Quotes About Pretense

There is no more pressure on my rudder, he once remarked. Plain sailing, no drag on other people either. A bit of dancing now and then, that's fine. I still see those girls, but I pretend they're paintings. Or advertisements. But that was only later.

Marilyn smiled back, a fake smile. The same one she had given to her mother all those years. You lifted the corners of your mouth toward your ears. You kept your lips closed. It was amazing how no one could tell.

You know, there's something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We're all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish.

We often pretend to fear what we really despise, and more often despise what we really fear.

To copy beauty forfeits all pretense to fame to copy faults is want of sense.

They have no heart attack, since they have no heart. (De crise cardiaque ils n'ont, - Puisque de cœur ils n'ont.)

Keep up appearances whatever you do.

All is gas and gaiters.

What a world of gammon and spinnage it is, though, ain't it!

He had used the word [humbug] in its Pickwickian sense.

All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself.

There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last respect a rather common one.

All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else's manufacture, is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make, as good money!

He had a certain air of being a handsome man--which he was not; and a certain air of being a well-bred man--which he was not. It was mere swagger and challenge; but in this particular, as in many others, blustering assertion goes for proof, half over the world.

We must have humbug, we all like humbug, we couldn't get on without humbug.

There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves and a skeleton of truth that we never did.

He [Old Mr. Turveydrop] was a fat old gentleman with a false complexion, false teeth, false whiskers, and a wig. He had a fur collar, and he had a padded breast to his coat, which only wanted a star or a broad blue ribbon to be complete. He was pinched in, and swelled out, and got up, and strapped down, as much as he could possibly bear.

T]hey somehow conveyed to me that they were all toadies and humbugs, but that each of them pretended not to know that the others were toadies and humbugs: because the admission that he or she did know it, would have made him or her out to be a toady and humbug.

But, he feigned not to notice the two strangers, and fell into discourse with the triumvirate of customers who were drinking at the counter.

We hear sometimes of an action for damages against the unqualified medical practitioner, who has deformed a broken limb in pretending to heal it. But, what of the hundreds of thousands of minds that have been deformed for ever by the incapable pettifoggers who have pretended to form them!

All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did

We are only able to continue our ravaging of the planet under the cover of pretense. How is it that we as a society take no action, when the awful artifacts of our way of life on this planet lay strewn all around us? How is it that we continue to hurtle toward an obvious abyss? It is only because we have been rendered blind and insensate.

Affectation is a greater enemy to the face than smallpox.

What job do you want to do? And I see them all hanging up before me, like clothes on a rack, all the jobs, tinker, tailor, soldier, and you have to pick one and then you have to pretend for the rest of your life that that's what you are. So they aint no different really from accidents of birth. I didn't know that phrase then but I learnt it later. It's a good phrase...