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.
Realizing that we've surrendered our self-esteem to others and choosing to be accountable for our own self-worth would mean absorbing the terrifying fact that we're always vulnerable to pain and loss.
The more humble and obedient to God a man is, the more wise and at peace he will be in all that he does.
Learn how to turn frustration into fascination. You will learn more being fascinated by life than you will by being frustrated by it.
If you call a thing bad you do little, if you call a thing good you do much
Being generous, just helping one's relatives and being blameless in one's actions; this is the best good luck.
A balanced and skillful approach to life, taking care to avoid extremes, becomes a very important factor in conducting one's everyday existence.
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