bring you closer to the truth of who you are and why you are here."

"It is time to be really honest with yourself, not basing your life on your preferences or your fears, but on true recognition within yourself. Facing the Revelation will challenge you to respond with this deeper honesty. Facing the Revelation will challenge you with this deeper honesty."

"You are being prepared for a greater life, with greater strength and integrity, but you must submit and receive and learn to become truly honest with yourself about your deeper intentions and your greater responsibilities in being here."

Excerpts

"The New Message is entirely honest, and it asks you to be entirely honest—a level of honesty that most people do not even consider."

"In learning The Way of Knowledge you become fundamentally honest. You take life as it is. You face life as it is. You do not try to pretend....Real honesty requires the willingness to face anything that you have to face."

"Knowledge will lead you to the right people and will develop slowly and carefully the right understanding if you are patient, persistent and honest in your approach."

"To honestly look at the world is to realize that its mounting difficulties are exceeding human capacity and understanding."

"It is the integrity, the honesty and the desire of the heart that will count and that will enable you to receive the New Message for yourself and to understand its importance for the world."

"If you are honest in looking at the world around you, open and objective rather than just simply trying to fulfill your dreams and ambitions, you will see many things that will be important for you."

"If you are honest and allow your feelings to emerge, you will see that already you sense the approach of great change in the world."

"Because Steps to Knowledge is wholly honest and pure, you must become really honest and pure to respond to it and to follow it."

"The struggle for freedom exists at many different levels and represents the core motivation within the individual if they are being honest and faithful to Knowledge within themselves."

"Are you living the life you know you must live? That is the question. And the honesty of your answer will be important."

"God has placed Knowledge within you to guide you and to protect you and to teach you how to live in harmony with your environment and with each other. It is oriented to the truth, to what is real and genuine and authentic, what is honest and what is compassionate."

"When Knowledge begins to move in your life,... [y]ou will seek a greater honesty from people, a greater responsibility in people and a greater resonance with people. You are no longer driven simply by your psychological, emotional and practical needs."

"Knowledge within you ... is not governed by social conditioning. It is not persuaded by the persuasions of the world. It does not bow down to those whom you think you must please and whom you must serve. It is clear. It is compassionate. And it is entirely honest."

"Freedom and honesty ... are tied together. There are people who want to serve God and even think they are serving God, but they are not free inside, and they are not really honest with themselves.... Yet if they become honest with themselves and doubt their beliefs and question their own assumptions, then the pathway to freedom begins to open up for them again."

"The correct attitude must also include the willingness to correct anything that obstructs the reclamation of Knowledge—those beliefs, those attitudes, those ambitions, those cherished needs and those personal demands that infringe on and limit your ability to experience life as it is, as it will be the next moment and as it is destined to be in the future. This takes great courage and a desire for honesty. Indeed, this far exceeds most people's definition of and boundaries for honesty. Here you must continue to push the boundary of honesty and come back to what you know, which is distinct from what you want or believe. This is an act of personal integrity and a statement of real honesty."

"You must have friendships with people who are strong, who inspire you. It is not their charm, their beauty and their wealth now that is valuable, if they even have these things. It is the commitment in their lives. It is their honesty. It is their clarity. It is their purposefulness."

"People will have to face the reality and the meaning of the New Revelation. They will have to face their response to the Messenger. They will have to face the consequences of either succeeding or failing in this encounter. It will be a great test, a test of integrity, honesty, clarity and wisdom."

"You must gain this greater perspective, but you must also express your feelings constructively, you must understand the condition of those people who have upset you or disappointed you. You must do the work at this level as well, for until you do, you are not emotionally free. You are not emotionally honest, and you will pollute your current relationships with your unforgiveness from the past."

Self-honesty

"You are being prepared for a greater life, with greater strength and integrity, but you must submit and receive and learn to become truly honest with yourself about your deeper intentions and your greater responsibilities in being here."

"The power of decision is given to you. Yet what motivates your decision is what is crucial. You begin with what you tell yourself. Whatever you tell others is based on what you tell yourself. If what you tell yourself is untrue, then what you tell others will be untrue. And though you will think that you are being honest because you are being consistent, it will be very difficult for you to unravel the layers of deception that you have succumbed to."

