Quotes & Sayings About Disguises

Disguise is central to God's way of dealing with us human beings. Not because God is playing games with us but because the God who is beyond our knowing makes himself known in the disguise of what we can know. The Christian word for this is revelation, and the ultimate revelation came by incarnation ... God is the master of disguises, in order that we might see. — Richard John Neuhaus

My dad believes that bad disguises itself - that danger hides. I think it's the opposite. The truly horrible things about the world are always reaching out for you. — Brian James

And yet he sometimes wondered if he could ever love anyone as much as he loved Jude. It was the fact of him, of course, but also the utter comfort of life with him, of having someone who had known him for so long and who could be relied upon to always take him as exactly who he was on that particular day. His work, his very life, was one of disguises and charades. Everything about him and his context was constantly changing: his hair, his body, where he would sleep that night. He often felt he was made of something liquid, something that was being continually poured from bright-colored bottle to bright-colored bottle, with a little being lost or left behind with each transfer. But his friendship with Jude made him feel that there was something real and immutable about who he was, that despite his life of guises, there was something elemental about him, something that Jude saw even when he could not, as if Jude's very witness of him made him real. — Hanya Yanagihara

But selfishness can take on many disguises. It can also be about defending and trying to prove your own belief system while denying there could be value in the beliefs of others. — Karlyle Tomms

For these disguises did not disguise, but reveal. — G.K. Chesterton

(As your experience about writing accrues) you learn how little you know. It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn't know you had. — James Baldwin

What unites us all as human beings is an urge for happiness, which at heart is a yearning for union, for overcoming our feelings of separateness. We want to feel our identity with something larger than our small selves. We long to be one with our own lives and with each other. If we look at the root of even the most terrible addictions, even the most appalling violence in this world, somewhere we will find this urge to unite, to be happy. In some form it is there, even in the most distorted and odious disguises. We can touch that. We can draw near and open up. — Sharon Salzberg

There are indeed millions of Christians in the United States, but most Americans who think that they are Christians truly are something else, intensely religious but devout in the American Religion, a faith that is old among us, and that comes in many guises and disguises, and that overdetermines much of our national life. — Harold Bloom

Every day I see Jesus Christ in all his distressing disguises. — Mother Teresa

Lies are everywhere. Even nature herself lies. What is camouflage, for instance, but a lie? The chameleon disguises itself as a leaf in order to deceive a poor butterfly. He lies to it saying, Don't worry, my dear, can't you see I'm just a very green leaf waving in the breeze, and then he jets out his tongue at six hundred and twenty-five centimeters a second, and eats it. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Indeed, liberation from outer domination is necessary, because such domination cripples the inner man, with the exception of rare individuals. But the one-sidedness of the emphasis on outer liberation also did great damage. In the first place, the liberators often transformed themselves into new rulers, only mouthing the ideologies of freedom. Second, political liberation could hide the fact that new un-freedom developed, but in hidden and anonymous forms. This is the case in Western democracy, where political liberation hides the fact of dependency in many disguises. — Erich Fromm

History will not let us forget: it wears disguises, reintroduces itself to us, claims it is someone new and wonderful. But let us not forget. — Robert Jackson Bennett

All Communist Parties, upon attaining power, have become completely merciless. But at the stage before they achieve power, it is necessary to use disguises. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The historical truth is a fiction. OK, I did whatever I could to find out what happened from
surviving friends, family and media, but that is simply a skeleton upon which the story is draped.
This is the unmasking of the myth, and, as Jean Cocteau put it: "Man seeks to escape himself
in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw
into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort."
I wanted to go beyond a recreation of the past to discover meaning in the degradation of my
addiction experience. The past is another country and not my prime interest. It's more what
the past can tell us about how we deal with the present moment.
- William Pryor — William Pryor

One of the oldest longings of all people of mystical sensibility is to be rid of disguises to the point of becoming naked. — Dorothee Solle

The religious leader is the most untrustworthy of leaders; in no other station do we have so many opportunities for pride, covetousness and lust, and with so many excellent disguises to keep such ignobility from being found out and called to account. — Eugene H. Peterson

We get so much in the habit of wearing disguises before others that we finally appear disguised before ourselves. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

No living person could disappear like Sofia. She'd have a go-bag stashed somewhere. Money and passports and disguises, with just enough ice to evaporate. — Cindy Skaggs

The best disguises were those that were poured out of the heart rather than painted on the face. — Scott Lynch

