Quotes & Sayings About Falseness

Art isn't life, you know. It if were, the world would go up in flames. It's artifice. By definition.
("Talking In The Dark") — Dennis Etchison

Lord Fawn did not immediately recognise the falseness of every word that the woman said to him, because he was slow and could not think and hear at the same time. — Anthony Trollope

The Beatles did everything with down-to-earth humor, honesty, optimism, style, charisma, irreverence, intelligence, and a particularly spiky disdain for falseness. — Mark Lewisohn

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness. — Charles Darwin

Sometimes, and I don't know why, everything I want to say to you presses upon me with great intensity, like a crowd of people all trying to squeeze through a narrow door at once. And I have said nothing to you, less than nothing, for everything I have written recently has been false - not fundamentally, of course, because fundamentally everything is true - but with so much confusion and falseness on the surface that no one could be expected to see through it. — Franz Kafka

Certain directors and actors were constantly preoccupied by one problem, and apparently, one only. This was connected with the so-called German greeting, which was the method of hailing a friend by raising the right arm straight out with the hand extended at, or slightly above, the level of the shoulder. This greeting had very definite political implications; it was employed daily by millions; and the directors and actors saw no reason why it should not be one on the films in a simple and life-like fashion. They failed. Even when shown in the rushes the effect on the select and professional audience was simply to produce uncontrollable hilarity. The cinema can do a great deal. It can entrance, t can tell fairy tales, it can be realistic or surrealistic -- but it cannot portray a gesture that is false without underlining the most brutal way its basic falseness. The German cinema could not reproduce the German greeting; it was the greeting that was to blame, not the cinema. — Ernst Von Salomon

I adore falseness. I don't want you to tell me accurately what happened yesterday. I want you to lie about it, to exaggerate, to entertain me. — Jim Crace

... some bits of Dickens-books with which latter I am long familiar and long enamored for the restful falseness of their sentiment and the pungent appetizing charm of their villains. — Mary MacLane

If kindness has falseness at its base, it is no longer kindness. It is labored courtesy. — Piero Ferrucci

All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy. — John Ruskin

And you shouldn't choose to care about someone. There shouldn't be a time and a place for it. Either you do or you don't. Don't try." He looks off. "There can be falseness in trying to do something that should come naturally to people. — Celia Mcmahon

The falseness of the seventeenth century became a large measure of the truth by the nineteenth. Money made the man, or at least went a long way toward doing so; and death became the occasion for a final accounting, a stocktaking of worldly success. Of course, there were other metrics: virtue, martyrdom, political standing, fraternal ties. But it took money to publicize them. The funeral became more and more a standardized commodity whose cost could be matched with exquisite precision to the class and degree of 'respectability' of the deceased. When one bought a funeral, one bought a more or less splendid parade, each additional bauble, each horse, each feather or set of nails adding to the base price. Bit by bit, finery accumulated, and by looking at the account books of an undertaker who specialized in pauper funerals, we can begin to see the bounds of decency in death. — Thomas W. Laqueur

Life's essential harmony is within each of us. So also is life's brokenness. To be part of transformation is to look falseness in the face, to passionately name it and denounce it in our world, and at the same time to clearly identify its shadow within our own hearts and to do battle with it there. — J. Philip Newell

The cynics were watchdogs terrifying malefactors. They tried to expose falseness and conceit. That's why their name is still spoken with a snarl. — Petr Skrabanek

I believe that you are sincere and good at heart. If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on the right road, and try not to leave it. Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself. Avoid fear, too, though fear is only the consequence of every sort of falsehood. Never be frightened at your own faint-heartedness in attaining love. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I do think that poetry is important though, if you don't strive at it, if you don't fill it full of stars and falseness. — Charles Bukowski

The life of the nation is shot through with a certain falseness and hypocrisy, which are all the more tragic because they are so often subconscious rather than deliberate ... The soul of the people is putrescent, and until that becomes regenerate and clean, no good work can be done. — Frantz Fanon

But there is another realm where we can always find something true, the fireside of a friend, where we shed our little conceits and find warmth and understanding, where small selfishnesses are impossible and where wine and books and talk give a different meaning to existence.
There we have made something that no falseness can touch. We are at home. — Kressman Taylor

Truth is the world and falseness is man who lives within his mind world which has copied the world of Truth. Therefore, man must cleanse and discard his mind. He must become "poor in spirit" in order to go to the real world that is heaven. — Woo Myung

The sentimentality of kitsch is a sign of its falseness. But it is also a sign of its extravagance. Unanchored to reality, sentimentality is naturally unbounded. Kitsch is a response to a failure or disintegration of cultural values. When the world no longer speaks meaningfully to us, we shout into the void and pretend the echoes come to us from on high.

