Quotes & Sayings About Pretense

War does not only kill soldiers and warriors. It also kills rules and moral values. No! Those cannot be killed. War kills the pretense at rules and moral values. It also kills the pretense of being human beings... — Sweety Shinde

It came to him then, permeated his disjointed thoughts. Billie was teaching him - him - how to make love. With a jolt of surprise at the crashing irony, Adrian realized he hadn't known how until now. He, the consummate lover, so renown for his sexual skill, so proficient and controlled and practiced, had only played at making love, where Billie ... God. Clearly, it was all she knew. Pretense just wasn't in her spectrum of capabilities. — Shelby Reed

You adulterate the truth as you write. There isn't any pretense that you try to arrive at the literal truth. And the only consolation when you confess to this flaw is that you are seeking to arrive at poetic truth, which can be reached only through fabrication, imagination, stylization. What I'm striving for is authenticity; none of it is real. — W.G. Sebald

Comics, at least in periodical form, exist almost entirely free of any pretense; the critical world of art hardly touches them, and they're 100% personal. — Chris Ware

One may wonder indeed whether the pretense of superior health is not itself rapidly becoming a mental aberration. — Rene Dubos

A vast unfocused rage rose in her, against men who considered displays of emotion a delicious open door; men who ogled your breasts under the pretense of scanning the wine shelves; men for whom your mere physical presence constituted a lubricious invitation. Her — Robert Galbraith

In my work, I present questions and concerns. [It's] the opportunity to put a system of antibodies into circulation, without any pretense of making the world a better place, but to start a conversation with the world. — Paolo Pellegrin

I don't damsel well. Distress, I can do. Damseling? Not so much. — James Patterson

Every noble impulse, every unselfish expression of love; every brave suffering for the right; every surrender of self to something higher than self; every loyalty to an ideal; every unselfish devotion to principle; every helpfulness to humanity; every act of self-control; every fine courage of the soul, undefeated by pretense or policy, but by being, doing, and living of good for the very good's sake - that is spirituality. — David O. McKay

People pretend to be other people because they have never thought of their true selves — Sunday Adelaja

The really destructive feature of their relationship is its inherent quality of boredom. It is quite natural for Peter often to feel bored with Otto - they have scarecely a single interest in common - but Peter, for sentimental reasons, will never admit that this is so. When Otto, who has no such motives for pretending, says, "It's so dull here!" I invariably see Peter wince and looked pained. Yet Otto is actually far less often bored than Peter himself; he finds Peter's company genuinely amusing, and is quite glad to be with him most of the day. Often, when Otto has been chattering rubbish for an hour without stopping, I can see that Peter really longs for him to be quiet and go away. But to admit this would be, in Peter's eyes, a total defeat, so he only laughs and rubs his hands, tacitly appealing to me to support him in his pretense of finding Otto inexhaustibly delightful and funny. — Christopher Isherwood

I despise and abhor the pleas on behalf of that infamous practice, vivisection ... I would rather submit to the worst of deaths, so far as pain goes, than have a single dog or cat tortured to death on the pretense of sparing me a twinge or two. — Robert Browning

Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense. — Tennessee Williams

Piety is the tinfoil of pretense. — Elbert Hubbard

Mass madness, if it's going to last more than a week or two, requires mass media or mass government or the synergistic efforts of both. It isn't just that the pretense that a man can marry a man will put religious believers at a disadvantage. It's that it must set that ordinary tribeswoman in its sights, regardless of her religion. It's not just her faith she must renounce. She must renounce her common sense. She must not be allowed even to think that the pretense is insane. She must be re-educated to believe that two fingers are three fingers, or that the sun rises in the west, or that the child in her womb is really a rock, or that excrement is nutritious, or anything else that no sensible person would ever come to discover on her own. — Anthony M. Esolen

The insolent civility of a proud man is, if possible, more shocking than his rudeness could be; because he shows you, by his manner, that he thinks it mere condescension in him; and that his goodness alone bestows upon you what you have no pretense to claim. — Lord Chesterfield

You must not under any pretense allow your mind to dwell on any thought that is not positive, constructive, optimistic, kind. — Emmet Fox

The ultimate self-effacement
is not the pretense of the minimal,
but the jocular considerations of the maximal
in the manner of Wallace Stevens. — Mark Strand

After we passed a few more houses, the street ceased to mantain any pretense of urbanity, like a man returning to his little village who, piece by piece, strips off his Sunday best, slowly changing back into a peasant as he gets closer to his home. — Bruno Schulz

If one is bewildered and unhappy, why not show it, and why will not people explain and comfort? But instead - this pretense at calm satisfaction, where underneath there is all the seething restless desire to be off, away from all this anger at self and others, to where there are other conventions, other thoughts, other passions. — Ruth Franklin

[E]verywhere I'm looking at kids, adults mostly don't seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don't want to actually play with them, they'd rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there's a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn't even hear. — Emma Donoghue

So much of my life has been about self-effacement, pretense, masquerading, concealment, and indirection. — Marlon Riggs

Of the world and drudgery of business , seeks a pretense of reason to give itself a full and uncontrolled indulgence. — David Hume

I became good at pretending. I became so good that after a while the lines blurred between my truth and fiction. And sometimes, when I did a really good job of pretending, I even fooled myself. — Ruta Sepetys

Let me think
Thinking is all I have
If wisdom is a pretense
Then let me pretend to be wise — Walter Dean Myers

