“As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself. Hiding your core feelings takes an enormous amount of energy, it saps your motivation to pursue worthwhile goals, and it leaves you feeling bored and shut down. Meanwhile, stress hormones keep flooding your body, leading to headaches, muscle aches, problems with your bowels or sexual functions—and irrational behaviors that may embarrass you and hurt the people around you. Only after you identify the source of these responses can you start using your feelings as signals of problems that require your urgent attention.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 235) | ★ Featured on this book list.
Integrity Quotes
“If it is not right, don’t do it: if it is not true, don’t say it.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Page 118)
“Calculated honesty is a stiletto. There is nothing more degrading than the friendship of wolves: avoid that above all. The good, honest, kindly man has it in his eyes, and you cannot mistake him.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Page 99)
“To tell the truth is the same as to be a good tailor, or to be a good farmer, or to write beautifully. To be good at any activity requires practice: no matter how hard you try, you cannot do naturally what you have not done repeatedly. In order to get accustomed to speaking the truth, you should tell only the truth, even in the smallest of things.”
Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 67)
“The only way to tell the truth is to speak with kindness. Only the words of a loving man can be heard.”
Henry David Thoreau, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 67)
“How rotten and fraudulent when people say they intend to ‘give it to you straight.’ What are you up to, dear friend? It shouldn’t need your announcement, but be readily seen as if written on your forehead, heard in the ring of your voice, a flash in your eyes—just as the beloved sees it all in the lover’s glance. In short, the straightforward and good person should be like a smelly goat—you know when they are in the room with you.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, via The Daily Stoic (Page 304)
“If one can actually revert to the truth, then a great deal of one’s suffering can be erased—because a great deal of one’s suffering is based on sheer lies.”
R. D. Laing, via Sunbeams (Page 134)
“Without trust, words become the hollow sound of a wooden gong. With trust, words become life itself.”
John Harold, via Sunbeams (Page 128)
“If you tell the truth, you have infinite power supporting you; but if not, you have infinite power against you.”
Charles Gordon, via Sunbeams (Page 97)
“Remember: one lie does not cost you one truth but the truth.”
Friedrich Hebbel, via Sunbeams (Page 78)
R. Buckminster Fuller Quote on Truth and How It’s Completely Spontaneous
“Truth is completely spontaneous. Lies have to be taught.”
R. Buckminster Fuller, Sunbeams (Page 23)
Beyond the Quote (Day 387)
I suspect that most people overthink the act of being—and it’s easy to see why. Think about everything that we’re exposed to on a daily basis. All of the advertisements, the images, the messages, the conversations—and think about how each of them communicate a different way of being. You can be the person who does this; who buys that; who believes this; who supports that; who interacts here; who chooses to go there; who speaks up about this; who follows people like that; who dresses like this; who spends their time doing that… the possibilities for becoming are, quite literally, endless.
Read More »R. Buckminster Fuller Quote on Truth and How It’s Completely Spontaneous“We have to be utterly broken before we can realize that it is impossible to better the truth. It is the truth that we deny which so tenderly and forgivingly picks up the fragments and puts them together again.”
Laurens Van der Post, Sunbeams (Page 17)
“To be honest, speak without identity.”
Naval Ravikant, Medium
“If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak and rejected, and desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise. Tell the truth. Or, at least, don’t lie.” ~ Jordan Peterson, via 12 Rules for Life (Page 230)