A liar begins with making falsehood appear like truth, and ends with making truth itself appear like falsehood.

William Shenstone (1714–1763) was an English poet and essayist best known in his lifetime for his cultivated “moral” prose and for the landscaped estate, the Leasowes, that became a model of the picturesque. The remark about lying belongs to the tradition of 18th‑century moral reflection—short, epigrammatic observations on character and conduct—often circulated in collections of “maxims” and “thoughts.” Shenstone’s posthumous reputation rested heavily on such aphoristic pieces, which were frequently excerpted in later commonplace books and quotation anthologies, sometimes without precise bibliographic detail.

The sentence traces a moral and psychological progression: lying is not merely the invention of a false statement but a corrosive habit that reshapes perception. At first, the liar’s aim is rhetorical—making the untrue seem plausible. Over time, however, repeated deception erodes the shared standards by which truth is recognized, so that genuine truth can be made to look suspect or “false.” Shenstone thus warns that dishonesty damages not only the liar’s integrity but also the social fabric of trust and the very criteria of credibility, turning truth into something that can be discredited by association and manipulation.