Perfidious Quotes & Sayings

I go to bed, and I wait for sleep as a man might wait for the executioner. I wait for its coming with dread, and my heart beats and my legs tremble, while my whole body shivers beneath the warmth of the bedclothes, until the moment when I suddenly fall asleep, as a man throws himself into a pool of stagnant water in order to drown. I do not feel this perfidious sleep coming over me as I used to, but a sleep which is close to me and watching me, which is going to seize me by the head, to close my eyes and annihilate me. — Guy De Maupassant

The point I am trying to make is that words are a mysterious, ambiguous, ambivalent, and perfidious phenomenon. They can be rays of light in a realm of darkness ... They can equally be lethal arrows. Worst of all, at times they can be one or the other. They can even be both at once! — Vaclav Havel

One must never be perfidious to his master. In the Lun Yu it says: One should act according to the way even in times of haste. One should act according to the way even in times of danger. It says further: 'When one is serving his master, he should exert himself.' — Takeda Nobushige

There is nothing more shameful than perfidious friendship. — Marcus Aurelius

The perfidious, savage, disdainful, stupid, slothful, inhospitable, stupid English. — Julius Caesar Scaliger

Liberty has not only enemies which it conquers, but perfidious friends, who rob the fruits of its victories: Absolute democracy, socialism. — Lord Acton

[Gambling] is a perfidious passion ... It is bad for one to win, and bad not to win ... it ends by setting your blood on fire, and to increase your chances of winning at any cost, your stakes increase frightfully; the desire of winning gets to be a madness. The soul gets sick; it neither sees nor hears anything. No family ties, position, nor fortune, can stand against this passion. — Matilde Serao

What do you mean, is that it? I just saved his career and the CIA from ruin and he calls me a perfidious ass."
"What's perfidious mean?" Ace asked from the driver's seat.
"You deceived him and stole his girlfriend out from under his nose," Julia said to Conrad. "I think technically 'ass' is a pretty mild revilement."
"Revilement?" Ace looked at one and then the other in his rearview. "This is some kind of spy talk, isn't it? Okay, I'm down with it. Just tell me what it means. — Misty Evans

In these meetings of all sorts, every counsel, in proportion as it is daring and violent and perfidious, is taken for the mark of superior genius. Humanity and compassion are ridiculed as the fruits of superstition and ignorance. Tenderness to individuals is considered as treason to the public. — Edmund Burke

No tye can oblige the perfidious.
[No tie can oblige the perfidious.] — George Herbert

John XXI was a very great pope and he's the one who actually corrected the liturgy. He did so because of his friend Jules Isaac, a French Jewish historian who was a friend of John Paul, of John 23rd, and he convinced him and he changed the liturgy, no more Jew, the perfidious Jew and so forth and now, and don't speak any more of the Jews killing Christ. Things have changed. — Elie Wiesel

They [twin beds] are the most stupid, the most perfidious, and the most dangerous invention in the world. Shame and a curse on who thought of them. — Honore De Balzac

It had been nice to be so sure of myself. Now that I didn't have that compass anymore, I'd never felt so lost. I dropped onto the red love seat and hated myself for a good long time. Here are some adjectives I aimed at myself: Self-righteous. Judgmental. Perfidious. Smug. The kind of person who's convinced the world would be a better place if everybody else would just shut up and listen. I — Julia Claiborne Johnson

And would not her fastidious litheness take away the heavy taste of the fleshy girls in the Citrus Inn? McGee, the Perfidious. — John D. MacDonald

In general, one must have value oneself in order freely and willingly to acknowledge value in another. This is the basis for the requirement that modesty accompany all merits, as well as the disproportionately loud praise for this virtue which alone, among all its sisters, is always added to the praise of anyone distinguished in some way by the person who dares to praise him, so as to conciliate the worthless and silence their wrath. For what is modesty if not false humility which someone with merits and advantages in a world teeming with perfidious envy uses to beg the pardon of those who have none? Someone who does not lay claim to merit because he in fact has none is being honest, not modest. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Girls fantasize about being tied up and bent over a broad pair of knees. Girls dream of being dominated and worshipped. Girls adore dressing up, role play, changing roles. Yes, that's right, perfidious submissives are itchy to switch to the Domme and grab the whip handle. — Chloe Thurlow

Some of the streets are, however, genuinely narrow. These same streets may not be filled with machine-gun fire and the dramatic screech of violins, but they overflow with the invisible and innumerable longings of the human heart. Love continues to minister here, but betrayal still wears its perfidious face, hatred hollows out the weak man's breast, revenge pursues its self-defeating course; and the unfulfilled dreams of the multitude haunt the island like so many hungry ghosts. — John Dolan

