Fictitious Quotes & Sayings

For indeed when painters themselves wish to represent sirens and satyrs [20] by means of especially bizarre forms, they surely cannot assign to them utterly new natures. Rather, they simply fuse together the members of various animals. Or if perhaps they concoct something so utterly novel that nothing like it has ever been seen before (and thus is something utterly fictitious and false), yet certainly at the very least the colors from which they fashion it ought to be true. And — Rene Descartes

We should seek to cooperate with Europe, not to divide Europe to a fictitious new and a fictitious old. — Zbigniew Brzezinski

I many times thought peace had come,
When peace was far away;
As wrecked men deem they sight the land
At centre of the sea,
And struggle slacker, but to prove,
As hopelessly as I,
How many the fictitious shores
Before the harbor lie. — Emily Dickinson

If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious. — E. M. Forster

Societies create their own history and tend to wipe out lowly beginnings, either by forgetting them or inventing totally fictitious heroic rescues. — Isaac

Spiritual: religion without any rules. All the comfort of fictitious friends with none of their demands. — Stefan Molyneux

Talent is to actors what luck is to card players. It's not really anything; it's just a fictitious word that people have created and labeled things. Talent is like, you know, I never really believed in talent, I believed in drive and determination and preparation, but talent is sort of like luck. — Shia Labeouf

Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it's hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention. Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it's true. — Javier Marias

Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter. — Charles Dickens

Travel is very useful and it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our own journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength. It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It's a novel, simply a fictitious narrative. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

O that the gods would bring to a miserable end such fictitious, crazy, deformed labours, with which the minds of the studious are blinded! — William Gilbert

For me, it's been liberating to put myself in the mind of a fictitious six year-old each day, and rediscover my own curiosity. I've been amazed at how one idea leads to others if I allow my mind to play and wander. — Bill Watterson

Non-Aristotelian logic deals with existencial/operacional probabilities. Aristotelian logic deals with certainties, and in the lack of certainties throughout most of life, Aristotelian logic subliminally programs us to ivent fictitious certainties.
That rush for fictitious certainties explains most of the Ideologies and damn near all Religions on the planet, I think. — Robert Anton Wilson

Prudence is not only the first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the standard of them all. Metaphysics cannot live without definition; but prudence is cautious how she defines. Our courts cannot be more fearful in suffering fictitious cases to be brought before them for eliciting their determination on a point of law, than prudent moralists are in putting extreme and hazardous cases of conscience upon emergencies not existing. — Edmund Burke

Many of our miseries are merely comparative: we are often made unhappy, not by the presence of any real evil, but by the absence of some fictitious good; of something which is not required by any real want of nature, which has not in itself any power of gratification, and which neither reason nor fancy would have prompted us to wish, did we not see it in the possession of others. — Samuel Johnson

The preponderance of pain over pleasure is the cause of our fictitious morality and religion. — Friedrich Nietzsche

For the folk-community does not exist on the fictitious value of money but on the results of productive labour, which is what gives money its value. — Adolf Hitler

He who prides himself on giving what he thinks the public wants is often creating a fictitious demand for low standards which he will then satisfy. — John Reith, 1st Baron Reith

But she was wrong; it was what gave her away; she had not taken into account that this fragmentary detail of the truth had sharp edges which could not be made to fit in, except to those contiguous fragments of the truth from which she had arbitrarily detached it, edges which, whatever the fictitious details in which she might embed it, would continue to shew, by their overlapping angles and by the gaps which she had forgotten to fill, that its proper place was elsewhere. — Marcel Proust

It is a curious fact that personal possessions take on fictitious values and exceptional charms when the owner, no matter how generous, is faced with giving them away or even selling them (which usually amounts to the same thing). — Marjorie Hillis

I love to design for women, it's really open and very free. I always think of my friends. I think of both fictitious characters, real people from the past and the present. I am not a woman, but I find women so beautiful and so fascinating. — Marc Jacobs

But this is not a world of free freights. One pays according to an iron schedule
for every strength the balanced weakness; for every high a corresponding low; for every fictitious god-like moment an equivalent time in reptilian slime. For every feat of telescoping long days and weeks of life into mad magnificent instants, one must pay with shortened life, and, oft-times,
with savage usury added. — Jack London