The traditional gender ideals of the strong-silent man who plays his cards close to his chest and the mysterious woman who disguises her feelings with coyness go so far as to make a virtue of being unavailable and secretive. But wholehearted intimacy can develop only where two people are equally forthcoming and self-revelatory. To take the risk of loving, we must become vulnerable enough to test the radical proposition that knowledge of another and self-revelation will ultimately increase rather than decrease love. It is an awe-ful risk. — Sam Keen

I wear so many disguises on the show that only a real comedy fan might spot me. — Paul Putner

Lyra, Cassiopeia the queen, whiplash Scorpius with the twin stings in his tail, all the friendly childhood patterns that had twinkled me to sleep from the glow-in-the-dark planetarium stars on my bedroom ceiling back in New York. Now, transfigured - cold and glorious like deities with their disguises flung off - it was as if they'd flown through the roof and into the sky to assume their true, celestial homes. — Donna Tartt

I once laughed at the vanity of women of thirty or forty who whitened their ruddy old skin with lead, but now I know such salves are not disguises for old crones who wish to catch a young husband. Instead they are only a mask we wear so that we can, for a little while, still recognize ourselves. — Rebecca Johns

If the past has nothing to say to the present, history may go on sleeping undisturbed in the closet where the system keeps its old disguises. — Eduardo Galeano

This is the city of disguises. — Jeanette Winterson

The Ladybug wears no disguises.
She is just what she advertises.
A speckled spectacle of spring,
A fashion statement on the wing ...
A miniature orange kite.
A tiny dot-to-dot delight. — J. Patrick Lewis

I think that there are so many women who understand nothing about clothes and they should try and understand themselves before they start putting on disguises: they should stand in front of the mirror for a day, two days or three, and find out what they have which is beautiful, interesting: what they should show: hair, neck, arms, or hands. — Sonia Rykiel

Mungo was a gnome. Disguised as a dwarf. The blatantly false beard was a giveaway. It appeared that Mungo had crafted it himself out of hair collected from a wide assortment of cars and then glued it to his face. — Jeffery Russell

A man who knows the court is master of his gestures, of his eyes and of his face; he is profound, impenetratable; he dissimulates bad offices, smiles at his enemies, controls his irritation, disguises his passions, belies his heartm speaks and acts against his feelings. — Jean De La Bruyere

In the midst of the disguises and artifices that reign among men, it is only attention and vigilance that can save us from surprises. — Jacques-Benigne Bossuet

Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding. — Ambrose Bierce

There is no passion that steals into the heart more imperceptibly and covers itself under more disguises than pride. — Joseph Addison

The life of Dumas is not only a monument of endeavour and success, it is a sort of labyrinth as well. It abounds in pseudonyms and disguises, in sudden and unexpected appearances and retreats as unexpected and sudden, in scandals and in rumours, in mysteries and traps and ambuscades of every kind. — William Ernest Henley

In the middle-class United States, a veneer of "alternative lifestyles" disguises the reality that, here as everywhere, women's apparent "choices" whether or not to have children are still dependent on the far from neutral will of male legislators, jurists, a male medical and pharmaceutical profession, well-financed lobbies, including the prelates of the Catholic Church, and the political reality that women do not as yet have self-determination over our bodies and still live mostly in ignorance of our authentic physicality, our possible choices, our eroticism itself. — Adrienne Rich

Extreme volume in music very often disguises a lack of actually important content. — Michael Tilson Thomas

The Bardic robe..disguises imperfections of figure: round shoulders, bosoms of unmodish size or shape...too-insistent buttocks, knock knees and bandy legs, all are mitigated in the merciful folds of the robe...but whatever the type of robe --soutane, sari, academic gown or Bardic wrap -- its effect is often destroyed by disillusioning shoes. — Ithell Colquhoun

Blessings sometimes show up in unrecognizable disguises. — Janette Oke

Laziness has many disguises. Soon "winter doldrums" will become "spring fever." — Bernard Williams

I like to think that I get better and better as a writer, but it seems pretty easy to me to slip on disguises of various people. — Daniel Handler

When the truth is ugly, people try to keep it hidden, because they know if revealed, the damage it will do. So they conceal it within sturdy walls or they place it behind closed doors or they obscure it with clever disguises but truth, no matter how ugly, always emerges. And someone we care about always ends up getting hurt. And someone else will revel in their pain and that's the ugliest truth of all. — Mary Alice

The problem with venality in business is that getting outraged about it makes it easy to miss the systemic problems that venality often disguises. — James Surowiecki

