Pretense Quotes

Whatever is above will be managed by the powers above you. Don’t live as a man, pretending to be God. Do what you can do; leave what you can’t to God!

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

Culture is a symbolic veil with which we hide our animal nature from ourselves … and other animals.

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.

For a sane person to sincerely be happy that someone has succeeded, they have to either be profiting or likely to profit from that person’s success, or be that person.

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 rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul.

A man cannot really be called (sexually) confident if he has never bought his woman a vibrator.

The primary goal of a righteous parent who has a daughter is to minimize the number of boys and men for whom their daughter will have willingly opened her legs come her wedding day; the closer to zero, the more righteous they will seem.

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

Some people wish they were as happy as or happy like some people think they are.

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

Being called ‘love’ or ‘my love’ by someone doesn’t necessarily mean that you are loved or even liked by them.

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

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.

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

Fiction: a game of pretend.

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

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.

[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.

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

When things are like hunky dory, every enemy comes in the name of friend, but when things are twisted like turmoil, every friendly enemy shows you their colour.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

I cannot encourage any fabrication even for the sake of making people feel good. If I were to fabricate consciously and knowingly, I would not only be ordaining myself their enemy, but also ordaining myself God's enemy.

Like a Columbus of the heart, mind and soul I have hurled myself off the shores of my own fears and limiting beliefs to venture far out into the uncharted territories of my inner truth, in search of what it means to be genuine and at peace with who I really am. I have abandoned the masquerade of living up to the expectations of others and explored the new horizons of what it means to be truly and completely me, in all my amazing imperfection and most splendid insecurity.

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.

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

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 onTo entrap the wisest.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Some men do not know the father of 'their' children.

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

Some women have been faking orgasms for so long that they sometimes fake one when they are masturbating.

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 short, a platinum-class jerk. But you, my friend, are too kind to tell me. Or you'd rather bear for the moment and cuss me roundly when I'm gone. That's unfair to us both.If I have ever done this to you, I am sincerely sorry.Accept my profound apologies

To evade insanity and depression, we unconsciously limit the number of people toward whom we are sincerely sympathetic.

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.

Cowardice is when you hide away from your real self, and wear another self in pretense. Be yourself; that is bravery. If yourself is not better for you to be, change yourself and live in that changed self!

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

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

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 disabled people spend a significant amount of their energy on trying to come across as abled or as not that disabled.

Everyone is watching you. If you don’t believe it, just pretend to fail and you’ll see many mockers. For this reason, work hard as if you are doing everyone’s business!

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

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 contemporary version is an exceptionally resourceful and, essentially, pitiful being.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Character that is fruit-producing can be summed up in the mastery of these 5 qualities: morals, but a sense of humor; love, but respect for criticism; intelligence without pretense; humility without self-loathing; and a mind open, but with solid convictions.

Some people are so sexually unattractive that the thought of masturbating turns them off.

Pretense cannot sustain blind power.

Most human beings would have never been pained by the death of a human being if they had never seen a human being or pretending to be pained by that.

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.

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

Coco Chanel is said to have said that a girl should be two things: who and what she is. I say a girl should do two things: what and who she wants.

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, and ended up being no good for anything, as you can see.'Oh yes, we know all about how you're no good for anything,' said one of us, 'But tell us: how many men would be no good for anything if it weren't for the likes of you?

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.