Frankness Quotes

“You must study to be frank with the world: Frankness is the child of honesty and courage.”

“Display politeness and frankness always both in action and conversation. Don’t keep engaging in useless arguments. It scares your dreams away. Talk sensibly.”

“A spirit of candor and frankness, when wholly unaccompanied with coarseness, headmired in others, but he could not acquire it himself.”

“I'm going to be frank, Max...""Of course. All cards on the table." But he gave me a poker smile.”

“The barber's assistant asks if I am a Swede. An American? Not that either. A Russian? Well, then, what are you? I love to answer such nationalistically tinted questions with a steely silence, and to leave people who ask me about my patriotic feelings in the dark. Or I tell lies and say that I'm Danish. Some kinds of frankness are only hurtful and boring.”

“If you wish to preserve your secret wrap it up in frankness.”

“All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.”

“You know, he said, our work is difficult: we confrontmuch sorrow and disappointment.He gazed at me with increasing frankness.I was like you once, he added, in love with turbulence.”

“Dissembling was so large a part of middle-class life that honesty and frankness seemed the most devious stratagem of all. The most outright lie was the closest one came to truth.”

“It was inevitable under a monarchy, however benevolent the monarch. The old virtues disappear. Independence and frankness are at a discount. Complacent anticipation of the monarch's wishes is then the greatest of all virtues. One must either be a good monarch like yourself, or a good courtier like myself—either an Emperor or an idiot.”