61 Quotes About Honor

Honor is a concept that transcends time, culture, and circumstance, shaping the very fabric of human character and society. Whether it’s through acts of courage, ethical integrity, or unwavering loyalty, honor embodies the pinnacle of human values. In an age where rapid changes often blur the lines of right and wrong, taking a moment to reflect on what honor truly means can be incredibly enlightening. To inspire and resonate with your sense of dignity and respect, we’ve curated a collection of the top 61 quotes about honor. These timeless words of wisdom from philosophers, leaders, and thinkers offer profound insights into the essence of living an honorable life.

1. “You should not honor men more than truth.” - Plato

2. “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

3. “We find these joys to be self evident: That all children are created whole, endowed with innate intelligence, with dignity and wonder, worthy of respect. The embodiment of life, liberty and happiness, children are original blessings, here to learn their own song. Every girl and boy is entitled to love, to dream and belong to a loving “village.” And to pursue a life of purpose.We affirm our duty to nourish and nurture the young, to honour their caring ideals as the heart of being human. To recognize the early years as the foundation of life, and to cherish the contribution of young children to human evolution.We commit ourselves to peaceful ways and vow to keep from harm or neglect these, our most vulnerable citizens. As guardians of their prosperity we honour the bountiful Earth whose diversity sustains us. Thus we pledge our love for generations to come. ” - Raffi

4. “Our own heart, and not other men's opinions, forms our true honor.” - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

5. “Seine Ehre kann auch der Arme behalten, nicht aber der Schlechte.” - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

6. “Any weapon is a good weapon as long as ye can use it with honor and skill.” - Brian Jacques

7. “There is no beauty in sadness. No honor in suffering. No growth in fear. No relief in hate. It’s just a waste of perfectly good happiness.” - Katerina Stoykova Klemer

8. “Honor is a fool's prize. Glory is of no use to the dead.” - Drew Karpyshyn

9. “...sometimes compassion is the greater part of honor.” - Rachel Vincent

10. “There is no dishonor in losing the race. There is only dishonor in not racing because you are afraid to lose.” - Garth Stein

11. “Harper to your word be trueHolder, crafter you also hewTo honesty, integrity, and respectAll others without regard to intellect” - Anne McCaffrey

12. “I have been asked what I mean by “word of honor.” I will tell you. Place me behind prison walls—walls of stone ever so high, ever so thick, reaching ever so far into the ground—there is a possibility that in some way or another I might be able to escape; but stand me on the floor and draw a chalk line around me and have me give my word of honor never to cross it. Can I get out of that circle? No, never! I’d die first.” - Karl G. Maeser

13. “...Next time you're faced with a choice, do the right thing. It hurts everyone less in the long run.” - Wendelin Van Draanen

14. “Be strong. Live honorably and with dignity. When you don't think you can, hold on.” - james frey

15. “My name is Ashallyn'darkmyr Tallyn, third son of the Unseelie Court...Let it be known--from this day forth, I vow to protect Meghan Chase, daughter of the Summer King, with my sword, my honor, and my life. Her desires are mine. Her wishes are mine. Should even the world stand against her, my blade will be at her side. And should it fail to protect her, let my own existence be forfeit. This I swear, on my honor, my True Name, and my life. From this day on..." His voice went even softer, but I still heard it as though he whispered it into my ear. "I am yours.” - Julie Kagawa

16. “Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.” - Lois McMaster Bujold

17. “When honor and the Law no longer stand on the same side of the line, how do we choose[?]” - Anne Bishop

18. “The liar was the hottest to defend his veracity, the coward his courage, the ill-bred his gentlemanliness, and the cad his honor” - Margaret Mitchell

19. “Anyone who teaches me deserves my respect, honoring and attention.” - Sonia Rumzi

20. “Honor was never taking the easy way when it was also the wrong one. Never telling a falsehood unless the truth was painful and unnecessary, or a lie was necessary to save others. Never manipulating the truth to serve only yourself. Protecting the weak and helpless; standing fast even when fear made you weak. Keeping your word.” - Mercedes Lackey