The grandiosity of kitsch is in proportion to the existential poverty out of which it arose. In this context, it is worth noting a limitation of that dictionary definition of kitsch. The sentimentality of kitsch can be "sweet," but it can also be sour, malignant. — Roger Kimball

I could not clearly distinguish what was passing in my head; it seemed to me that I was under the influence of a horrible dream and that I had but to awake to find myself cured; at times it seemed that my entire life had been a dream, ridiculous and childish, the falseness of which had just been disclosed. — Alfred De Musset

But in my life, in my personality, there is an essence of falseness and insincerity. A thin, fine vapor of fraud hangs always over me and dampens and injures some things in me that I value. — Mary MacLane

belief, by its very nature, is exclusive. If The earth is more than four billion years old is true, then the claim, The earth is fewer than ten thousand years old is false. And so my believing the truth of the former entails my also believing the falseness of the latter. — David Werther

The elaborateness of the cover story made him feel like a criminal. This is what criminals must feel like as they prepare to do a job, he thought, constructing a world based on the fullness (and falseness) of the cover story. And yet he was not going to commit a murder or rob a bank or burglarize a house. He was only going to do something so normal the wonder was that it did require such an elaborate preparation. But it was the combination of secretness and commonness that made it so sweet. It was what everyone wanted and almost nobody did, to slip out of or through the structure that gave your life a shape into a room where your life took the shape you wanted it to have, to love and be loved by someone perfectly beautiful. — Ron Loewinsohn

She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake. — Abraham Verghese

I actually shivered at the insincerity that gripped me as I spoke these words: their falseness was shameful. I was sure my coolness would return. I'd just been caught with my guard down. But at the moment I was in shambles. Walking along the deck (adopting my old casual swagger), I jollied up the troops with small talk, put on a frozen grin, and kept murmuring to myself with rhythmic fatuity: You love the marine Corps, it's a terrific war, you love the Marine Corps, it's a terrific war ... — William Styron

Don't accept a life that has been molded for you by others because eventually you'll succumb to its falseness. — Carol Vorvain

See, Biff, everybody around me is so false that I'm constantly lowering my ideals ... — Arthur Miller

How much rationality and higher protection there is in such self-deception, and how much falseness I still require in order to allow myself again and again the luxury of my sincerity. — Friedrich Nietzsche

If you are often deceived by those around you, you may be sure that you deserve to be deceived; and that instead of railing at the general falseness of mankind, you have first to pronounce judgment on your own jealous tyranny, or on your own weak credulity. — Arthur Helps

Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas. It is true that every dogma crumbles sooner or later, because reality will eventually disclose its falseness; however, unless the basic delusion of it is seen for what it is, it will be replaced by others. — Eckhart Tolle

False notions of love teach us that it is the place where we will feel no pain, where we will be in a state of constant bliss. We have to expose the falseness of these beliefs to see and accept the reality that suffering and pain do not end when we begin to love. In some cases when we are making the slow journey back from lovelessness to love, our suffering may become more intense. Acceptance of pain is part of loving practice. — Bell Hooks

Everything she does, she means. There's no falseness to her. No deception. So when she tells me she loves me, I know she means it with every part of her. — Pierce Brown

Originally, Sula opened with 'Except for World War II, nothing interfered with National Suicide Day.' With some encouragement I recognized that sentence as a false beginning." Falseness, in this case, meant abrupt. There was no lobby, as it were, where the reader could be situated before being introduced to the goings-on of the characters. — Toni Morrison

Patriotism, whether it is of the Western kind, or of the Eastern kind, is the same, a poison in human beings that is really distorting thought. So patriotism is a disease, and when you begin to realize, become aware that it is a disease, then you will see how your mind is reacting to that disease. When, in time of war, the whole world talks of patriotism, you will know the falseness of it, and therefore you will act as a true human being — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Although it may appear as though there have been many miracles in the world, a true miracle has never come to pass. A true miracle is when falseness is made into Truth, and when dead people are made real so that they are born and can live. Only this is a true miracle. — Woo Myung

The average man thinks that a little falseness goes with beauty. — Thomas Mann

The wise man does nothing but what can be done openly and without falseness, nor does he do anything whereby he may involve himself in any wrong-doing, even where he may escape notice. For he is guilty in his own eyes before being so in the eyes of others; and the publicity of his crime does not bring him more shame than his own consciousness of it. — Ambrose