I always imagine divine mercy giving us back to ourselves and letting us laugh at what we became, laugh at the preoisterous disguises of crouch and squint and limp and lour we all do put on. — Marilynne Robinson

Character actor' is a technical term denoting a clever stage performer who cannot act, and therefore makes an elaborate study of the disguises and stage tricks by which acting can be grotesquely simulated. — George Bernard Shaw

The "hypocrite" is the critic who disguises his own failings by focusing attention on the failings of others. — Michael Shermer

This is why homophobia is a terrible evil: it disguises itself as concern while it is inherently hate. — Tyler Oakley

It is not always easy to diagnose. The simplest form of stupidity - the mumbling, nose-picking, stolid incomprehension - can be detected by anyone. But the stupidity which disguises itself as thought, and which talks so glibly and eloquently, indeed never stops talking, in every walk of life is not so easy to identify, because it marches under a formidable name, which few dare attack. It is called Popular Opinion ... — Robertson Davies

There are many ways to generate numerical falsehoods from data, many ways to create proofiness from even valid meaurements. Causuistry distorts the relationships between two sets of numbers. Randumbness creates patterns where none are to be found. Regression to the moon disguises nonsense in mathematical-looking lines or equations or formulae, making even the silliest ideas seem respectable. Such as the one described by this formula:
Callipygianness=(S+C)x(B+F)/T-V)
Where S is shape, C is circularity, B is bounciness, F ir firmness, T is texture, and V is waist-to-hip ratio. This formula was devised by a team of academic psychologists after many hours of serious research into the female derriere. Yes, indeed. This is supposed to be the formula for the perfect butt.

It fact, it's merely a formula for a perfect ass — Charles Seife

I like working on things that are very different and that involve different disguises. — Alan Cumming

All that are printed and bound are not books; they do not necessarily belong to letters, but are oftener to be ranked with the other luxuries and appendages of civilized life. Base wares are palmed off under a thousand disguises. — Henry David Thoreau

The fun is getting to wear multiple disguises and getting to explore multiple personalities and bring them to life. So a movie career definitely affords me that. — Jenna Fischer

It is the illusion of magic and the magic of illusion that we are primarily interested in- not the privy tricks or the key to the secrets themselves. We seek the bafflement, the contradictions, the amusements, and the innumerable emotions that ripple uneasily through the audience. It is not knowledge we are after, but mystery and disguises. We want to gaze at the impossible. We are hungry for surprises, astonishment. In short, we are looking for a true story, but one impossible to explain in all its complexity. When we discover that story, we shall have found- magic. — Edward Claflin

We can see through all your disguises: the paths of day, the paths of darkness, whichever paths you take - we're right behind you, following you like a trail of smoke, like a long tail, a tail made of girls, heavy as memory, light as air: twelve accusations, toes skimming the ground, hands tied behind our backs, tongues sticking out, eyes bulging, songs choked in our throats. — Margaret Atwood

And what is all this life but a kind of comedy, wherein men walk up and down in one another's disguises and act their respective parts, till the property-man brings them back to the attiring house. And yet he often orders a different dress, and makes him that came but just now off in the robes of a king put on the rags of a beggar. Thus are all things represented by counterfeit, and yet without this there was no living. — Desiderius Erasmus

It ratified a theory of mine that great writing could sneak up on you, master of a thousand disguises: prodigal kinsman, messenger boy, class clown, commander of artillery, altar boy, lace maker, exiled king, peacemaker, or moon goddess. — Pat Conroy

America .. the international Jekyll and Hyde ... the land of a thousand disguises, sneaks up on you but rarely surprises — Gil Scott-Heron

What We Want
What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don't remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there. — Linda Pastan

Day by day, the superficial mask she'd donned chafed more and more; and no matter how many disguises Persis took on as the Poppy, she couldn't help but feel they fit her better than the one she wore at home. — Diana Peterfreund

Thanks, Molly. It's been a tough night. Some idiot's started selling Metamorph-Medals. Just sling them around your neck and you'll be able to change your appearance at will. A hundred thousand disguises, all for ten Galleons!" "And what really happens when you put them on?" "Mostly you just turn a fairly unpleasant orange color, but a couple of people have also sprouted tentaclelike warts all over their bodies. As if St. Mungo's didn't have enough to do already! — J.K. Rowling

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort. — Jean Cocteau

Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret. — Emile M. Cioran

Apparently, he uses disguises sometimes in the course of his investigations. In his liaison with Mariah, he used them for discretion. He came to her once dressed as a chimney sweep. Quite invigorating, don't you think? — Deanna Raybourn

the author's judgment is always present, always evident to anyone who knows how to look for it. Whether its particular forms are harmful or serviceable is always a complex question, a question that cannot be settled by any easy reference to abstract rules. As we begin now to deal with this question, we must never forget that though the author can to some extent choose his disguises, he can never choose to disappear. — Wayne C. Booth

The process in which a writer is compelled to counterfeit his true feelings is exactly the opposite of that which the man of society is compelled to counterfeit his. The artist disguises in order to reveal; the man of society disguises in order to conceal — Yukio Mishima

God changes appearances every second. Blessed is the man who can recognize him in all his disguises. One moment he is a glass of fresh water, the next, your son bouncing on your knees or an enchanting woman, or perhaps merely a morning walk. — Nikos Kazantzakis

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one's self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the niceties of language. Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and write — George Sand

I think cynicism often disguises itself as humour. — Michka Assayas

Faith in life, in oneself, in others must be built on the hard rock of realism; that is to say, on the capacity to see evil where it is, to see swindle, destructiveness, and selfishness not only when they are obvious but in their many disguises and rationalizations. Indeed, faith, love, and hope must go together with such a passion for seeing reality in all its nakedness that the outsider would be prone to call the attitude 'cynicism.' And cynical it is, when we mean by it the refusal to be taken in by the sweet and plausible lies that cover almost everything that is said and believed. But this kind of cynicism is not cynicism; it is uncompromisingly critical, a refusal to play the game in a system of deception. — Erich Fromm

Vedanta is the teaching of the Upanishads, a collection of dialogues, stories, and poems, some of which go back to at least 800 B.C. Sophisticated Hindus do not think of God as a special and separate super-person who rules the world from above, like a monarch. Their God is "underneath" rather than "above" everything, and he (or it) plays the world from inside. One might say that if religion is the opium of the people, the Hindus have the inside dope. What is more, no Hindu can realize that he is God in disguise without seeing at the same time that this is true of everyone and everything else. In the Vedanta philosophy, nothing exists except God. There seem to be other things than God, but only because he is dreaming them up and making them his disguises to play hide-and-seek with himself. — Alan W. Watts

The safest of disguises were the consistent ones. — Kristi Ann Hunter

In the poor we meet Jesus in his most distressing disguises. — Mother Teresa

Non-magic people (more commonly known as Muggles) were particularly afraid of magic in medieval times, but not very good at recognizing it. On the rare occasion that they did catch a real witch or wizard, burning had no effect whatsoever. The witch or wizard would perform a basic Flame-Freezing Charm and then pretend to shriek with pain while enjoying a gentle, tickling sensation. Indeed, Wendelin the Weird enjoyed being burned so much that she allowed herself to be caught no less than forty-seven times in various disguises. Harry — J.K. Rowling

Disguised in a handlebar mustache with a ten gallon hat hanging low against his brow, Loki moseyed into Odin's party, despite the fact that he wasn't invited. Being dressed like Juan Valdez in a room full of people dawning Viking braids and pointy horned hats, however, tended to call attention to oneself. Odin's wife, Frigg, noticed Loki the moment that he stepped through the door, "What the Hel are you doing here? You weren't invited. — Dylan Callens

He who disguises tyranny, protection, or even benefits under the air and name of friendship reminds me of the guilty priest who poisoned the sacramental bread. — Nicolas Chamfort

Of course in the present situation the Communists have to use various disguises. Sometimes we hear words like "popular front," at other times "dialogue with Christianity." For Communists a dialogue with Christianity! In the Soviet Union this dialogue was a simple matter: they used machine guns and revolvers. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It was one of those moments when life's disguises are stripped away, when you see clearly what is real, and all you can say to yourself is useful to get that learned. — Claire Messud

When my words are concealed
With lies and disguises, truth and beyond
Insecurities in the veil of trust
Betrayal in bounds of lies
It's just the charm of words darling
Giving the illusion of happiness inside misery — Irum Zahra

He had only just made the Elysian deadline; hanging onto the typescript until the last moment in case there was something still to be done; two sentences turned into one, one sentence broken into two, the substitution of a slightly resistant adjective to engender a moment's reflection, in short, the joys of editing, all carried out without forgetting the art that disguises art. — Edward St. Aubyn

