“(M)aybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect… you know… like being people.”

"Your guide for proper etiquette at sacred sites" https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=52701329&itype=cmsid, The Salt Lake Tribune (October 21, 2011)

Source: Little Women

Variant: Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch.1

"A Stranger Comes to Town" (c. 2001)
Context: Being with Hemingway meant joining in his elaborate game playing as a necessary mark of respect. Tennessee asked only that you be colorful and that you be honest.
Looking back I still find the 50s the most exhilarating decade I've lived through. The only mistake I made then was in thinking it would go on forever. I keep reading it was all Dull Conformity and I wonder where those people were living. Not on my planet. The fact that we had won World War 2 and that we were alive led to a post-war cultural explosion.

Looking for an Honest Man (2009)
Context: Diogenes … refuses to be taken in by complacent popular belief that we already know human goodness from our daily experience, or by confident professorial claims that we can capture the mystery of our humanity in ­definitions. But mocking or not, and perhaps speaking better than he knew, Diogenes gave elegantly simple expression to the humanist quest for self-knowledge: I seek the human being — my human being, your human being, our humanity. In fact, the embellished version of Diogenes' question comes to the same thing: To seek an honest man is, at once, to seek a human being worthy of the name, an honest-to-goodness exemplar of the idea of humanity, a truthful and truth-speaking embodiment of the animal having the power of articulate speech.

Lucretius, p. 163
Dialogue de l'arbre (1943)