Quotes & Sayings About Dissembling

Did I mention any name?" But dissembling was wasted; Eldir only glowered until Sethvir gave way with a shrug. "That's the part of his personality that makes us all feel like we've been kissing coiled vipers for a penny bet. — Janny Wurts

Poor Tom did not know and could not learn that dissembling successfully is one of the creative joys of a businessman. To indicate enthusiasm was to be idiotic. — John Steinbeck

When it's time to confess, you don't know what you're saying. Are you telling the truth, or do you confuse your lies with reality? The question is comical. The answer is lost in the maelstroms of consciousness. It's even impossible to pretend, eventually, that the question wasn't asked. You've been kidding yourself about yourself for so long, you're someone else. Your you is just a fragile fabrication. Every morning, you have to wake up, assemble this busy, dissembling monster, and get him or her on his or her feet again for another round of fantasy. — David Guterson

September's Baccalaureate A combination is Of Crickets - Crows - and Retrospects And a dissembling Breeze That hints without assuming - An Innuendo sear That makes the Heart put up its Fun And turn Philosopher. — Emily Dickinson

There are lying looks, as well as lying words; dissembling smiles, deceiving signs, and even a lying silence. — Ellin Devis

Outrage is easy, cheap, and oversold. The nation needs less anger and more thoughtful reflection, less shouting and more listening, less dissembling and more honesty. — Mario Cuomo

Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel.
This is how you lose her. — Junot Diaz

The characters of man's heart, blotted and confounded as they are with dissembling, lying, counterfeiting, and erroneous doctrines, are legible only to him that searcheth hearts. — Thomas Hobbes

Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt. — James A. Baldwin

He who is passionate and hasty is generally honest. It is your cool, dissembling hypocrite of whom you should beware. — Johann Kaspar Lavater

I shall strip away layer after layer of grime
the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling
until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self. — John Banville

Chaos is indeed the normal state of affairs on the battleground, and no army has figured out a way to plan effectively for, let alone alleviate, the so-called fog of war. When the military is confronted with the fratricidal carnage that predictably results, denial and dissembling are its time-honored responses of first resort. — Jon Krakauer

Perhaps there is something more than courtesy behind the dissembling reticence of childhood ... Most artists dislike having their incomplete work considered and discussed and this analogy, I think, is valid. The child is incomplete, too, and is constantly experimenting as he seeks his own style of thought and feeling. — Dervla Murphy

A heat full of coldness, a sweet full of bitterness, a pain full of pleasantness, which maketh thoughts have eyes and hearts ears, bred by desire, nursed by delight, weaned by jealousy, kill'd by dissembling, buried by ingratitude, and this is love. — John Lyly

A person is nothing but his image. Philosophers can tell us that it doesn't matter what the world thinks of us, that nothing matters but what we really are. But philosophers don't understand anything. As long as we live with other people, we are only what other people consider us to be. Thinking about how others see us and trying to make our image as attractive as possible is considered a kind of dissembling or cheating. But does there exist another kind of direct contact between my self and their selves except through the mediation of the eyes? Can we possibly imagine love without anxiously following our image in the mind of the beloved? When we are no longer interested in how we are seen by the person we love, it means we no longer love. — Milan Kundera

He turned to her - his gesture a superb compound of relief, remorse, passionate candour and bewilderment touched with curiosity; confidence and perfect penitence. Against which Scylla had to brace herself. Against such bravura how dull truth seemed, and difficult to access. Never had the bottom of a well seemed less attractive. She must hear him first. She could go down later. — Mary Butts

Dissembling is a common tool of the anger junkie. — Jack Nicholson

It was fascinating to watch her spin the tale. She'd adjusted her accent yet again, adding just a twitch of country. She looked up at him with just the right amount of girlish adoration. As if they were deeply in love and barely beginning to discover one another.
He couldn't help looking back with the same expression. He wasn't dissembling. — Courtney Milan

Especially where financial matters are concerned, when it comes to dissolving a marriage, any dissembling at all is strictly against the law - on penalty of perjury. You need to disclose fully and factually, which is precisely what the discovery process is all about. — Laura Wasser

Dissembling was so large a part of middle-class life that honesty and frankness seemed the most devious stratagem of all. The most outright lie was the closest one came to truth. — J.G. Ballard

Dissembling courtesy! How fine this tyrant can trickle when she wounds! — William Shakespeare

This was the feeling that Ms. Hempel couldn't shake: a conviction that she spent her days among people at the age when they are most purely themselves. How could she not be depleted when she came home, having been exposed for hours, without protection, to all those thrumming radiant selves? Here they were, just old enough to have discovered their souls, but not yet dulled by the ordinary act of survival, not yet practiced in dissembling. — Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

To know the piano is to know the universe. To master the piano is to master the universe. The spectrum of piano sound acts as a prism through which all musical and non-musical sounds may be filtered. The grunts of sheep, the braying of mules, the popping of champagne corks, the sighs of unrequited love, not to mention the full lexicon of sounds available to all other instruments-including whistles, scrapes, bleatings, caresses, thuds, hoots, plus sweet and sour pluckings-fall within the sovereignty of this most bare and dissembling chameleon. — Russell Sherman

We are so used to dissembling with others that in time we come to deceive and dissemble with ourselves. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Some of his colleagues and a few of his students claimed to have been moved so by a book that they had read it again and again. Who were they? Of what were they made? Were they dissembling? Perhaps he was a fool, but he thought that if a work were truly great you would only have to read it once and you would be stolen from yourself, desperately moved, changed forever. It would become part of you and never leave, and you would love the characters as if they were your own. Who would want to plough over ground that has been perfectly ploughed? Would it not be, like living one's life again, infinitely painful and dissonant? — Mark Helprin

O thou dissembling cub! what wilt thou be
When time hath sow'd a grizzle on thy case?
Or will not else thy craft so quickly grow,
That thine own trip shall be thine overthrow?
Farewell, and take her; but direct thy feet
Where thou and I henceforth may never meet. — William Shakespeare

Now that you offer me the platter,
Kitchen makes a wry face
Burning stove priorities in grudged flames,
Like the dissembling of prominent names,
Kitchen makes a wry face,
Now that you offer me the platter,
I render my nights insane
Like the murky hugs of a sweet pain,
I pierce my days with a blunt knife
Like the aftermath of a indelible strife,
I cajole my laughter to a calm silence
Like the death of a young boy, hence;
Now that you offer me the platter,
I place my hunger on my finger tips,
My taste in the credulousness of my lips,
I place my honour in the chocking sips,
Now that you offer me the platter.
The Harkening — Ashfaq Saraf

You know nothing of me." Through clenched teeth. "Nothing. You've fucked me, that's all. Well, that's a crowded hole you're in, darling. And us humans, we're a lying, dissembling bunch, remember. Doesn't pay to trust us between the sheets any more than anywhere else. — Richard K. Morgan

This was why men fell in love with strippers and escorts: it wasn't the licentiousness, the dissembling, their craven willingness to do whatever you wanted. It was the way they would, out of the blue, surprise you with the psychic ability to know what you needed. — Chris Bohjalian

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them,
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun. — William Shakespeare

Dissembling profiteth nothing; a feigned countenance, and slightly forged externally, deceiveth but very few. — Seneca The Younger

Man is too near all kinds of beasts,
a fawning dog, a roaring lion, a thieving fox, a robbing wolf, a dissembling crocodile, a treacherous decoy, and a rapacious vulture. — Abraham Cowley