Honesty is seldom ingratiating and often discomfiting.
Interpretation
Honesty can create discomfort and may not always win favor with others.
In this quote, Tom Stoppard highlights the paradox of honesty; while being truthful is a virtuous quality, it can also lead to awkwardness or unhappiness in interactions with others. People may find blunt honesty disarming or offensive, suggesting that the truth can be challenging to accept or might strain relationships.
In practice
In a discussion about ethics, this quote can remind people that honesty might lead to uncomfortable truths that need to be faced.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
My prayer became 'May I find peace... May I love this life no matter what.' I was seeking an inner refuge, an experience of presence and wholeness that could carry me through whatever losses might come.
We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail.
As long as you know men are like children, you know everything!
Service brings merit, merit allows you to go deeper in meditation, meditation brings back your smile.
Any man who, having planted a vineyard, has not yet reaped the benefits should do so at once, so that he does not die in the struggle and leave it for another to enjoy.
Whatever posessions and objects of its desires the lower self may obtain, it hangs on to them, refusing to let them go out of greed for more, or out of fear of poverty and need.
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