Guilty conscience? Me?

Alfred Tennyson Tennyson (1809–1892)
That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies;
That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright;
But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.
The Grandmother. Stanza 8.

Sophocles (c. 496 B.C.–406 B.C.)
A lie never lives to be old.
Acrisius. Frag. 59.

George Gordon Noel Byron, Lord Byron (1788–1824)
And after all, what is a lie? ’T is but
The truth in masquerade.
Don Juan. Canto xi. Stanza 37.

George Herbert (1593–1633)
Dare to be true: nothing can need a lie;
A fault which needs it most, grows two thereby.
The Church Porch.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894)
Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. vi.

A lie has short legs.
Estonian. Trans. by Ilse Lehiste (1993).

A lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet, strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the scrape and left out the lie.
C.E. (Charles Edward) Montague (1867–1928), British author, journalist. Disenchantment, ch. 15, sect. 4 (1922).

You told a lie, an odious, damned lie;
Upon my soul, a lie, a wicked lie.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616), British dramatist, poet. Emilia, in Othello, act 5, sc. 2, l. 180-1.
On learning of Iago’s lies about Desdemona.

No lie ever reaches old age.
Sophocles (497–406/5 B.C.), Greek tragedian. Fragments, l. 59 (Acrisius).

Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically—for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist—but then what isn’t?
Quentin Crisp (b. 1908), British author. Manners from Heaven, ch. 4 (1984).

Pain forces even the innocent to lie.
Publilius Syrus (1st century B.C.), Roman writer of mimes. Sententiae, no. 171.

An injurious lie is an uncommendable thing; and so, also, and in the same degree, is an injurious truth.
Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910), U.S. author. “On the Decay of the Art of Lying,” (1882).

I deny the lawfulness of telling a lie to a sick man for fear of alarming him. You have no business with consequences; you are to tell the truth.
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), British author, lexicographer. (Originally published 1791). Boswell’s Life of Johnson, June 13, 1784, pp. 1301-02, Oxford University Press (1980).
There are two kinds of liars the kind that lie and the kind that don’t lie the kind that lie are no good.
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), U.S. author. (Written 1925-1926). A Novel of Thank You, ch. CXCIII, Yale University Press (1958).

There is none who does not lie hourly in the respect he pays to false appearance.
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. Letter, April 3, 1850, to Harrison Blake, in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 6, p. 177, Houghton Mifflin (1906).


The real history of consciousness starts with one’s first lie.
Joseph Brodsky (b. 1940), Russian–born U.S. poet, critic. (First published 1976). “Less Than One,” sct. 1, Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986).

It takes good memory to keep up a lie.
Pierre Corneille (1606–1684), French playwright. Cliton, in The Liar (Le Menteur), act 4, sc. 5 (1644).

I have longed to move away
From the hissing of the spent lie....
Dylan Thomas (1914–1953), Welsh poet. “I have longed to move away.”

Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), Austrian philosopher. Culture and Value, 1947 journal entry, eds. G.H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman (1980).

An omnipotent God is the only being with no reason to lie.
Mason Cooley (b. 1927), U.S. aphorist. City Aphorisms, Fourth Selection, New York (1987

Truth does not consist in never lying but in knowing when to lie and when not to do so.
Samuel Butler (1835–1902), British author. First published in 1912. Samuel Butler’s Notebooks, p. 304, E.P. Dutton & Company (1951).

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917–1963), U.S. Democratic politician, president. Commencement address, June 11, 1962, Yale University, New Haven, Conn

Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.
Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality.
Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself,
So the weary travelers may find repose.
Czeslaw Milosz (b. 1911), Lithuanian–born Polish poet. Child of Europe, sect. 4, Selected Poems (1973).


The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.
Susan Sontag (b. 1933), U.S. essayist. “Simone Weil,” Against Interpretation (1966).

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
Samuel Butler (1835–1902), British author. First published in 1912. Samuel Butler’s Notebooks, p. 114, E.P. Dutton & Company (1951).

You see, a person of my acquaintance used to divide people into three categories: those who would prefer to have nothing to hide than have to lie, those who would rather lie than have nothing to hide, and finally those who love both lies and secrets.
Albert Camus (1913–1960), French-Algerian novelist, dramatist, philosopher. The Fall, p. 125, Gallimard (1956).

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.
Franz Kafka (1883–1924), Prague German Jewish author, novelist. The Third Notebook, January 14, 1918. The Blue Octavo Notebooks, ed. Max Brod, trans. by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. Exact Change, Cambridge, MA (1991). Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings, trans. by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, New York, Schocken Books (1954).