Life Pretence Quotes & Sayings

What the poet does is as ordinary and mysterious as digesting. I question. I break life down. I impose chaos on order. For instance, we think we know how food is ingested, digested, divided into energy and excrement. The neat theory, however, is one thing; control of the process is another; consciousness of the process yet another. Are we aware of protein in the stomach being acted on by pepsin, the appropriate enzyme? Digestion, thinking and breathing are all functions we perform without knowing how we perform them. The body is a dark continent. The mind is another. So I can say very little about what I do. I accept nothing as read. I attack the pretence that we know how things work, whether they happen to be the action of saliva or sexual love from adolescence to old age. — Craig Raine

I do not believe that the tendency is to make men and women brave and glorious when you tell them that there are certain ideas upon certain subjects that they must never express; that they must go through life with a pretence as a shield; that their neighbors will think much more of them if they will only keep still; and that above all is a God who despises one who honestly expresses what he believes. — Robert Green Ingersoll

JAY: Why is a story more upfront than life?
LENORE: It just seems more honest, somehow.
JAY: Honest meaning closer to the truth?
LENORE: I smell trap.
JAY: I smell breakthrough. The truth is that there's no difference between a life and a story? But a life pretends to be something more? But it really isn't more?
LENORE: I would kill for a shower. — David Foster Wallace

I love the idea of spies in love. How would it work between two people who were so programmed to lie and be suspicious, who have a whole life based on pretence? — Tony Gilroy

I don't make any pretence of knowing about the existence of a Supreme Entity, neither do I make any attempt to create any friction among religions. If anything, I have spared myself no pains in my endeavor to smoothen the ongoing friction among all religions of the world. — Abhijit Naskar

If you are bent on assuming a pose and never reveal yourself to anyone frankly, in the fashion of many who live a false life that is all made up for show; for it is torturous to be constantly watching oneself and be fearful of being caught out of our usual role. And we are never free from concern if we think that every time anyone looks at us he is always taking-our measure; for many things happen that strip off our pretence against our will, and, though all this attention to self is successful, yet the life of those who live under a mask cannot be happy and without anxiety. — Seneca The Younger

The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Life is an act and we are all actors in the arena of life. We all do act each day from dawn to dusk. Some act well but some act to cover their acts — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

In spite of all the value which may belong to the true, the positive, and the unselfish, it might be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life generally should be assigned to pretence, to the will to delusion, to selfishness, and cupidity. It might even be possible that WHAT constitutes the value of those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil and apparently opposed things - perhaps even in being essentially identical with them. — Friedrich Nietzsche

No imagination has yet been great enough to invent improvements to the truth. Truth, however terrible, carried within itself its own strange comfort for the misery it is so often compelled to inflict on behalf of life. Sooner or later it is not pretence but the truth which gives back with both hands what it has taken away with one. Indeed, unaided and alone it will pick up the fragments of the reality it has shattered and piece them together again in the shape of more immediate meaning than the one in which they had been previously contained. — Laurens Van Der Post

Friends make pretence of following to the grave but before one is in it, their minds are turned and making the best of their way back to life and living people and things they understand. — Robert Frost

Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretence. — Marcus Aurelius

And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is woman's whole existence. And if we look for a moment at Orlando writing at her table, we must admit that never was there a woman more fitted for that calling. Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper (and as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation for Sunday dusk and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will whistle under the window
all of which is, of course, the very stuff of life and the only possible subject for fiction. — Virginia Woolf

Life is for those that deserve it. Those kings amongst men who can climb out of barrels and will dare to break through glass walls and to transcend all of this whatever it is, these eyes to the ground, this pretence, acting only as is expected and never as is intended. We have been told what is acceptable in what situation and so we take heed. This is not living. In the real world, in nature, there is no need to pretend. There is no place for it. — Oli Anderson

The biggest hindrance in life is to live for other people and crave for their approval. This kind of behaviour diminishes your God given purpose and it leads you to live a barren life. Free yourself from the prison of pretence and live a purposeful lifestyle. — Euginia Herlihy

I have always disliked shrouding ... especially feelings and emotions. I discovered quite later in life that truth and transparency are expected but exploited and disliked. — Balroop Singh

Tom hunts alone. While shunned by all he sees, he grows aware that, in reality, life is lived alone. When with a hen, there's only an illusion of sharing; a pretence that life's trials are easier to endure. Even sleep is a barrier that can't be shared. — Peter Gray

It was not so much fun. His work became confused with Nicole's problems; in addition, her income had increased so fast of late that it seemed to belittle his work. Also, for the purpose of her cure, he had for many years pretended to a rigid domesticity from which he was drifting away, and the pretence became more arduous in this effortless immobility, in which he was inevitably subjected to microscopic examination. When Dick could no longer play what he wanted to play on the piano, it was an indication that life was bring refined down to a point. He stayed in the big room a long time, listening to the buzz of the electric clock, listening to time. — F Scott Fitzgerald

In our society (that is, advanced western society) we have lost even the pretence of a common culture. Persons educated with the greatest intensity we know can no longer communicate with each other on the plane of their major intellectual concern. This is serious for our creative, intellectual and, above all, normal life. It is leading us to interpret the past wrongly, to misjudge the "present, and to deny our hopes of the future. It is making it difficult or impossible for us to take good action. — C.P. Snow

We feel that, for the honour of God (and also, though we do not say this, for the sake of our own reputation as spiritual Christians), it is necessary for us to claim that we are, so to speak, already in the signal-box, here and now enjoying the inside information as to the why and wherefore of God's doings. This comforting pretence becomes part of us: we feel sure that God has enabled us to understand all His ways with us and our circle thus far, and we take if for granted that we shall be able to see at once the reason for anything that may happen to us in the future. And then something very painful and quite inexplicable comes along, and our cheerful illusion of being in God's secret councils is shattered. Our pride is wounded; we feel that God has slighted us; and unless at this point we repent, and humble ourselves very thoroughly for our former presumption, our whole subsequent spriritual life may be blighted. — J.I. Packer

The View from Europe And that was Africa: the long line to the south little higher than the Atlantic that defined it. The sea rolled its drums on the shore, broke in white foam, flowers for the hair of the girls. I sipped the wind with my nostrils, and the smell was the smell of fear. Two million- year-old skulls surfaced from soil fathoms, grinning their disdain at the accuracy of the new weapons. And that was Eden indeed: Adam was black and the woman, Eve, was black; and the serpent, master of the click languages, spoke to them sibilantly of how the machine would sound as it waited under the tree of death, offering them nothing but a pretence of life. 1988 — R.S. Thomas