Pretense Quotes

i discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind, but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature.

He often felt that too many people lived their lives acting and pretending,wearing masks and losing themselves in the process.

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.

The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices.

When wisdom and knowledge appear, great pretense arises.

In our own presence, we all pretend to be simpler than we are: thus we take a break from our fellow human beings.

In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn't actually doing any writing.

Learned conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed.

Moral severity in women is only a dress or paint which they use to set off their beauty.

for business reasons, I must preserve the outward signs of sanity.

To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.

Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.

He who stands on tiptoe does not stand firm.

A dangerous quality, if real; and a not less dangerous one, if feigned.

A modest ring at the bell at length allayed her fears, and Miss Benton, hurrying into her own room and shutting herself up, in order that she might preserve that appearance of being taken by surprise which is so essential to the polite reception of visitors, awaited their coming with a smiling countenance.

And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.

A forward critic often dupes us With sham quotations peri hupsos, And if we have not read Longinus, Will magisterially outshine us. Then, lest with Greek he over-run ye, Procure the book for love or money, Translated from Boileau's translation, And quote quotation on quotation.

Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?

We are almost always wearied in the company of persons with whom we are not permitted to be weary.

There is something laughable about the sight of authors who enjoy the rustling folds of long and involved sentences: they are trying to cover up their feet.

Dignity is a mask we wear to hide our ignorance.

The most dangerous physicians are those born actors who imitate born physicians with a perfectly deceptive guile.

They that have voice of lions and act of hares,--are they not monsters?

He who walks on tip-toe does not walk on solid ground.

I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose.

Truth and ceremony are two things.