Sane and intelligent human beings are like all other human beings, and carefully and cautiously and diligently conceal their private real opinions from the world and give out fictitious ones in their stead for general consumption. — Mark Twain

If we, who live outside asylums, act as if we lived in a fictitious world- that is to say, if we are consistent with our beliefs- we cannot adjust ourselves to actual conditions, and so fall into many avoidable semantic difficulties. But the so-called normal person practically never abides by his beliefs, and when his beliefs are building for him a fictitious world, he saves his neck by not abiding by them. A so-called "insane" person acts upon his beliefs, and so cannot adjust himself to a world which is quite different from his fancy. — Alfred Korzybski

A first impression works like a magic mirror; it reflects what intrigues us rather than echoing a truthful picture. A first impression is the creating of an imagined character born from personal desires, perceptions, and biases. Though sparked by an introduction to a real, living, breathing individual, the person remains a mystery long after parting. It is a fictitious ghost masked with similar features that remains. A first impression is rarely accurate; therefore, it should never be trusted. — Richelle E. Goodrich

I came to understand that the perception that freedom is decadence is a fictitious one. Freedom is a good that is preserved and defended because it places individual responsibility at the heart of society. — Omar Saif Ghobash

Democracy cannot consist solely of elections that are nearly always fictitious and managed by rich landowners and professional politicians. — Che Guevara

Still, in this book, we will treat the chakras as if they are actual components of a subtle body, even as we leave the overarching question of their existential status (physical? psychical? imaginal? fictitious?) unanswered. This agnostic approach means that you don't actually have to believe in the literal reality of chakras to get something out of this book and start working with the chakra system. If — Tai Morello

The fictitious kleptomaniac's only crime was stealing imaginations — Dean Cavanagh

I wrote a novel called 'Blonde,' which is about Norma Jean Baker, who becomes Marilyn Monroe, which I called a fictitious biography. That uses the material as if it were myth - that Marilyn Monroe is like this mythical figure in our culture. — Joyce Carol Oates

This 'flying saucer' situation is not at all imaginary or seeing too much in some natural phenomena. Something is really flying around. The phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious. — Nathan Farragut Twining

Strange it is, but unforgettable moments are often connected with very small happenings, happenings that assume fictitious proportions, especially when we are children. — Radclyffe Hall

Whatever happens in the world is real, what one thinks should have happened is projection. We suffer more from our fictitious illusion and expectations of reality. — Jacque Fresco

I think any time you've got a story based on a true story, no matter how accurate it is, obviously it's still fictitious. — John Lee Hancock

I should be extremely sorry to find that in a fictitious proceeding, instituted for the more easy attaining of justice, different rules were to obtain in the different Courts. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Have you ever been married? Had that thing of someone calling you by a name not your own? It's unsettling. It's like a fictitious person. — Stacy Schiff

The power of fictitious writing, for good as well as for evil, is a thing which ought most seriously to be reflected upon. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

I do not scruple to employ mendacity and a fictitious appearance of female incompetence when the occasion demands it. — Elizabeth Peters

The world of human aspiration is largely fictitious and if we do not understand this we understand nothing about man. — Ernest Becker

Gohar smiled at the thought of El Kordi, at his exaggeration of his troubles, more fictitious than real, and his constant search for human dignity. "What is most futile in man," he thought, "is this search for dignity." All these people trying to maintain their dignity! For what? The history of mankind is a long, bloody nightmare only because of such nonsense. — Albert Cossery

(Prayer is) a fictitious consolation invented by those who have everything in order to keep those who have nothing contented. I belong to the bourgeoisie and I know the only reason my class bothers to show the lower classes that distant paradise full of ineffable pleasures that will one day be theirs is to divert attention from their own bulging coffers and from the abundance of their harvests. — Eca De Queiros

One must know oneself as one is, not as one wishes to be, which is merely an ideal and therefore fictitious, unreal; it is only that which is that can be transformed, not that which you wish to be. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

If a stranger is writing something completely fictitious, or insulting me on a blog or a tabloid, I don't take it personally. — Dasha Zhukova

It's the opening of Manderlay in Cannes, and I'm sitting next to this guy who's writing for a tiny fictitious French paper called On the Sunny Side, and he's writing a review on the film, and he's obviously bored. Then he tells me about all the cars he owns, and how rich he is, and all these things. So, at a certain point, he says, "So what do you do?" Then I take out this very strange hammer we have in the Danish building business, and I say, "I kill." And then I kill him. It is as stupid as it sounds. — Lars Von Trier

