Variant: Too much truth confuses the facts. Too much honesty makes you sound insincere
Source: The Name of the Wind (2007), Chapter 26, “Lanre Turned” (p. 203)
Context: “All stories are true,” Skarpi said. “But this one really happened, if that’s what you mean.” He took another slow drink, then smiled again, his bright eyes dancing. “More or less. You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way. Too much truth confuses the facts. Too much honesty makes you sound insincere.”
Source: Organization and Management: Selected Papers (1948), p. 11
At The Zoo
Song lyrics, Bookends (1968)
“Sometimes my mouth is a little too big and a little too open and sounds too much like a sailor.”
“Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway!”
Peter Quince at the Clavier (1915)
Context: Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the self-same sounds On my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music.
“Maybe my expectations for honesty are too high.”
Source: The Calling
“God is a sound people make when they're too tired to think anymore.”
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)
“In poetry much of the sense and most of the pleasure resides in the sounds the poem make.”
The Great Modern Poets, London, 2006