People do not know what Truth is and what false is. Truth knows both Truth and falseness. However, the false know neither the false nor Truth. People do not know what Truth is, nor do they know what they are being deceived by. When they have a bigger mind and become Truth, they will know the wisdom of the world and will live without death. — Woo Myung

4. The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life- preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live - that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Seeing movies about mental illness, a lot of falseness has leapt out at me over the years. So I just focused on what I remembered, the real experience of seeing somebody like that. And as an adult, I've had family members who are bipolar, so I've seen it again. — Maya Forbes

It must be granted that many aspects of the intellectual life of that era showed energy and grandeur. We moderns explain its concomitant uncertainty and falseness as a symptom of the horror which seized men when at the end of an era of apparent victory and success they found themselves suddenly confronting a void: great material scarcity, a period of political and military crises, and an accelerating distrust of the intellect itself, of its own virtue and dignity and even of its own existence. Yet that very period, filled though it was with premonitions of doom, was marked by some very fine intellectual achievements, — Hermann Hesse

He always smiles, even when contemplating nothing good. — Henryk Sienkiewicz

I have done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt. — Jessamyn West

Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions ... So when we thing we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. Don't you think it's depressing? — Tony Kushner

And he felt a crazy desire to join the forlorn ones, to throw himself into inevitable defeat, to live his life as he saw it in spite of everything, to proclaim once more the falseness of the gospels under the cover of which greed and fear filled with more and yet more pain the already unbearable agony of human life. As — John Dos Passos

A spiritual teaching is a finger pointing toward Reality; it is not Reality itself. To be in a true and mature relationship with a spiritual teaching requires you to apply it, not simply believe in it. Belief leads to various forms of fundamentalism and shuts down the curiosity and inquiry that are essential to open the way for awakening and what lies beyond awakening. A good spiritual teaching is something that you work with and apply. In doing so, it works on you (often in a hidden way) and helps reveal to you the Truth (and falseness) that lies within you. — Adyashanti

You really believe that there are subjects that shouldn't be photographed?' George said. He spoke evenly and softly.
'Maybe I do,' I said, thinking aloud.
'You believe in censorship then,' said Stephen.
I looked up at Stephen. His face was tight, combative. 'Not censorship,' I said slowly. 'That's external. I mean control from the inside. After all, pictures can lie, too, can convey falseness rather than truth. — Siri Hustvedt

My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not in the future, not in the past, not for all eternity. Not only to endure what is necessary, still less to conceal it - all idealism is falseness in the face of necessity - , but to love it ... — Friedrich Nietzsche

That's what a book is: a failed attempt that, its failure notwithstanding, is sincere and hard-worked and expunged of as much falseness as he could manage, given his limited abilities, and has thus been imbued with a sort of purity. — George Saunders

You are in my very soul, tormenting me, Anakin went on, not a bit of falseness in his tone. — R.A. Salvatore

Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

No man, or woman, was ever cured of love by discovering the falseness of his or her lover. The living together for three long, rainy days in the country has done more to dispel love than all the perfidies in love that have ever been committed. — Arthur Helps

Try to avoid falseness and strain. Write what you really know about. Make it new. Don't invent melodrama for the sake of it. Don't try to run, let alone fly, before you can walk with ease. — A.S. Byatt

The falseness of your own hearts, if you look not to them, may undo you(15). — Richard Baxter

To know the will of God is the highest of all wisdom. Living in the center of God's will rules out all falseness of religion and puts the stamp of true sincerity upon our service to God. — Billy Graham

The truth now.He was disappointed in human beings.He had seen too many betrayals,too many pitiful weaknesses,too much greed for money and fame.The falseness between lovers,husbands and wifes,fathers,sons,mothers,daughters — Mario Puzo

I was just burnt out. I didn't like the music business and I didn't like me. There's an element of falseness about the whole thing. Even things like doing an interview. It's not as though we just met in the pub and are having a chat - it's part of a process. If you do it all day, every day for years, you end up thinking: 'Who the hell am I?' I was lucky enough to make some money, enough to let me kick back. It was a great experience and it was nice to have a couple of No.1s but the best thing about it was that the money I made allowed me to have freedom and choice in my life. — Rick Astley

Falseness in life is the secret that makes man's inner self a rare truth; it hides from him although it's obvious to all. — Naguib Mahfouz