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong. — Russell Baker

In U.S. history, war has served as an important diversionary tactic, causing the people at large to shift their attention away from the state's own criminality and toward real or fictitious devils abroad. Wars have therefore proved to be extremely useful in propping up the political class and preserving it from the public resistance and rebellion that might otherwise have arisen. — Robert Higgs

The economy which prefers fictitious money to real, is, at best, like that which prefers a leaky ship to a sound one. — Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Everyone takes pause at 40. It's the age you have to assess everything in your life. It's the fictitious marker that's always coming up when you're young. The world really does look at you to kind of have it together by 40, and be successful by 40. Whatever success means. — Paul Feig

She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world. — Kate Chopin

Many a real genius is lost in the fictitious character of the Gentleman. I am the most inconsistent, changeable being so full of fits and starts. — Thomas Gainsborough

It is a terrible situation when the Government, to insure the National Wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charges, at the hands of men, who control the fictitious value of gold. Interest is the invention of Satan. — Thomas A. Edison

The identity that we ascribe to things is only a fictitious one, established by the mind, not a peculiar nature belonging to what we're talking about. — David Hume

The fictitious worlds created for kids are nearly bereft of female presence. It's sending a very clear message from the beginning that women and girls do not have half of the adventures, that they're not as important. We're teaching kids that girls and women don't take up half the space in the world. — Geena Davis

Those who set up a fictitious worship, merely worship and adore their own delirious fancies; indeed, they would never dare so to trifle with God, had they not previously fashioned him after their own childish conceits. — John Calvin

Characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any apparent similarity to real persons is not intended by the author and is either a coincidence or — David Foster Wallace

Having to think so much about fictitious relationships that work or don't work, and with each relationship between characters managing to do one or other of those in its own peculiar way, I spend a lot of time thinking about relationships, real and imagined. — Nick Earls

The events inspired characters that truly existed, as well as fictitious people I had to invent. Sometimes the harsh reality was too much, too absurd. This was the case with the story of the cat who roamed from one trench to another and in the film ended up being imprisoned. In reality, the tom cat was accused of spying and was arrested by the French army, and then shot according to regulations. — Christian Carion

The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths. — Gilbert Murray

It is already apparent that the 'minimalist' view of the Bible as wholly fictitious and unhooked from historical reality, may be as much of a mistake as the biblical literalism it sought to supersede. — Simon Schama

Who were my fictitious witches and what did they mean? Never ask that of yourself while writing. It may stop you cold. Just trust that if you believe in your characters, others will too. ... Whenever I thought too critically about my work, I couldn't write. — Erica Jong

I've never written a fiction before about real people ... I read everything that I could find by people who met them and tried to get some impression of them, but as always when you write fiction, even if you have completely fictitious characters, you start by thinking of what is plausible, what would they say, what would they be likely to do, what would they be likely to think. At some point, if it is every going to come to life, the characters seem to take over and start speaking themselves, and it happened with [COPENHAGEN]. — Michael Frayn

If others think I am nuts, naive, gullible, and not living in the real world, that's all right, too... I'll gladly stay in what some have called my fictitious world, my happy and peaceful world, a world full of signs of hope. — Ward Foley

I have wrangles with Facebook, entered fictitious trips because I can't get the map to get off my page, don't want people to know where I live. It is possible to carve out a space that's your own. — Nick Harkaway

Fiction with its big question of 'what if?' is one of the most powerful forces in the world. Once upon a time, the ability to light a fire was fictitious. — Travis Langley

I was so enthused with literature -- not stuck on literature, but in love with letters -- that I was easily inclined to bring all the conversations round to works I had read or fictitious characters from my readings about whom I loved to talk — Joseph Zobel

Liar! I know that you humans build your life in lies. It starts with your mortal lords and their fabricated gods. They use fictitious stories to impregnate the minds of people, and like herds of sheep they do as their told. With manipulation alone is enough to secure their reign. After all, is it not in your nature to be wanted and purposeful? It is such an easy game to play. I have observed this falsehood accepted by fathers and mothers over and over again. The idiocy becomes one with their children, and they become the infrastructure that not only sedates but corrodes the soul with instructed conformity. In the end, lies are all that you are. — H.S. Crow

