“ The good liar should be the converse of the poet; he should be made, not born.It is not loss of confidence in a man’s strict adherence to the letter of truth that shakes my confidence in him. ”
Samuel Butler, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912). copy citation
| Author | Samuel Butler |
|---|---|
| Source | The Note-Books of Samuel Butler |
| Topic | loss confidence |
| Date | 1912 |
| Language | English |
| Reference | |
| Note | |
| Weblink | http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6173/6173-h/6173-h.htm |
Context
“As for the other—if he does not know how to invest his own thoughts safely he will invest mine still worse; he will hold God’s most precious gift of falsehood too cheap; he has come by it too easily; cheaply come, cheaply go will be his maxim. The good liar should be the converse of the poet; he should be made, not born.
It is not loss of confidence in a man’s strict adherence to the letter of truth that shakes my confidence in him. I know what I do myself and what I must lose all social elasticity if I were not to do. * Turning for moral guidance to my cousins the lower animals—whose unsophisticated instinct proclaims what God has taught them with a directness we may sometimes study—I find the plover lying when she reads us truly and, knowing that we shall hit her if we think her to be down, lures us from her young ones under the fiction of a broken wing.”
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