Quotes about pretense

Let's live a lie for today.You’ll spin talesand pretend to love me.And I'll smile you’ll not realize it’s fakeThen I’ll pretendyour pretensions don’t cause me pain.

You cannot force someone to believe something they do not believe you can only manage to force them to speak or act as if they do.

I despise the rituals of fake friendship. I wish we could just claw each other's eyes out and call it a day instead we put on huge radiant smiles and spout compliments until our teeth hurt from the saccharine sweetness of it all.

The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is the pretense of intelligent ignorance. The former is teachable the latter is not.

First one tells a lie then one believes it then one becomes it.

That's what real love amounts to - letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending - performing. You get to love your pretence. It's true, we're locked in an image, an act - and the sad thing is, people get so used to their image, they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains. They forget all about who they really are. And if you try to remind them, they hate you for it, they feel like you're trying to ste

I don't impressed if you're a religious person.I just wanna know about soul behind that mask.

To give herself a measure of credible autonomy, she had decided to invent a husband. Then, in a subsequent flash of inspiration, she had just as quickly killed him off.

Fiction: a game of pretend.

Novelists are basically inviting their readers to play a game of pretend. That's what fiction is: a game of pretend.

My correspondence has certainly the charm of variety, and the humbler are usually the more interesting. This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.

I don't like bullshit and pretense.I can't enjoy the joy at church...without some cash in my wallet.

But these were essentially the accoutrements that appeal to all people who are not actually rich but who want to look rich, though all they manage to do is look like each other: damasks, ebony, plants, rugs and bronzes, anything dark and gleaming-everything that all people of a certain class affect so as to be like all other people of a certain class. And his arrangements looked so much like everyone else's that they were unremarkable, though he saw them as something truly distinctive.

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!

Pretense cannot sustain blind power.

There was always a screen behind which one could hide— a superior who in turn had his superior— orders, instructions, duties, commands— and finally the many-headed monster, morale, necessity, hard reality, responsibility, or whatever it was called— there was always a screen behind which to evade the simple law of humanity.

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of

Look on beauty,And you shall see 'tis purchased by the weight;Which therein works a miracle in nature,Making them lightest that wear most of it:So are those crisped snaky golden locksWhich make such wanton gambols with the wind,Upon supposed fairness, often knownTo be the dowry of a second head,The skull that bred them in the sepulchre.Thus ornament is but the guiled shoreTo a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarfVeiling an Indian beauty; in a word,The seeming truth which cunning times put onT

People pretend to be other people because they have never thought of their true selves

Perfect' - the most misattributed word in English languageA 'perfect' thing can never be improved - at least by what the meaning implies. Why should anyone want to be perfect?Unfortunately, this happens to be my greatest flaw. Turning a relative idea into an absolute one. Seeking perfection in others - or should I say 'subconsciously seeking perfection in myself' and projecting a benchmark based in fantasy on others.Makes one come across as judgmental, intolerant, arrogant or impatient - in shor

If we get separated there’s not much hope of us ever meeting anywhere, but I need to keep up the pretense of hope because that may be all we have.

Art should be pretentious. The place to be sincere is in one's relationships.

I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure — that is all that agnosticism means.

I was utterly convinced that an intellectual could never be anything but an intellectual, was simply not capable of being anything else, that his intellectuality would, sooner or later, erode his faith or erode whatever he'd masked it with . . . For example, intellectuals like to dress themselves up as peasants . . . but it never works. The intellectual's constitution is impervious to such things - it permits only one object of worship - oneself. Generally speaking, an intellectual in the contem

When you aren't sincere you need to pretend, and by pretending you end up believing yourself; that's the basic principle of every faith.

So may the outward shows be least themselves:The world is still deceived with ornament.In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,Obscures the show of evil? In religion,What damned error, but some sober browWill bless it and approve it with a text,Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?There is no vice so simple but assumesSome mark of virtue on his outward parts.

As they walked out of the store, Ifemelu said, “I was waiting for her to ask ‘Was it the one with two eyes or the one with two legs?’ Why didn’t she just ask ‘Was it the black girl or the white girl?’”Ginika laughed. “Because this is America. You’re supposed to pretend that you don’t notice certain things.

I live there...where the birds are infiniteeverywherewhere they fleeit's a place your eyes can wanderbut never seeWhere everyone accepts me,Without any pretenseIt's a place your mind can picturebut never really comprehend.

The heart of the world is breaking under this load of pride and pretense. There is no release from our burden apart from the meekness of Christ.

The vice president (Nixon) seems like a man who is acting like a nice man rather than being one.

You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it.

Adopting the language of a pretense only serves to ease participation in it.

Well, do you suppose I made up my mind then that what I had seen was something sickening? Not a bit of it. 'If it was done with such assurance and everyone thought it was necessary, then they must have known something I didn't,' was what I thought, and I tried to find out what it was. But I couldn't, no matter how hard I exerted myself. And since I couldn't, I couldn't join the army as I'd planned to, and not only did I not join the army, I couldn't find a place for myself anywhere in society, a

I can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mold my message, not my voice. By my voice, whatever it says, the other will recognize "that something is wrong with me". I am a liar (by preterition), not an actor. My body is a stubborn child, my language is a very civilized adult...

Some human beings in their craftiness thought they can pretend to be good when they are actually bad.

As you recover, you will find yourself letting go of many of your negative beliefs. You will discover that many of the so-called truths you were raised with and forced to believe are not truths at all. With this perspective, you will come to see, for example, that the names you were called as a child are simply not true. You are not ‘stupid,’ ‘lazy,’ ‘ugly,’ or a ‘liar’. You can discover just who you really are. You can let go of your pretenses and masks and discover who the real person is under

How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!

There's a difference between playing and playing games. The former is an act of joy, the latter — an act.

I became good at pretending. I became so good that after a while the lines blurred between my truth and fiction. And sometimes, when I did a really good job of pretending, I even fooled myself.

Pretension, dear love, does not buy truth into lies, nor alter its course.

To put an arrogant 'famous' writer in his place: pretend to be illiterate.

Above the keyhole the door has a latch. It is pretending to be an authentic old latch. The door is pretending to be an authentic old door. Maybe everything there is isn't authentic any more. Maybe everything there is is a kind of pretending.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

In a world of selfie-addiction smile usually is the brand name for an essential drug called pretense

I was thinking that being a demon and a ghost must be very difficult, even for Charles; if he ever forgot, or let his disguise drop for a minute, he would be recognized at once and driven away; he must be extremely careful to use the same voice every time, and present the same face and the same manner without a slip; he must be constantly on guard against betraying himself. I wondered if he would turn back to his true self when he was dead.

[E]verywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there's a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn't even hear.

The Jews have made him [Yahweh] the assassin of the human species, to make room for the religion of the Jews. The Christians have made him the murderer of himself, and the founder of a new religion to supersede and expel the Jewish religion. And to find pretence and admission for these things, they must have supposed his power or his wisdom imperfect, or his will changeable; and the changeableness of the will is the imperfection of the judgement.

There are two kinds of love: the love that is and the love that isn't.

I don't damsel well. Distress, I can do. Damseling? Not so much.

Employment is an employee’s kissing of an employer’s ass. A salary is the employer’s pretense to be cleaning his ass.

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort of choice.

It is better to lack the semblance of honor but possess it than to possess the semblance and lack the honor.

To put an arrogant 'famous' singer in her place: pretend to be deaf.

The problem with wearing a facade is that sooner or later life shows up with a big pair of scissors.