Each day I feel a little differently; some times I try to write something that's fictitious and then there's other times where I try to write something that's true. — Josh Turner

I am, as it were, the created creating - a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, constructing a fictitious autobiography for myself in these pages. — Sol Luckman

At the time, the question of woman's emancipation was of great interest to reformers. For the nihilist the issues were regarding work and sexual freedom. Because a woman's passport (which was used for general travel and not just travel abroad) was legally controlled by men - a father, or husband, had ultimate control of a woman's life. The nihilists solved this problem by having 'fictitious' marriages. This allowed for an emancipation of women de jure if not de facto. This resulted in women having the freedom of mobility to pursue some academic pursuits (which were curtailed during the White Terror) and some enterprise. Finally, the nihilists adopted the credo that adultery was a natural, and even desirable trait, in contrast to the spirit of their time, or their own cultural composition (i.e. they were prudes). — Anonymous

None but the most blindly credulous will imaging the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits. — Edmund Crispin

Politeness is fictitious benevolence. Depend upon it, the want of it never fails to produce something disagreeable to one or other. — Samuel Johnson

In short, our gentleman became so immersed in his reading that he spent whole nights from sundown to sunup and his days from dawn to dusk in poring over his books, until, finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind. He filled his imagination with everything he had read, with enchantments, knightly encounters, battles, challenges, wounds, with tales of love and its torments, and all sorts of impossible things, and as a result had come to believe that all these fictitious happenings were true; they were more real to him than anything else in the world. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Travel is useful, it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.
It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It's a novel, just a fictitious narrative. Littre says so and he's never wrong.
And besides, in the first place, anyone can do as much. You just have to close your eyes.
It's on the other side of life. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Poetry is perhaps what teaches us to nurture the charming illusion: how to be reborn out of ourselves over and over again, and use words to construct a better world, a fictitious world that enables us to sign a pact for a permanent and comprehensive peace ... with life. — Mahmoud Darwish

By itself, the Holographic Principle was not enough to win the Black Hole War. It was too imprecise, and it lacked a firm mathematical foundation. The reaction to it was skepticism: The universe a hologram? Sounds like science fiction. The fictitious future physicist Steve passing to the "other side" while the emperor and the count watch him being immolated? Sounds like spiritualism. — Leonard Susskind

There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are double, make-believe streets. One's imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which the streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible inventiveness of the night. — Bruno Schulz

Better and happier those who, recognizing that everything is fictitious, write the novel before someone writes it for them and, like Machiavelli, don courtly garments to write in secret. — Fernando Pessoa

But certain favourite roles are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten. — Marcel Proust

I remember a time where Trolls were a fictitious monster from fairy tales, not arseholes on the internet looking for attention. — Robert O'Sullivan

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real. — George Bernard Shaw

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow. — Colleen McCullough

The much-vaunted sex appeal of American women is drawn from films, reviews and pin-ups, and is in large print fictitious. A recent medical survey in the United States showed that 75% of young American women are without strong sexual feeling and instead of satisfying their libido they seek pleasure narcissistically in exhibitionism, vanity, and the cult of fitness and health in a sterile sense. — Julius Evola

Bodies are real entities. Surfaces and lines are but fictitious entities. A surface without depth, a line without thickness, was never seen by any man; no; nor can any conception be seriously formed of its existence. — Jeremy Bentham

In fact, she was rapidly coming to suspect her fictitious image was just that, and it didn't quite fit with the real Sebastian Fairfax at all. — Emma Bennet

WHEN I was five years old my parents all of a sudden produced a baby boy, which my mother said was what I had always wanted. Where she got this idea I did not know. She did quite a bit of elaborating on it, all fictitious but hard to counter. — Alice Munro

The phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious. There are objects approximating the shape of a disc, some of which appear flat on bottom and domed on top. These objects are as large as man-made aircraft and have a metallic or light-reflecting surface. Further they exhibit extreme rates of climb and maneuverability with no associated sound and take action which must be considered evasive when contacted by aircraft and radar. — Nathan Farragut Twining

The statement I wanted to make was that it makes no sense to put these real-life women into one limited template, so why then are we doing it to our fictitious heroines? — David Trumble