21. “Your father died for me, and dying with you would be an honor, though not as great as dying to save you.” - N.D. Wilson

22. “Now, your Honor, I have spoken about the war. I believed in it. I don’t know whether I was crazy or not. Sometimes I think perhaps I was. I approved of it; I joined in the general cry of madness and despair. I urged men to fight. I was safe because I was too old to go. I was like the rest. What did they do? Right or wrong, justifiable or unjustifiable -- which I need not discuss today -- it changed the world. For four long years the civilized world was engaged in killing men. Christian against Christian, barbarian uniting with Christians to kill Christians; anything to kill. It was taught in every school, aye in the Sunday schools. The little children played at war. The toddling children on the street. Do you suppose this world has ever been the same since? How long, your Honor, will it take for the world to get back the humane emotions that were slowly growing before the war? How long will it take the calloused hearts of men before the scars of hatred and cruelty shall be removed?We read of killing one hundred thousand men in a day. We read about it and we rejoiced in it -- if it was the other fellows who were killed. We were fed on flesh and drank blood. Even down to the prattling babe. I need not tell you how many upright, honorable young boys have come into this court charged with murder, some saved and some sent to their death, boys who fought in this war and learned to place a cheap value on human life. You know it and I know it. These boys were brought up in it. The tales of death were in their homes, their playgrounds, their schools; they were in the newspapers that they read; it was a part of the common frenzy -- what was a life? It was nothing. It was the least sacred thing in existence and these boys were trained to this cruelty.” - Clarence Darrow

23. “Unaffected modesty is the sweetest charm of female excellence, the richest gem in the diadem of her honor.” - Noah Webster

24. “And what made these heart-to-hearts possible--you might even say what made the whole friendship possible during that time--was this understanding we had that anything we told each other during these moments would be treated with careful respect: that we'd honor confidences, and that no matter how much we rowed, we wouldn't use against each other anything we'd talked about during those sessions.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

25. “My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.” - Huey P. Newton

26. “The things we do outlast our mortality. The things we do are like monuments that people build to honor heroes after they've died. They're like the pyramids that the Egyptians built to honor the pharaohs. Only instead of being made of stone, they're made out of the memories people have of you.” - R.J. Palacio

27. “Honor from death,” I snap, “is a myth. Invented by the war torn to make sense of the horrific. If we die, it will be so that others may live. Truly honorable death, the only honorable death, is one that enables life.” - Rae Carson

28. “I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.” - Aeschylus

29. “It was a life, she eventually concluded, that had been lived in the middle ground, where contentment and love were found in the smallest details of people's lives. It was a life of dignity and honor, not without sorrows yet fulfilling in a way that few experiences ever were.” - Nicholas Sparks

30. “He was ruled by the tyranny of instinct, by passion and the instant legislation of a simple heart.” - Pat Conroy

31. “When you find a guy who calls you beautiful instead of hot, who calls you back when you hang up on him, who will stand in front of you when other’s cast stones, or will stay awake just to watch you sleep, who wants to show you off to the world when you are in sweats, who will hold your hand when your sick, who thinks your pretty without makeup, the one who turns to his friends and say, ‘that’s her’, the one that would bear your rejection because losing you means losing his will to live, who kisses you when you screw up, watches the stars and names one for you and will hold and rock that baby for hours so you can sleep…..you marry him all over again.” - Shannon Alder

32. “A true gentleman is one that apologizes anyways, even though he has not offended a lady intentionally. He is in a class all of his own because he knows the value of a woman's heart.” - Shannon Alder

33. “Son, a real battlefield lacks dignity and honor. When lives are being spent—actual human lives—those high-minded concepts lose their meaning. All that matters is victory. If you have blades, you’ll use blades. If you have rocks, you’ll use rocks. If there’s nothing but sand, you’ll throw the damn sand. A true war is only waged when men don’t want to live to see what failure looks like. You do what it takes to win. You go wherever necessity takes you.” - B. Justin Shier