In his very first encyclical Pius X had uttered a warning: ... We shall take the greatest care to see that the members of the clergy do not allow themselves to be taken in by the insidious maneuvers of a certain new science which dons the mask of truth and from which one does not discern the fragrance of Jesus Christ; it is a mendacious science which, using fallacious and perfidious arguments, tries to beat a path to the errors of rationalism and semi-rationalism, and against which the Apostle was already warning his beloved Timothy when he wrote: Guard the deposit, avoiding profane novelties in language as well as in the arguments of a knowledge falsely so-called, whose enthusiasts, with all their promises, have failed in the faith.19 — Anonymous

It was that fatal and perfidious bark, Built in th' eclipse, and rigg'd with curses dark. — John Milton

Unless the perfidious wolves have the temerity to disobey the High King's plans, we should meet Shalhassan's forces by the Latham in mid-wood with the wolves between us. If they aren't,' Diarmuid concluded, 'we blame anyone and everything except the plan. — Guy Gavriel Kay

In World War One it was the propaganda of our side that first made "propaganda" so opprobrious a term. Fouled by close association with "the Hun," the word did not regain its innocence - not even when the Allied propaganda used to tar "the Hun" had been belatedly exposed to the American and British people. Indeed, as they learned more and more about the outright lies, exaggerations and half-truths used on them by their own governments, both populations came, understandably, to see "propaganda" as a weapon even more perfidious than they had thought when they had not perceived themselves as its real target. Thus did the word's demonic implications only harden through the Twenties, in spite of certain random efforts to redeem it. — Edward L. Bernays

It was just past dawn, in the perfidious part of the day that implied anything was possible when, really, nothing was very likely. — T.C. Boyle

O world, why do you wish to persecute me? How do I offend you, when I intend only to fix beauty in my intellect, & never my intellect fix on beauty?
I do not set store by treasures or riches; & therefore it always brings me more joy only to fix riches in my intellect, & never my intellect fix on riches.
I do not set store by a lovely face that, vanquished, is civil plunder of the ages, & perfidious wealth has never pleased me,
for I deem it best, as one of my truths, to deplete the vanities of this life & never this life to deplete in vanities. — Juana Ines De La Cruz

It is better to discuss things, to argue and engage in polemics than make perfidious plans of mutual destruction. — Mikhail Gorbachev

All men are liars, inconstant, hollow, talkative, hypocrites, proud and cowards, contemptible and sensual; all woman are perfidious, artificial, vain, curious and depraved; the world is nothing but a bottomless sewer where the most shapeless seals crawl and wriggle on mountains of muck; but there one single thing in this world, saint and sublime, it's the union of these two beings so imperfect and dreadful. We are often deceived in love, often wounded and often miserable; but we love, and when we are on of the verge of the grave, we look back, and we say: I often suffered, I erred sometimes: but I loved. It is me who lived and not a factitious being created by my pride and my boredom. — Alfred De Musset

Yes, it does feel deceptively safer with two; but Thou is a slippery character. Every Thou I've known has had a way of going missing. They skip town or turn perfidious, or else the drop like flies and then where are you? — Margaret Atwood

There is no vice that doth so cover a man with shame as to be found false and perfidious. — Francis Bacon

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Misery and ignorance are always the cause of great evils. Misery is easily excited to anger, and ignorance soon yields to perfidious counsels. — Joseph Addison

To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse, 10 times as ignorant, 10 times as unfair and tyrannical, 10 times as complaisant and pusillanimous, and 10 times as devious, hypocritical, disingenuous, deceitful, pharisaical, Pecksniffian, fraudulent, slippery, unscrupulous, perfidious, lewd and dishonest. — H.L. Mencken

Good morning, dear lady," he said. "By Jove! what a picture of health and freshness you are!"

Miss Mapp cast one glance at her basket to see that the paper quite concealed that article of clothing which the perfidious laundry had found. (Probably the laundry knew where it was all the time, and--in a figurative sense, of course--was "trying it on".) — E.F. Benson

Jamie was real, alright, more real than anything had ever been to me, even Frank and my life in 1945. Jamie, tender lover and perfidious blackguard. — Diana Gabaldon

Her vice takes hold of her again, but she still refrains until some moment when, gnawed by some hideous caprice, she comes aground like a mournful wreck ruined by lust, in the midst of her own banal, perfidious pollution. — Jean Lorrain