Quotes About Pretense

I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath made me mad.

Come on, come on; you are pictures out of doors, Bells in your parlours, wild cats in your kitchens, Saints in your injuries, devils being offended, Players in your housewifery, and housewives in your beds.

meet it is I set it down        That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;        At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark. [

But such wan cheer was an habitual pretense which I knew meant very little, for I was certain to feel ghastly before nightfall. I had come to a point where I was carefully monitoring each phase of my deteriorating condition.

If you wish to be thought a good estate manager, or a good horseman, or a good physician, or a good flute player without really being one, just imagine all the tricks you have to invent just to keep up appearances. You might succeed at first, but in the end you're going to be exposed as an impostor.

And therefore, a Man who should neglect to render himself capable of such an employment, and yet pretend to it, ought to be severely punished.

You can pretend to admire, but, unless you are a superb actress, you can't pretend to laugh. Laughter is genuine or else it is just a noise.

You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it's just teeth.

Like everyone else at the Anchorage, except maybe for Natalie, Jonah had developed the blinders that allowed him to dance on. That prevented him from seeing the gradual decline of everyone around him; that allowed him to pretend that they weren't all heading for the same tragic end. The band played on as the ship sank beneath them. Distracted by the magic of music, they would keep dancing until the waves closed over their heads.

That's the way it is in our house, everybody knowing things but pretending they don't.

What sustains me is to know that I shall always fabricate a god in the image I require in order to sleep peacefully, and that others will quietly pretend that we are all justified, and that there is nothing to be done. All this because we are astute by nature and the bastions of something. And above all, because we try not to understand.

Arriving back home, I didn't start to read it. I pretended I didn't have it, in order to have, later, the shock of discovering it. I opened it hours later, had a few marvelous lines, closed it again, walked around the house, put it off even more by going to eat a piece of bread with butter, pretended I didn't know where I had left it, found it, opened it for a few instants. I created the most false sense for that covert thing that was joy. Joy would always be covert for me.

You know when you're young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they're trying to be old men and they have no idea what that's like? It's just that stupid the other way around.

But they are quite often ignoring the truth while they say so.

Asking you to play someone you're not is like asking King Kong to play the Moonlight Sonata.

even the meanest person has still at his disposition high-sounding words wherewith to mask his real character.

It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.

Quando a gente é aquilo que finge ser, é castigada por isso, é como se fosse uma lei.

But Jeanie had just gone through the motions. No one would have realized, except perhaps her too-perceptive son-in-law, but that was one of the few perks of maturity: you knew how to dissemble.

He looks down at them and arranges his face. Erasmus says that you must do this each morning before you leave your house: "put on a mask, as it were.

That is the taste of a liar!

Men den, som skall bli diktare, är ingenting alls annat än ett åtlöje för Gud och människor, förrän han redan blivit erkänd och berömd. Därför måste han under alla de långa läroåren hänga en falsk skylt över sin dörr och låtsas sysselsätta sig med något som människorna anser aktningsvärt.

Never feel bad when your friends are becoming your enemies They're just tired of pretending

The disturbing thing about Cardan is how well he plays the fool to disguise his own cleverness.