As an actor, I'm limited to re-in acting someone else's vision or portraying a fictitious character. — Denzel Whitaker

The social prestige of wine at table and at the club must be destroyed through lofty example and polite ridicule; forces which are not always available, and for whose successful operation much time will be required. But the outstanding fact remains, that the world has come to regard liquor in a new and clearer light. Our next generation of poets will contain but few Anacreons, for the thinking element of mankind has robbed the flowing bowl of its fancied virtues and fictitious beauties. The grape, so long permitted to masquerade as the inspirer of wit and art, is now revealed as the mother of ruin and death. The wolf at last stands divested of its sheep's clothing. — H.P. Lovecraft

Right and wrong are superstitions; your desires, however, are real. Those who cannot achieve their desires, or who despair of doing so, often compensate by constructing imaginary frameworks. For example, if you wish to live in a world in which no one exploits animals, it is moralism to judge those who eat meat immoral instead of setting about disabling the animal exploitation industry. People retreat into moralism as a sort of consolation prize, for it is easier to rule in the realm of good and evil, fictitious as it may be, than to come to terms with our limited leverage upon this world and yet persist in endeavoring to change it. — CrimethInc.

The banks themselves were doing business on capitals three-fourths of which were fictitious. This fictitious capital ... is now to be lost, and to fall on somebody; it must take on those who have property to meet it, and probably on the less cautious part, who, not aware of the impending catastrophe, have suffered themselves to contract, or to be in debt, and must now sacrifice their property of a value many times the amount of the debt. We have been truly sowing the wind, and are now reaping the whirlwind. — Thomas Jefferson

The characters and action in this story are purely fictitious. Should the description of certain journalistic practices result in a resemblance to the practices of Bild-Zeitung, such resemblance is neither intentional, nor fortuitous, but unavoidable. — Heinrich Boll

The times might be unpleasant, repulsive.
The ghastly chaos, the abhorrent uncivility might be intolerable, might force us into argument or leave us panic-stricken.
On such occasions people build within themselves a conviction, that the world outside is diabolical.
The whimsical insults test our level of endurance causing us to plead for mercy, wanting us to be pitied than exploited and victimized.
Often this grief and shame form a delusion within us that there no longer exists good in this world, that good people are fictitious and that goodness has lost its definition altogether.
But such is not true because there are still people who are virtuous, unselfish, willing to help and possessing the ability of restoring our faith in humanity, to disregard them, their presence would be as heinous as the deeds of the people who are unlike them.
The times might be unpleasant, repulsive but we'll come out it, unharmed and liberated. — Chirag Tulsiani

The pressure to reduce health care costs is aimed only at the treatment of real diseases. There is no pressure to reduce the costs of treating fictitious diseases. On the contrary, there is pressure to define ever more types of undesirable behaviors as mental disorders or addictions and to spend ever more tax dollars on developing new psychiatric diagnoses and facilities for storing and treating the victims of such diseases, whose members now include alcoholics, drug abusers, smokers, overeaters, self-starvers, gamblers, etc. — Thomas Szasz

A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation [ ... ] He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribed in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. — Michel Foucault

I was lingering out on the pavement. There was a missing person inside of myself and I needed to find him ... I felt done for, an empty burned-out wreck ... Wherever I am, I'm a '60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows. — Bob Dylan

We like nonfiction, and we live in fictitious times, — Michael Moore

Credit expansion can bring about a temporary boom. But such a fictitious prosperity must end in a general depression of trade, a slump. — Ludwig Von Mises

Mea culpa, mea culpa. MIT and Wharton and University of Chicago created the financial engineering instruments, which, like Samson and Delilah, blinded every CEO. They didn't realize the kind of leverage they were doing and they didn't understand when they were really creating a real profit or a fictitious one. — Paul Samuelson

A father acts on behalf of his children by working, providing, intervening, struggling, and suffering for them. In so doing, he really stands in their place. He is not an isolated individual, but incorporates the selves of several people in his own self. Every attempt to live as if he were alone is a denial of the fact that he is actually responsible. He cannot escape the responsibility, which is his because he is a father. This reality refutes the fictitious notion that the isolated individual is the agent of all ethical behavior. It is not the isolated individual but the responsible person who is the proper agent to be considered in ethical reflection. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer