False Image Quotes & Sayings

I will only mention that the independent power of words to affect the writing of history is a thing to be watched out for. They have an almost frightening autonomous power to produce in the mind of the reader an image or idea that was not in the mind of the writer. Obviously they operate this way in all forms of writing, but history is particularly sensitive because one has a duty to be accurate, and careless use of words can leave a false impression one had not intended. — Barbara W. Tuchman

It's a true image, born of a false spectacle. — Jean Genet

When the light of God's truth begins to find its way through the mists of illusion and self-deception with which we have unconsciously surrounded ourselves, and when the image of God within us begins to return to itself, the false self which we inherited from Adam begins to experience the strange panic that Adam felt when, after his sin, he hid in the trees of the garden because he heard the voice of the Lord God in the afternoon.
If we are to recover our own identity, and return to God by the way Adam came in his fall, we must learn to stop saying: "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked. And I hid." [Genesis 2:10] We must cast away the "aprons of leaves" and the "garments of skins" which the Fathers of the Church variously interpret as passions, and attachments to earthly things, and fixation in our own rigid determination to be someone other than our true selves. — Thomas Merton

When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it's a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. — Robert Pirsig

He gasped in despair while he wrote to her knowing everything is going to end.
He: Why did you ruin my image in front of your mother and family though I wasn't the bad guy?
She replied Coldly: I acted childish and took revenge, I wanted to end this relation.
He kept asking all that she accused him of.
She kept admitting false allegations, something kept breaking inside him.
Silence kept creeping into him, sorrow enveloped his soul and tears fell of his eyes for he knew all had ended. — Anonymus Autor

People sometimes see an image and without knowing the surrounding patterns draw false conclusions. — Marianne Williamson

If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out - since our self-image is untenable - their false notions of us ... We play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us. — Joan Didion

The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another. A realization of the inevitable guilt of life may so sicken the heart, that like Hamlet, or like Arjuna, one may refuse to go on with it. On the other hand, like most of the rest of us, one may invent a false finally unjustified image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world
not guilty as others are, but justified in one's inevitable sinning, because one represents the good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself, but of the nature of both Man and the Cosmos. The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life-ignorance by affecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will, and this is affected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all. — Joseph Campbell

What Rizzoli thought, staring at her own image, was that she hated Elizabeth Hurley for giving women false hope. The brutal truth was, there are some women who will never be beautiful, and Rizzoli was one of them. — Tess Gerritsen

Never fall for a person's image and status as the may serve as a false representation of character. Watch closely the character and you"ll know who a person really is. — Kemi Sogunle

My goddess! My queen!'
'Oh, no, no, no!'
He raised his head, smiling a little crookedly down at her. 'Do you dislike to hear yourself called so? There is nothing I would not do to please you, but you cannot help but be my goddess! You have been so these seven years!'
'Only a goddess could dislike it! You see by that how wretchedly short of the mark I fall. I have a little honesty - enough to tell you *now* that you must not worship me.'
He only laughed, and kissed her again. She protested no more, too much a woman not to be deeply moved by such idolatry, and awed by the constancy which, though it might have been to a false image, could not be doubted. — Georgette Heyer

The copy of an ad is merely a punning gag to distract the critical faculties while the image of the product goes to work on the hypnotized viewer. Those who have spent their lives protesting about 'false and misleading ad copy' are godsends to advertisers, as teetotalers are to brewers, and moral censors are to books and films. The protesters are the best acclaimers and accelerators. Since the advent of pictures, the job of the ad copy is as incidental and latent as the 'meaning' of a poem is to a poem, or the words of a song are to a song. — Marshall McLuhan

Who is telling us about the false self today? Who is even equipped tell us? Many clergy have not figured this out for themselves, since even ministry can be a career decision or an attraction to "religion" more than the result of an encounter with God or themselves. Formal religious status can maintain the false self rather effectively, especially if there are a lot of social payoffs like special respect, titles, salaries, a good self image, or nice costumes. It is no accident that the religious "Pharisees" became the symbolic bad guys in the Jesus story. — Richard Rohr

I hate to tell things in which I don't belive to impress people who are not on my mind so that they see my false image. — Bryanna Reid

Many people have failing relationships because they have not really fallen in love with each other, but they have fallen for the mental images they have created of one another. We assume we know our partner, we think about them nonstop, creating many different ideas of who they are, what they like, and how we will be together, then as soon as our partner does something that doesn't fit with our mental image of them, we become sad, upset, confused, or heart broken. Our partner did not cause our suffering; we caused it, through our false perceptions and mental images. — Joseph P. Kauffman

God reproduces and lives out His image in millions of ordinary people like us. It is a supreme mystery. We are called to bear that image as a Body because any one of us taken individually would present an incomplete image, one partly false and always distorted, like a single glass chip hacked from a mirror. But collectively, in all our diversity, we can come together as a community of believers to restore the image of God in the world. (In His Image, Philip Yancey and Dr. Paul Brand, p. 40) — Philip Yancey

When we think of something, we create a mental image of it, and our image is then always filtered through our mental perception. We may meet someone one day when they are in a bad mood, we then make a false assumption that this person does not like us. We have created an image of this person, and now every time we meet them, we associate this person with our negative mental image of them. We don't interact with them as they are in this moment; we interact with how we think they are. — Joseph P. Kauffman

The illusion they cherish of being a brave minority heroically facing the whole world, false as it is, gives them nevertheless a strange sense of comfort: they feel absolutely safe, being equipped with the most powerful political tools in today's world but at the same time priding themselves on their courage and decency, which are more formidable the more awesome the image of the enemy becomes. — Ryszard Legutko

The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God. — Martin Buber

As I look back on it, I'm glad that I had this false image. I was who everyone else - my parents, my friends, society - wanted me to be. I was a pleaser, someone who wanted to make everyone happy, to not let anyone down. Now, I'm not like that. — Natalie Portman

I know that mirrors give us a false sense of confidence." I continued. "The reflection that we see everyday has nothing to do with how others see us. The glass lies. — Rasmenia Massoud

I'm too alone in the world, yet not alone enough
to make each hour holy.
I'm too small in the world, yet not small enough
to be simply in your presence, like a thing -
just as it is.

I want to know my own will
and to move with it.
And I want, in the hushed moments
when the nameless draws near,
to be among the wise ones -
or alone.

I want to mirror your immensity.
I want never to be too weak or too old
to bear the heavy, lurching image of you.

I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed,
for where I am closed, I am false.
I want to stay clear in your sight. — Rainer Maria Rilke

In an age in which we can project an image and score that image based on immediate Facebook and Twitter feedback, thus making a video game of life and a false-reality composed of lies, what gets lost is a joyful obsession with the work we create from the purest of motives, a sheer joy in the act of creation itself that causes us to lose ourselves in something else, and in a way die to ourselves over the absolute love of a thing we are breathing into life. — Donald Miller

The question is not: do we believe in God? but rather: does God believe in us? And the answer is: only an unbeliever could have created our image of God; and only a false God could be satisfied with it. — Kenneth Patchen

All men naturally hate each other. We have used concupiscence as best we can to make it serve the common good, but this is mere sham and a false image of charity, for essentially it is just hate. — Blaise Pascal

That's the biggest problem with personas. A false self can never rest. It looks like a real person, but a persona is actually just a hologram, a projected image, and it requires constant energy to keep that image up. A persona is afraid to go to sleep, because to sleep is to die. — Nate Larkin

I've actually found the image of Silicon Valley as a hotbed of money-grubbing tech people to be pretty false, but maybe that's because the people I hang out with are all really engineers. — Linus Torvalds

I realize how depraved it was to instill false guilt in an innocent child's conscience, causing a distorted image of life, God, & self, leaving little if any feeling of personal worth. — Mary Griffith

In this image-driven age, wildlife filmmakers carry a heavy responsibility. They can influence how we think and behave when we're in nature. They can even influence how we raise our kids, how we vote and volunteer in our communities, as well as the future of our wildlands and wildlife. If the stories they create are misleading or false in some way, viewers will misunderstand the issues and react in inappropriate ways. People who consume a heavy diet of wildlife films filled with staged violence and aggression, for example, are likely to think about nature as a circus or a freak show. They certainly won't form the same positive connections to the natural world as people who watch more thoughtful, authentic, and conservation-oriented films. — Chris Palmer

The question that has perhaps divided students of vouchers more than any other is their likely effect on the social and economic class structure. Some have argued that the great value of the public school has been as a melting pot, in which rich and poor, native- and foreign-born, black and white have learned to live together. That image was and is largely true for small communities, but almost entirely false for large cities. There, the public school has fostered residential stratification, by tying the kind and cost of schooling to residential location. It is no accident that most of the country's outstanding public schools are in high-income enclaves. — Milton Friedman

All Creatures know that some must die
That all the rest may take and eat;
Sooner or later, all transform
Their blood to wine, their flesh to meat.
But Man alone seeks Vengefulness,
And writes his abstract Laws on stone;
For this false Justice he has made,
He tortures limb and crushes bone.
Is this the image of a god?
My tooth for yours, your eye for mine?
Oh, if Revenge did move the stars
Instead of Love, they would not shine. — Margaret Atwood

U.S.-Israel relations are often depicted as an extended honeymoon, but that's a false image. — Elliott Abrams

One individual is his or her own best teacher, and no other idol or false image should be worshiped or adored because the God we are all seeking lies inside oneself, not outside. — Shirley Maclaine

We all tell lies to protect our solitude. We deny the truth and present a false image of ourselves to blend into society. — Saleem Haddad

I will always love the false image I had of you. — Ashleigh Brilliant

We are accused of being obsessed by property. The truth is the other way round. It is the society and culture in question which is so obsessed. Yet to an obsessive his obsession always seems to be of the nature of things and so is not recognized for what it is. The relation between property and art in European culture appears natural to that culture, and consequently if somebody demonstrates the extent of the property interest in a given cultural field, it is said to be a demonstration of his obsession. And this allows the Cultural Establishment to project for a little longer its false rationalized image of itself. — John Berger

You show me someone who can't understand people and I'll show you someone who has built up a false image of himself. — Isaac Asimov

We have to be what we are, so we don't have to present a false image. If you love me the way I am, "Okay, take me." If you don't love me the way I am, "Okay, bye-bye. Find someone else." It may sound harsh, but this kind of communication means the personal agreements we make with others are clear and impeccable. — Miguel Ruiz

God cannot be represented by an image. We ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device. We wrong God, and put an affront upon him, if we think so. God honoured man in making his soul after his own likeness; but man dishonours God if he makes him after the likeness of his body. The Godhead is spiritual, infinite, immaterial, incomprehensible, and therefore it is a very false and unjust conception which an image gives us of God. — Matthew Henry

According to my file, I was abandoned on the steps of the children's home in Telbury with a birth certificate tucked inside the shawl. The certificate stated my name, date of birth, and place of birth - which was Aldabury Maternity Hospital - and my birth mother's name and address. All I have is my first name and date and place of birth. Everything else regarding my birth mother on the certificate seems to be false. — Lorna Peel

He thought about how the camera makes one fall in love with an image of oneself, and perpetuates a false reality. — Ben Okri

As you grow up, you form a mental image of who you are, based on your personal and cultural conditioning. We may call this phantom self the ego. It consists of mind activity and can only be kept going through constant thinking. The term ego means different things to different people, but when I use it here it means a false self, created by unconscious identification with the mind. — Anonymous

As we joined the line of people getting off at the last stop before Sofia, I looked once more at the little boy, whom I felt I would never forget, though maybe it wasn't exactly him I would remember, I thought, but the use I would make of him. I had my notes, I knew I would write a poem about him, and then it would be the poem I remembered, which would be both true and false at once, the image I made replacing the real image. Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But that wasn't what it felt like when I looked back at the boy, wanting a last glimpse of him; it felt like a loss. Whatever I could make of him would diminish him, and I wondered whether I wasn't really turning my back on things in making them into poems, whether instead of preserving the world I was taking refuge from it. — Garth Greenwell

Before You post

*Will this ultimately glorify me or God?
*Will this stir or muffle healthy affections for Christ?
*Will this merely document that I know something that others don't?
*Will this misrepresent me or is it authentic?
*Will this potentially breed jealousy in others?
*Will this fortify unity or stir up unnecessary division?
*Will this build up or tear down?
*Will this heap guilt or relieve it?
*Will this fuel lust for sin or warn against it?
*Will this overpromise and instill false hopes in others? — Tony Reinke

From the front I look to put together, but every other angle would reveal how false the front of me is, how much effort has gone into presenting a one-sided image of perfection. — Lauren Graham

Melancholia for Freud is the relationship that the subject takes up with respect to itself from the position of what he calls conscience or what he later calls the super-ego. And that can be lacerated - if you think of the anorexic who sees themselves from the perspective of the image they have, of the image they have of themselves in the mirror which is false - that would be the super-ego. Super-ego is what generates depression and it is what has to be dealt with in psychoanalysis. — Simon Critchley

