64 Quotes About Integrity

Integrity is a cornerstone of character that influences our decisions, relationships, and how we perceive ourselves and others. It is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles, standing firm even when faced with challenges. This attribute is crucial in personal and professional domains, guiding individuals to act in alignment with their values and beliefs. In this exploration, we dive into a curated selection of 64 powerful quotes about integrity. These quotes offer timeless wisdom and inspiration, reminding us of the importance of authenticity and the impact of our actions. Whether you're seeking motivation or reflection, these insights into integrity serve as both a mirror and a guide for navigating life with honor and honesty.

1. “If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything.” - Gordon A. Eadie

2. “It is not the repeated mistakes, the long succession of petty betrayals--though, God knows, they would give cause enough for anxiety and self-contempt--but the huge elementary mistake, the betrayal of that within me which is greater than I--in complacent adjustment to alien demands.” - Dag Hammarskjöld

3. “When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everyone will respect you.” - Lao Tzu

4. “If you don't know where you are going,you'll end up someplace else.” - Yogi Berra

5. “Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agised as in that hour left my lips: for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.” - Charlotte Brontë

6. “Because he had nothing to hide, he did perhaps appear to have forfeited a little of his strength. But that is the irony of honesty.” - Patrick White

7. “When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?” - Eleanor Roosevelt

8. “No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.” - Henry Adams

9. “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters” - Albert Einstein

10. “Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.” - Andre Gide

11. “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

12. “Be good to your work, your word, and your friend.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

13. “Dependability, integrity, the characteristic of never knowingly doing anything wrong, that you would never cheat anyone, that you would give everybody a fair deal. Character is a sort of an all-inclusive thing. If a man has character, everyone has confidence in him.” - Omar Bradley

14. “Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.” - Marcus Aurelius

15. “and half of learning to play is learning what not to playand she's learning the spaces she leaves have their own things to sayand she's trying to sing just enough so that the air around her movesand make music like mercy that gives what it is and has nothing to proveshe crawls out on a limb and begins to build her homeand it's enough just to look around and to know that she's not aloneup up up up up up up points the spire of the steeplebut god's work isn't done by godit's done by people” - Ani DiFranco

16. “If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.” - Marcus Aurelius

17. “Govern thy life and thy thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one, and read the other.” - Thomas Fuller

18. “Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will. Integrity is not a search for the rewards of integrity. Maybe all you ever get for it is the largest kick in the ass the world can provide. It is not supposed to be a productive asset.” - John D. MacDonald

19. “Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.” - Samuel Johnson

20. “Anyone who says he knows God's intention is showing a lot of very human ego.” - Michael Crichton

21. “Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.” - Ayn Rand

22. “Honesty is more than not lying. It is truth telling, truth speaking, truth living, and truth loving.” - James E. Faust

23. “Unless today is well lived, tomorrow is not important.” - Alan Sakowitz

24. “The person of superior integrity does not insist upon his integrity.For this reason, he has integrity.The person of inferior integritynever loses sight of his integrity;For this reason, he lacks integrity.” - Lao Tzu

25. “My own father had always said the measure of a man wasn't how many times or how hard he got knocked down, but how fast he got back up. I made a pledge to myself that I would get up and emerge from this debacle better for having gone through it. I would live up to the expectation I had for myself. I would be the kind of man I wanted to be.” - Joe Biden

26. “...the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.""...a ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is.” - George R.R. Martin

27. “The truly scary thing about undiscovered lies is that they have a greater capacity to diminish us than exposed ones.” - Cheryl Hughes

28. “When people cheat in any arena, they diminish themselves-they threaten their own self-esteem and their relationships with others by undermining the trust they have in their ability to succeed and in their ability to be true.” - Cheryl Hughes

29. “I am an average good Christian, when you don't push my Christianity too far. And all the rest of you—which is a great comfort—are, in this respect, much the same as I am.” - Wilkie Collins

30. “Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burnt at the stake he'd taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived and he lifted darkness from the face of the Earth.” - Ayn Rand

31. “Never offer advice just to appear concerned.” - Jack Gardner

32. “Cavenaugh rubbed his hands together and smiled his sunny smile.'I like that idea. It's reassuring. If we can have no secrets, it means we can't, after all, go so far afield as we might,' he hesitated, 'yes, as we might.'Eastman looked at him sourly. 'Cavenaugh, when you've practiced law in New York for twelve years, you find that people can't go far in any direction, except-' He thrust his forefinger sharply at the floor.'Even in that direction, few people can do anything out of the ordinary. Our range is limited. Skip a few baths, and we become personally objectionable. The slightest carelessness can rot a man's integrity or give him ptomaine poisoning. We keep up only be incessant cleansing operations, of mind and body. What we call character, is held together by all sorts of tacks and strings and glue. ("Consequences")” - Willa Cather

33. “Never do anything that you can't admit doing, because if you are that ashamed of whatever it is, it's probably wrong.” - Ashly Lorenzana

34. “Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him -- or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

35. “The decent, strong person had to do decent, strong things like love unlovable people and keep peace even when it wasn't easy.” - Mary Connealy

36. “Our lives say much more about how we think than our books do. The theories we preach are not always the ones we actually believe. The theories we live are the ones we really believe.” - R.C. Sproul

37. “Character is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking. There are too many people who think that the only thing that’s right is to get by,and the only thing that’s wrong is to get caught.” - J.C. Watts Jr.