"In a moment of real sobriety and self-honesty, you will realize how little you really understand of anything. But this moment of sobriety, though perhaps painful, is a moment of humility. And with that humility, you can gain a new understanding, a new recognition of where your true power resides."

"Sometimes after great, sad or traumatic events [people] will really do some kind of honest reckoning with their life.... The person only really becomes honest and self-aware when there is no other alternative, when there is no place to hide, when it is seen that hiding only hurts you and prevents you from gaining your real strength."

"You have come to serve the world at a very great turning point, perhaps the greatest turning point that any race can face. You have come for this. So do not take forever to come to terms with your deeper inclinations. We call for a greater honesty within you, an honesty that responds to Knowledge and is not governed or controlled by your will or your ambitions. Then the time it takes to come to terms with what you really know and what is really genuine in your life can be effectively shortened, which saves you time, energy and a great deal of suffering."

"If you come to Knowledge asking questions, but you really do not want to know the answer, or you want to make a deal between what you know and what you want, then you are not being sincere. Ask an honest question and you will get an honest answer. Ask a dishonest question and you will get the answer that you want."

"If you are truly honest with yourself, you must recognize that your experience of physical existence is predominantly one of suffering and uncertainty."

"If you cannot be honest with yourself, how can you be honest with others? If you cannot respect your own experience, how can you have any respect for theirs?"

"How far you go on this journey depends upon the level of honesty that you have within yourself. How you express this freedom, how far you take this freedom, depends upon your self-awareness and your honesty within yourself. Honesty here is so central to the freedom journey."

"You are in a state of avoidance with your own experience. If people stayed with their experience, it would lead them eventually to seek resolution and to change their circumstances to whatever degree they can. It would make them more honest with themselves and with other people, thus enhancing their relationship with themselves and with other people."

"Are you really being honest with yourself about what you are doing regarding your activities and involvements with others? ... Are you honestly engaged with the primary people of your life or are these relationships only established for convenience and for personal benefit?"

"Your ability to recognize the Revelation will be determined by how deeply you can experience your own nature and the honesty you bring to your own self-inquiry and to what you tell yourself.... The wise will respond. The honest will respond. The sincere will respond because they are honest and wise and sincere."

"To come to the realization that you do not really know what you want for yourself or the world, is a profound position of self-honesty. It is a real reckoning within yourself."

“There is a greater honesty that is waiting for you to discover. There is a greater honesty that you must utilize on your own behalf. It is not enough merely to know how you feel. It is a greater requirement to feel what you know.”

“All falsehoods begin with what you tell yourself. All self-deception begins with what you tell yourself. All errors in discernment and discretion begin with what you tell yourself.”

“Here you must continue to push the boundary of honesty and come back to what you know, which is distinct from what you want or believe. This is an act of personal integrity and a statement of real honesty.”

“Tell yourself a lie, and you will lie to others. Alter the truth to yourself, and the representation of truth to you will be altered as well.”

“Lack of awareness limits honesty because without awareness, you tend to be dishonest in order to protect yourself.”

“Honesty, then, is seen as a good thing as long as it is convenient. When it ceases to be convenient, then other ways are chosen.”

“Do not condemn dishonesty. Dishonesty is what you can expect unless the person has made a real effort to counteract it.”

“Being accountable to your beliefs is not honesty. That is deception. You must be accountable to something greater within you, which will motivate you to go beyond your beliefs and to outgrow them if it is necessary.”

“You begin with what you tell yourself. Whatever you tell others is based on what you tell yourself. If what you tell yourself is untrue, then what you tell others will be untrue. And though you will think that you are being honest because you are being consistent, it will be very difficult for you to unravel the layers of deception that you have succumbed to.”

“You want to be very careful what you tell yourself, for honesty and dishonesty both begin with what you tell yourself. Listen to what you tell yourself and see if it is really true or if it is merely a habit or a part of your conditioning. Listen to what you tell other people, to see if it is really true.”

“Honesty is a difficult subject because it all depends on the range of your own experience, your courage and your integrity. When you make a proclamation or a judgment, ask yourself, ‘Am I really being honest with myself in making this proclamation or this judgment?’ In considering the New Message from God that is now in the world, ask yourself, ‘Am I honestly considering this?’ Ask yourself, ‘Am I really being honest in my relationships?’ Ask yourself, ‘Am I really being honest regarding my work?’ Ask yourself, ‘Do I really know how I feel about my relationships?’”