34. “The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.” - Arthur Miller

35. “There are things we don't do. From this moment forth, let us all ensure our every action reflects well on us and our ancestors. Let us live to the highest standards, lest we win this war only to find ourselves staring in the mirror at the face of our late enemy.” - Jack Campbell

36. “You wear your honor like a suit of armor... You think it keeps you safe, but all it does is weigh you down and make it hard for you to move.” - George R.R. Martin

37. “Honor must start in the heart, but if it ends there, it isn’t honor. Honor must be expressed through words, symbols, actions, or gestures. Honor is among the most incarnational of the virtues. It must have feet and hands.” - Douglas Wilson

38. “She was like a queen who beholds the virgin soil of her kingdom invaded and wasted by a traitor.Any other thing she would have pardoned: infidelity, indifference, cruelty, any sins of manhood's caprice or passion, but who should pardon this? The sin was not alone against herself; it was against every law of decency and truth that ever she had been taught to hold sacred; it was against all those great dead, who lay with the cross on their breasts and their swords by their side, from whom she had received and treasured the traditions of honor and purity of race.It was those dead knights whom he had smote upon the mouth and mocked, crying to them: 'Lo! your place is mine; my sons will reign in your stead. I have tainted your race forever; for every my blood flows with yours!'The greatness of a race is a thing far higher than mere pride. Its instincts are noble and supreme. Its obligations are no less than its privileges; it is a great light which streams backward through the darkness of the ages, and if by that light you guide not your footsteps, then are you thrice accursed, holding as you do that lamp of honor in your hands.So she had always thought, and now he had dashed the lamp in the dust.--"Wanda” - Ouida

39. “We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.” - H.P. Lovecraft

40. “‎It isn't enough to stand up and fight darkness. You've got to stand apart from it, too. You've got to be different from it.” - Jim Butcher

41. “The test we must set for ourselves is not to march alone but to march in such a way that others will wish to join us.” - Hubert Humphrey

42. “I will love you even when I am dust on the wind.” - Nalini Singh

43. “When I say 'I won't hurt you', it's a promise, which can and will be kept but it does not come from me without a breakdown of what it means.It does not mean we will never disagree, nor does it mean that you will always like everything which I say or do. It does not mean that you will never hurt yourself by behaving in a way which is damaging to a relationship or by behaving in a way which would ultimately result in my withdrawal from your life. What it does mean is that I can promise all that I expect in terms of loyalty, honor and respect. It means I am faithful. It also means that I will not intentionally or carelessly behave in a way which causes upset or doubt. It means, at the lowest level, 'You will break these terms before I do.'Communication is essential. Trust is paramount.Be completely honest and don't make promises that you can't keep, that's all.” - Evette

44. “I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.” - Octavia E. Butler

45. “Desperaux," she said. He saw his name on her lips."I honor you," whispered Desperaux. "I honor you.” - kate dicamillo

46. “Love grows and wanes, but honor, duty, and commitment, those things are constant and stable. They define who you are.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

47. “The warrior who goes off to battle should not boast as the one who returns from it.” - Richard Paul Evans

48. “I am leaving now; but know, Katerina Ivanovna, that you indeed love only him. And the more he insults you, the more you love him. That is your strain. You precisely love him as he is, you love him insulting you. If he reformed, you would drop him at once and stop loving him altogether. But you need him in order to continually contemplate your high deed of faithfulness, and to reproach him for his unfaithfulness. And it all comes from your pride. Oh, there is much humility and humiliation in it, but all of it comes from pride.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

49. “Dear heart,” he murmured, “do not look on me with those dear, scared eyes of yours. If there is aught that puzzles you in what I said, try and trust me a little longer. Remember, I must save the Dauphin at all costs; mine honor is bound with his safety. What happens to me after that matters but little, yet I wish to live for your dear sake.” - Emmuska Orczy

50. “...all a guy can do is die once. The big difference is whether he dies clean - or dirty... ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")” - Cornell Woolrich

51. “When a brother is given the right to pass into the third life as a father, then he chooses his greatest rival or his truest friend to give him passage. You. Speaker—ever since I first learned Stark and read The Hive Queen and the Hegemon, I waited for you. I said many times to my father, Rooter, of all humans he is the one who will understand us. Then Rooter told me when your starship came, that it was you and the hive queen aboard that ship, and I knew then that you had come to give me passage, if only I did well.""You did well, Human.” - Orson Scott Card

