“An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may.”

— William Hazlitt

No. 387
Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1823)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may." by William Hazlitt?

William Hazlitt 186

English writer 1778–1830

Related quotes

“However roguish a man may be, he always loves to deal with an honest man.”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

Letter, Philadelphia, to Rachel Smithers (6 July 1794), published in The Autobiography of William Cobbett: The Progress of a Plough-boy to a Seat in Parliament, ch. 5, p. 57 (1933).

“Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever: But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an œconomy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure that he may speak it the longer.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Letters On a Regicide Peace (1796)

“And though, as Tully remarks, the populace may be ignorant, it is capable of grasping the truth and readily yields when a man, worthy of confidence, lays the truth before it.”

Niccolo Machiavelli book Discourses on Livy

Book 1, Ch. 4 (as translated by LJ Walker and B Crick)
Discourses on Livy (1517)
Context: The demands of a free populace, too, are very seldom harmful to liberty, for they are due either to the populace being oppressed or to the suspicious that it is going to be oppressed... and, should these impressions be false, a remedy is provided in the public platform on which some man of standing can get up, appeal to the crowd, and show that it is mistaken. And though, as Tully remarks, the populace may be ignorant, it is capable of grasping the truth and readily yields when a man, worthy of confidence, lays the truth before it.

“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.”

Leon R. Kass (1939) American academic

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.