“With greater honesty, how can you be astray in your relationships? If you are telling the truth about what you are doing and what you are looking for, then others will know how to be with you… The reclamation of Knowledge is a process of becoming purely honest with yourself. With pure honesty, you become totally integrated within yourself—one person, not a group of divergent interests, not a group of different intentions, not a variety of responses. You become one person, one self, with one focus. If you can be one person, then you can be joined with life.”

If you are honest

"If you are really honest with yourself, then you will realize that you cannot say what God will do and not do. You cannot claim your religion is the only religion or the great religion or the last religion or the final religion, for this is to claim that you know God’s Plan and Purpose now and into the future, and no one on Earth, no one in the physical universe, can make such a claim."

"If you are truly honest with yourself, you must recognize that your experience of physical existence is predominantly one of suffering and uncertainty. You have moments of happiness, moments of reprieve, moments of enjoyable distraction. You perhaps believe you are happier than you really are, and many people suffer from this delusion, but if you are really honest about it, looking at your own experience objectively, you will have to admit that really it is not a very balanced experience. It is weighted far more towards suffering, uncertainty and anxiety than it is towards any real enjoyment of life.

And this problem of suffering has been a major issue for religions in the world and for important teachers and important traditions to deal with directly. It is a major problem and it is a problem that many people have not yet even faced. Here the poor have a certain advantage over the rich, for the rich are more deluded than the poor. They have much more fantasy regarding their life and their prospects for the future than do the poor, who are facing more directly the aggravation and the destitution of trying to survive in a physical reality without having the necessary resources to do so."

"If you are really honest, you will have to see you do not have an answer, that your intellect alone cannot solve everything here. If you are honest and allow your feelings to emerge, you will see that already you sense the approach of great change in the world. The mind does not want to suffer, so it creates convenient solutions, convenient conclusions and simple explanations.

It casts blame upon others. It asserts that technology will solve this, that humanity has always solved its problems and it will solve all of these problems, and you try to keep the experience away from yourself. This is understandable, but it is unfortunate because it disengages you from recognizing the great change that is even coming into your life, and it prevents you from preparing for the impacts for the Great Waves of change."

"There is a clamoring for change, but who will change, and what will change? People who are wealthy want to keep their wealth and have more. People who are not wealthy want wealth, and they need many practical things. And then, of course, there are vast and ever-growing numbers of people in the world who cannot even meet the daily requirements of life. They need reliable and sufficient sources of food. They need political stability. They need security. They need ethical governance. The needs are immense and growing. But you must ask yourself: Who will have to change here? And while you may point the finger at certain people or institutions, if you are really honest in your questioning, you must come down to yourself."

"Taking the Steps to Knowledge is like taking the steps to God — the God within you and the God within everyone else. Some people try to make every aspect of a person Godlike or connected to God, but this is not accurate. The only thing that God created in you is Knowledge. Everything else is a product of your self-creation and co-creation with other people living in separation.

Now some people may say, “Oh, I don’t believe that! I think God created everything!” But if you think like that, then you must justify everything and that becomes increasingly difficult to do if you are really honest and objective in your observations of life around you.

So learning The Way of Knowledge is like learning The Way of God. Taking the Steps to Knowledge is like taking the steps to God. Living the life of Knowledge is like living the life of God in the world."

"Humanity is facing the Great Waves of Change. It is unprecedented. Never before has the entire race been confronted with such challenges, all converging at the same time. How will you deal with them? How will you know what to do individually? How can you prepare? How can you help others to prepare? How can you generate greater unity and cooperation between individuals, between cultures, religions and nations?

If you are truly honest with yourself, you must come to the conclusion that you do not really know. You do not have all these answers. You may say, “If only this” or “If only that,” but these are not answers. They’re wishes. Wishes will not prepare you for the future. Wishes will not alter the course of human activity and awareness. Wishes will not save humanity from a calamity largely of its own making. And wishes will not prepare you for the realities, the dangers and the opportunities inherent in your emergence into this Greater Community of intelligent life."

See also

• "Honesty"