DAILY CHOICE: Honest vs. Dishonest

REFLECTION:

To say what you mean and mean what you say is to be honest. The truth is tough at times to tell. It can hurt. It does hurt when told in the wrong words or at the wrong time or in the wrong place. Yet in spite of the risk and challenge, honesty must serve as the common thread that unites thoughts, beliefs and deeds. We know the truth, though hard work in denying it can confuse and complicate almost to the point where facts seem fiction and fiction facts. What binds us and what we are bound to is truth and a commitment to not extinguish our inner flame or let another do the same. For each of us is her own best advertisement if we stick to what is, rather than inventing some new reality that, in the end, is never to be trusted nor valued to the same degree as was the original. Facts are facts, not to be falsified or rearranged. When we begin to falsify, to counterfeit, we run the risk of undermining our own happiness. Because true relationships are built on honest words, spoken aloud, without enlargement, without manipulation. And healthiness thrives where secrets dare not hide.

MUSES:

I have said what I meant and meant what I said. I have not done as well as I should have liked to have done, but I have done my best, frankly and forthrightly; no man can do more, and you are entitled to no less.

Adlai Stevenson

I don’t give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it is hell.

Harry S. Truman

There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.

Freya Stark

Truth is not introduced into the individual from without, but was within him all the time.

Søren Kierkegaard

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have.

Abraham Lincoln

The best ad is a good product.

Alan H. Meyer

What you don’t see with your eyes, don’t invent with your tongue.