I'm not quite at the point where I feel the need to wear disguises in public. — Christina Hendricks

Otis was inspired by a boy who sat across the aisle from me in sixth grade. He was a lively person. My best friend appears in assorted books in various disguises. — Beverly Cleary

I get recognised sometimes, and that's really cool. I've tried certain disguises, but that doesn't work. — Rupert Grint

O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales. — Leo Rosten

How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness; for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty; for its illusion of continuity, seamlessly, as the night follows the day, so to speak- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal raptures, falling upon your defenseless hands, like the blows of a woodman's axe? — Salman Rushdie

His ally was the age-old, unending human search for truth and security. In the first century as the twenty first, some were devout, some superstitious, others were frankly materialistic, even though in that age they paid lip service to the gods. Others, contemptuous of religion, believed only in mankind. But at heart, when disguises were torn away and defenses broken, lay the same anxieties and hopes. — John Charles Pollock

I used to wear disguises, like hats and false beards, just to walk around and avoid attention. — Al Pacino

I also think he is given to disguises ... Sometimes he wears spectacles and sometimes he does not. And twice he has worn an extremely peculiar hat. Inside. — Julia Quinn

Words themselves - the very material of our discourse increasingly take on masks or disguises — Dennis Potter

Here's something you must know and don't forget it - animals never lie. They don't like, they don't put on disguises, and they are always true to what they are. That's why you can trust them. — Jonathan Carroll

Yet after all there is nothing so deceptive as one's outward appearance. The reason of this is that as soon as childhood is past, we are always pretending to be what we are not
and thus, with constant practice from our youth up, we manage to make our physical frames complete disguises for our actual selves. It is really wise and clever of us
for hence each individual is so much flesh-wall through which neither friend nor enemy can spy. Every man is a solitary soul imprisoned in a self-made den
when he is quite alone he knows and frequently hates himself
sometimes he even gets afraid of the gaunt and murderous monster he keeps hidden behind his outwardly pleasant body-mask, and hastens to forget its frightful existence in drink and debauchery. — Marie Corelli

Love is not a sentiment or an emotion. It's the fact that we're all the same being in different disguises. — Deepak Chopra

Perhaps all grown-ups were just children carefully putting on their grown-up disguises each day and then acting accordingly. — Liane Moriarty

The gods, likening themselves to all kinds of strangers, go in various disguises from city to city, observing the wrongdoing and the righteousness of men. — Homer

Much that we call evil is really good in disguises; and we should not quarrel rashly with adversities not yet understood, nor overlook the mercies often bound up in them. — Horace Mann

I was gathering more insights into how George operated. He was a hustler for sure. That was obvious to me pretty early on. But his style is a little like mine; he disguises it with a charisma that feels trustworthy and probably *is* trustworthy, but edited for maximum effect. It's about disarming someone with your sincerity, which is legitimately sincere but also strategic, selective. Almost everyone does that - balances their personality to serve themselves given whatever the moment demands - but some people are really good at doing it and really good at hiding it. — Charlotte Shane

Do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less? — C.S. Lewis

Your transparency is just another one of your disguises, isn't it? — Gregory Maguire

I do not like the reappearance of the Jesuits ... Shall we not have regular swarms of them here, in as many disguises as only a king of the gipsies can assume, dressed as printers, publishers, writers and schoolmasters? If ever there was a body of men who merited damnation on earth and in Hell, it is this society of Loyola's. Nevertheless, we are compelled by our system of religious toleration to offer them an asylum. — John Adams

If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, in remorse, in times of passion, in surprises, in the instructions of dreams, wherein often we see ourselves in masquerade,
the droll disguises only magnifying and enhancing a real element, and forcing it on our distinct notice,
we shall catch many hints that will broaden and lighten into knowledge of the secret of nature. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I would not say I am looking for God. Or, I am not looking for God precisely. I am not seeking the God I learned about as a Catholic child, as an 18-year-old novice in a religious community, as an agnostic graduate student, as - but who cares about my disguises? Or God's. — Mary Rose O'Reilley

Over time, years of meditation gave me glimpses of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all life. I experienced that on one level we are alone, separate, apart from everyone and everything; on another level, we are the Self in different disguises, different names and forms, a part of everyone and everything. This experience of interconnectedness is part of spiritual traditions and the perennial wisdom in virtually all religions and cultures. — Dean Ornish

Whoever finds love beneath hurt and grief disappears into emptiness with a thousand new disguises — Rumi