We have this sort of false self we portray over the internet. It's a facade of highlights we believe our peers will deem noteworthy. — Chris Matakas

The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence - as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence ... The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality. — Roland Barthes

It made the kids at camp much more enthusiastic and cooperative when they had ego goals to fulfill, I'm sure, but ultimately that kind of motivation is destructive. Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. Now we're paying the price. When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it's a hollow victory. In order to sustain victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That's never the way. — Robert M. Pirsig

Our self image is based on people comments, so most images are false. You aren't this and this, they made you, because they wanted! — Deyth Banger

He was like one of those pictures full of small errors, the kind you could only pick out by searching the image from every angle, and even then, a few always slipped by. On the surface, Eli seemed perfectly normal, but now and then Victor would catch a crack, a sideways glance, a moment when his roommate's face and his words, his look and his meaning, would not line up. Those fleeting slices fascinated Victor. It was like watching two people, one hiding in the other's skin. And their skin was always too dry, on the verge of cracking and showing the color of the thing beneath. — Victoria Schwab

Whereas representation attempts
to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum. Such would be the successive phases of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever;
it is its own pure simulacrum. — Jean Baudrillard

For the social phobic, any kind of performance - musical, sporting, public speaking - can be terrifying because failure will reveal the weakness and inadequacy within. This in turn means constantly projecting an image that feels false - an image of confidence, competence, even perfection. — Scott Stossel

A true prophet would rather be believed false by many but actually true than believed true by many but actually false. — Criss Jami

One great distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly between even the characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother English, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In 1970 I realized that there was negligible risk from x-rays but many radiographs had poor image quality so that the risk from a false negative was significant. — John Cameron

Our world has created a false unrealistic image of what women are supposed to look like and act like. But the truth is that every woman was not created by God to be skinny, with a flawless complexion and long flowing hair. Not every woman was intended to juggle a career as well as all of the other duties of being a wife, mother, citizen, and daughter. Single women should not be made to feel they are missing somenthing because they are not married. Married women should not be made to feel they must have a career to be complete. We must have the freedom to be our individual selves. — Joyce Meyer

The image of the disinterested, dispassionate scientist is no less false than that of the mad scientist who is willing to destroy the world for knowledge. — Lewis Wolpert

This other man he could never see in his entirety but he seemed an artisan and a worker in metal. The judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger who worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exile from men's fires, hammering out like his own conjectural destiny all through the night of his becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be. It is this false moneyer with his gravers and burins who seeks favor with the judge and he is at contriving from cold slag brute in the crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual specie current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge and the night does not end. — Cormac McCarthy

When you are in the company of lunatics, behave like a lunatic. When you are in the company of intelligentsias, speak with brilliance ... that is how a chameleon behaves, the territory changes it, and it adapts to the changes. — Michael Bassey Johnson

A false image is, of course, a work of art, an idol. And a lie. A narcissist identifies with this image, not his true inner self. So, all he cares about is his image, not what kind of person he really is. Indeed, the latter has no real existence in his world.

In identifying with his image, he's identifying with an ephemeral figment that has but virtual reality, a purely immanent existence as a reflection in the attention shone on him by others. No attention, no image. No image, no self! — Kathy Krajco

I do not like the Broadway theatre because it does not know how to say hello. The tone of voice is false, the mannerisms are false, the sex is false, ideal, the Hollywood world of perfection, the clean image, the well pressed clothes, the well scrubbed anus, odorless, inhuman, of the Hollywood actor, the Broadway star. And the terrible false dirt of Broadway, the lower depths in which the dirt is imitated, inaccurate. — Julian Beck

Fear is a beautiful mirror reflecting the reality of great things with false illussions. After all, images in the mirror ain't real at all, they're just virtual. So, keep ballin' without checkin mirrors coz u may see an image that proves it's hard
ya, u never know it's hard till u've done it!!! — Mphezulu Xetho Dainamyk

The part of acting business is the struggle to do what you love and to maintain body image and to maintain this sort of false stature of who you're supposed to be as a role model and also who you are supposed to be to yourself personally and privately. — Amber Tamblyn

Unfortunately, several companies are attempting to deceive consumers through the unauthorized use of my image or my name, and my attorneys are pursuing those making these false claims. — Mehmet Oz

But there are realities governing what they can do. And Ukraine cannot live with the false image that somehow or another the West will come and rescue her. It's not going to happen. — Marvin Kalb