38. “As you change your point of view, your views bring about a change in you.” - George Alexiou

39. “Honor is no phantom. Duty doesn't melt away, no matter how much we might wish it to.” - Claudia J. Edwards

40. “I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.” - Albert Einstein

41. “Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama.” - Miguel Ruiz

42. “Friendship is thinking of the other person first.” - George Alexiou

43. “When you stop living your life based on what others think of you real life begins. At that moment, you will finally see the door of self acceptance opened.” - Shannon L. Alder

44. “If Jesus were to ask me, as He did that poor demoniac in the Gospel: "What is your name?" I too would have to reply: "My name is legion, for there are many of us" (Mk 5:9). There are as many of us as there are desires, plans and regrets which we harbor, each one different from and contrary to others which pull us in opposite directions. They literally dis-tract us, drag us apart.” - Raniero Cantalamessa

45. “No: I shall not marry Samuel Fawthrop Wynne.""I ask why? I must have a reason. In all respects he is more than worthy of you."She stood on the hearth; she was pale as the white marble slab and cornice behind her; her eyes flashed large, dilated, unsmiling."And I ask in what sense that young man is worthy of me?” - Charlotte Brontë

46. “So do I wish I was to be king? That is not a question I ask myself. I ask myself, Would I be a good king? Would I be quick witted and generous of spirit and full of that boundless energy? Or would I be clumsy and stupid and dulled by my own prejudices? I try to be a good man, since I am alive at all, and hope that that teaches me what I would need to know if I was ever faced with a higher challenge.” - Sharon Shinn

47. “[I]t is not by being richer or more powerful that a man becomes better; one is a matter of fortune, the other of virtue. Nor should she deem herself other than venal who weds a rich man rather than a poor, and desires more things in her husband than himself. Assuredly, whomsoever this concupiscence leads into marriage deserves payment rather than affection.” - Héloïse

48. “Dav­el­lon may be a vil­lage, but the Dav­el­lon House can be any­thing you make it. No­bil­ity has to start some­where. It might as well start with you. Let no­body look down on you, for what­ever rea­son, My Lord. Ti­tles are granted or in­her­ited, no­bil­ity isn't.~Tenaxos I to Landar Parmingh, Baron Davellon” - Andrew Ashling

49. “A few people of integrity can go a long way.” - Bill Kauth

50. “God grant, if we must have two eyes, that they may be both clear ones, one the eye of faith wholly fixed on Christ, the other the eye of obedience equally and wholly fixed on the same objective!” - Charles H. Spurgeon

51. “Politics is the art of saying well that which may or may not be true.” - Orrin Woodward

52. “Your integrity is sacrosanct. It is who you are. Never let anyone step on your integrity - that's absolutely where you must stand solid.” - Ret. Gen. Peter Pace

53. “Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.” - Jonathan Franzen

54. “One of the greatest disconnects for this generation is how life and work fit together. There is a need to talk about purpose in life, vocation, and calling. We need to provide a stronger theology of work to help them make integrated connections to their daily lives.” - David Kinnaman

55. “Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence.” - Ayn Rand

56. “But pecuniary interest is clearly not in your nature. How quaint. I have written about people who don't care for money, but I never expected to meet one. Therefor I conclude that the difficulty concerns integrity. People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appauling obsession with personal integrity." - Vida Winter” - Diane Setterfield

57. “See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind ... is the one fundamental treason which the scholar's mind must not allow is the bond uniting all the Oxford people in the last resort.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

58. “Everyone makes mistakes, but only a person with integrity owns up to them.” - Nicole Guillaume

59. “Avoidance of self deception is a matter of integrity not comfort.” - Orrin Woodward

60. “I quit eating meat in 1976, the same year I turned fifteen, came out, and went to my first gay rights rally (not in that order). When I say that I 'came out,' I mean that I resolved to never lie about my love for women, never deliberately pass for straight, and never deny a lover by calling her 'him.' To do so, I felt, would be to betray not only the women I desired, but my deepest self.My decision to quit meat was equally simple. Somehow, through the confluence of midseventies influences, I knew that vegetarianism was a particularly healthy way to eat. One day, quite suddenly, I realized: If I didn't need to eat meat to stay alive, then eating meat was killing for pleasure. I couldn't live with myself, wouldn't be the nonviolent person I believed myself to be, if I killed other beings--beings who had their own desires--merely to satisfy my desire for the taste of their flesh.Looking back, I see that both decisions, coming out and quitting meat, are about the interplay of desire and integrity. Sometimes integrity means being true to your desires, and sometimes integrity requires you to refuse your desires. I also notice that both decisions were about bodies and consent. A primary tenet of gay liberation is that what consenting people do with each other's bodies is nobody else's business. And, of course, eating meat is something you do to somebody else's body without their consent.” - pattrice jones

61. “The man of integrity who is true to self and to God will choose the right whether or not anyone is looking because he is self-driven, not externally controlled.” - Tad R. Callister

62. “Kindness is a currency that can cover a multitude of interpersonal debts.” - George Alexiou

63. “Success follows those who champion a cause greater than themselves.” - George Alexiou

64. “Choosing with integrity means finding ways to speak up that honor your reality, the reality of others, and your willingness to meet in the center of that large field. It’s hard sometimes.” - Terry Tempest Williams