Quotes About Deception

If the role of an honest woman were nothing more than perilous ... I would admit that it would serve. But it is tiresome; and I have never met a virtuous woman who did not think about deceiving somebody.

There are husbands, tall and of superior intellect, whose wives have lovers who are ugly, short, or stupid.

You, you sybarites, canting bigots, vagabonds, hypocrites, sneaks, cudgellers, bucks, pilgrims, and such like, who are disguised as masqueraders to cheat the world! .... to heel, hounds; get out of the way! Away, pudden-heads! What, are you still there, in the devil's name?

When a woman has no friend of her own sex intimate enough to assist her in proving false to marital love, her maid is a last resource which seldom fails in bringing about the desired result.

When women are secretly to blame they often show ostensibly the utmost womanly pride. It is a dissimulation of mind for which we ought to be obliged to them. The deception is full of dignity, if not of grandeur.

What a wretched dramatist Shakespeare is! Othello is in love with glory; he wins battles, he gives orders, he struts about and is all over the place while Desdemona sits at home; and Desdemona, who sees herself neglected for the silly fuss of public life, is quite meek all the time. Such a sheep deserves to be slaughtered.

Épouses nous sommes trahies. Amantes, nous sommes délaissées.

I had the feeling that Nakajima was taking one aspect of me - the straightforward, easy-going part that emerged when I was with him, the cheerful surface that I had inherited from my mom - and blowing it all out of proportion. If so, he might feel terribly betrayed when my dark, somber side eventually showed its face.

I know just how slimy people can be, and how people like that are during the daytime. They don't get slimy at night because they're drunk, they get slimy because they're already slimy to begin with. I

I started out thinking I'd just have to look the part to get by, and before I knew it the poison had seeped in and changed me inside.

A man who can get taken in by a move like that will never change. I'm glad you broke up.

It was all your imagination. And imagination is sometimes worse than reality.

There are other false prophets, in like manner so termed, because they do apply the sayings of the true prophets unto a false end and purpose.

What a mistake people make who say that the man who won't look you in the eye is not to be trusted! As if mere brazenness were a sign of honesty; really, the theory of decency is the most amusing thing in the world.

That's the trouble with people like them, I suppose; whenever you think you're detecting the first signs of them starting to behave responsibly, it's just them being even more devious and underhand than usual.

I'd been painting rats for three years before someone said, 'That's clever. It's an anagram of art,' and I had to pretend I'd known that all along.

Become good at cheating and you never need to become good at anything else.

He comes to them in disguise, tricks himself out as a bull, an eagle, a swan, or, as in the present case, a husband, and thinks to make them love him--him, that is, and not what or who he is pretending to be, as if he were a mortal just like them. Ah, yes, love, what they call love, it drives him to distraction, for it is one of that pair of things our kind may not experience, the other being, obviously, death.

When you have once seen the chaos, you must make some thing to set between yourself and that terrible sight; and so you make a mirror, thinking that in it shall be reflected the reality of the world; but then you understand that the mirror reflects only appearances, and that reality is somewhere else, off behind the mirror; and then you remember that behind the mirror there is only the chaos.

Espionage has something of the quality of a dream. In the spy's world, as in dreams, the terrain is always uncertain. You put your foot on what looks like solid ground and it gives way under you and you go into a kind of free fall, turning slowly tail over tip and clutching onto things that are themselves falling. This instability, this myriad-ness, that the world takes on, is both the attraction and terror of being a spy.

I use to believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Tom Cruise too.

The cost of the pretense was the loss of the real human texture underneath, but since we all thought that was what was expected of us, that was what we delivered.

Are we always to be wanting what isn't: the greenest grass accord and principle motherhood and career? Yet our age lies to us like an asp, whispering. "Both.

many who claimed to want the truth actually wanted anything but.