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.
There is no joy without hardship. If not for death, would we appreciate life? If not for hate, would we know the ultimate goal is love? At these moments you can either hold on to negativity and look for blame, or you can choose to heal and keep on loving.
Only someone who is well prepared has the opportunity to improvise.
Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.
Our misery is that we thirst so little for these sublime things, and so much for the mocking trifles of time and space.
The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn't resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates.
One of the things I learned, the easiest of lessons, was that the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be.
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