52. “No man of honor avoided what needed to be done, simply because it might not proceed in his favor.” - Claire Delacroix

53. “He put his forehead against hers. “Alannah, my heart is yours.” He said softly.“And yet, I must hand it over to someone else for the keeping.” Her last words falling to a strained whisper.” - B.C. Morin

54. “What were they thinking?' we ask about our ancestors, but we know that, a century hence, our descendents will ask the same thing about us. Who knows what will strike them as strangest? The United States incarcerates 1 percent of its population and subjects many thousands of inmates to years of solitary confinement. In Saudi Arabia, women are forbidden to drive. There are countries today in which homosexuality is punishable by life in prison or by death. Then there's the sequestered reality of factory farming, in which hundreds of millions of mammals, and billions of birds, live a squalid brief existence. Or the toleration of extreme poverty, inside and outside the developed world. One day, people will find themselves thinking not just that an old practice was wrong and a new one right but that there was something shameful in the old ways. In the course of the transition, many will change what they do because they are shamed out of an old way of doing things. So it is perhaps not too much to hope that if we can find the proper place for honor now, we can make the world better.” - Kwame Anthony Appiah

55. “Rose, I cheat at cards and buy liquor for minors. But I would never, ever force you into something you don't want.” - Richelle Mead

56. “You can still make today the day you change yourself, love yourself, forgive yourself, respect yourself, honor yourself, cherish yourself, admire yourself, express yourself, be true to yourself... It’s never too late!” - Steve Maraboli

57. “Underlying the attack on psychotherapy, I believe, is a recognition of the potential power of any relationship of witnessing. The consulting room is a privileged space dedicated to memory. Within that space, survivors gain the freedom to know and tell their stories. Even the most private and confidential disclosure of past abuses increases the likelihood of eventual public disclosure. And public disclosure is something that perpetrators are determined to prevent. As in the case of more overtly political crimes, perpetrators will fight tenaciously to ensure that their abuses remain unseen, unacknowledged, and consigned to oblivion. The dialectic of trauma is playing itself out once again. It is worth remembering that this is not the first time in history that those who have listened closely to trauma survivors have been subject to challenge. Nor will it be the last. In the past few years, many clinicians have had to learn to deal with the same tactics of harassment and intimidation that grassroots advocates for women, children and other oppressed groups have long endured. We, the bystanders, have had to look within ourselves to find some small portion of the courage that victims of violence must muster every day. Some attacks have been downright silly; many have been quite ugly. Though frightening, these attacks are an implicit tribute to the power of the healing relationship. They remind us that creating a protected space where survivors can speak their truth is an act of liberation. They remind us that bearing witness, even within the confines of that sanctuary, is an act of solidarity. They remind us also that moral neutrality in the conflict between victim and perpetrator is not an option. Like all other bystanders, therapists are sometimes forced to take sides. Those who stand with the victim will inevitably have to face the perpetrator's unmasked fury. For many of us, there can be no greater honor. p.246 - 247Judith Lewis Herman, M.D. February, 1997” - Judith Lewis Herman

58. “Rejecting predatory capitalism in America is a way to respect and honor America.” - Bryant McGill

59. “If you want to be an honorable man, then be what you pretend to be.” - Shannon L. Alder

60. “Let Us Be GratefulToday we give our thanks most of all, for the ideals of honor and faith we inherit from our forefathers - for the decency of purpose, steadfastness of resolve and strength of will, for the courage and the humility, which they possessed and which we must seek every day to emulate. As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words but to live by them.” - John F. Kennedy

61. “Great men speak secrets about themselves with nods and gestures, walking away from jokes about women rather than condemn the jokester; if with a woman, the turning of their head during a nude scene in a movie speaking volumes about their character without ever saying a word. It is a language foreign to women, but those that take the time to learn it find themselves knowing more about their man than by any other means.” - Lee Goff