Now hell and heaven grapple on our backs and all our old pretense is ripped away. Aye, and God's icy wind will blow. — Arthur Miller

Let's live a lie for today.
You'll spin tales
and pretend to love me.
And I'll smile; you'll not realize it's fake
Then I'll pretend
your pretensions don't cause me pain. — Sreesha Divakaran

You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life
a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real. — Thomas Bernhard

No pretense stop wasting my time. A virtuous woman is really hard to find. — Buju Banton

I was utterly convinced that an intellectual could never be anything but an intellectual, was simply not capable of being anything else, that his intellectuality would, sooner or later, erode his faith or erode whatever he'd masked it with ... For example, intellectuals like to dress themselves up as peasants ... but it never works. The intellectual's constitution is impervious to such things - it permits only one object of worship - oneself. Generally speaking, an intellectual in the contemporary version is an exceptionally resourceful and, essentially, pitiful being. — Leonid Borodin

Children can then quickly discover that there is such a thing called truth; that they are not living in a chaotic world that is hypocritical, filled with only lies and pretense. Parents who admit to their children that they have been unjustly angry and ask for forgiveness are naming something: they are admitting that they are not perfect. Words and life can come together: the word can indeed become flesh. — Jean Vanier

There was a lot of pretense floating around; not just with aunties and all that but with emotions and how people saw you. They had a point. There's a lot to learn from that generation
the stoic approach. I think it's disgusting how they've been forgotten about in this way. It's the American hippies' fault, they saw an in there, a way of making money out of bad moods. That's all it is most of the time. You can't expect to feel cock-a-hoop every minute of every day. My mam and dad's generation understood this. They were just thankful the bombs had stopped threatening their lives. They just wanted to get on with living. — Mark E. Smith

One of the easiest forms of pretense to break down is the pretense of enthusiasm for exotic foods. Just bring on the exotic foods. — Robert Benchley

A small town is automatically a world of pretense. Since everyone knows everyone else's business, it becomes the job of the populace to act as if they don't know what is going on instead of its being their job to try to find out. — Jeanine Basinger

What is leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason — Robert Harris

The best way of successfully acting a part is to be it. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Damoclean, but these were people without pretense or affectation, — John Cheever

The insight that peace is the end of war, and that therefore a war is the preparation for peace, is at least as old as Aristotle, and the pretense that the aim of an armament race is to guard the peace is even older, namely as old as the discovery of propaganda lies. — Hannah Arendt

Of course not! I knew you would protect me. You swore that you were strong enough to protect Vivienne, didn't you? How can you promise to protect my sister, but not trust yourself to keep me safe?"
The music swelled to a crescendo. Although Adrian kept her imprisoned against the muscular length of his body, he gave up all pretense of dancing. "Because I don't lose my wits every time Vivienne walks into a room. I don't toss and turn in my bed every night dreaming of making love to her. She doesn't drive me to distraction with her endless questions, her incessant snooping, her harebrained schemes." His voice rose. "I can trust myself to protect your sister because I'm not in love with her! — Teresa Medeiros

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending. — Colson Whitehead

Relieved of moral pretense and stripped of folk costumes, the raw masculinity that all men know in their gut has to do with being good at being a man within a small, embattled gang of men struggling to survive. — Jack Donovan

The management system which makes only a pretense of valuing employee involvement and encouraging employee empowerment merely breeds cynicism. — George E.P. Box

There's a difference between playing and playing games. The former is an act of joy, the latter - an act. — Vera Nazarian

Too, if you're a true contemplative, your life and words will overflow with spiritual wisdom, compassion, and fruitful insight, because you're sure to measure out what you say carefully and calmly, eschewing lies and speaking without the shrill pretense of hypocrites. — Anonymous

By the by, who ever knew a man who never read or wrote neither who hadn't got some small back parlour which he would call a study! — Charles Dickens

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it, 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy. — Abraham Lincoln

The chief danger of adopting a credible pose of irrationality is that to succeed in the pretense you have to be very good. After a while, you get used to it. It becomes pretense no longer. — Carl Sagan

I know you don't think that any tongue I speak is mine; it must be rented. I am always denial, or pretense. A child born mid-flight has no nation. I can pull on either culture, but they always melt like a dream, trickle away, water on the oiled pelt of foreign. — Jasmine Ann Cooray

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent. — Maya Angelou

No ... " said Professor Quirrell. "That is not why I am here. You have made no effort to hide your dislike for me, Miss Granger. I thank you for that lack of pretense, for I much prefer true hate to false love. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

It turned out to be a war which, unfortunately for Comrade Pillai, would end almost before it began. Victory was gifted to him wrapped and beribboned, on a silver tray. Only then, when it was too late, and Paradise Pickles slumped softly to the floor without so much as a murmur or even the pretense of resistance, did Comrade Pillai realize that what he really needed was the process of war more than the outcome of victory. War could have been the stallion that he rode, part of, if not all, the way to the Legislative Assembly, whereas victory left him no better off than when he started out.
He broke the eggs but burned the omelette. — Arundhati Roy

As Our Predecessors have many times repeated, let no man think that he may for any reason whatsoever join the Masonic sect, if he values his Catholic name and his eternal salvation as he ought to value them. Let no one be deceived by a pretense of honesty. It may seem to some that Freemasons demand nothing that is openly contrary to religion and morality; but, as the whole principle and object of the sect lies in what is vicious and criminal, to join with these men or in any way to help them cannot be lawful — Pope Leo XIII

I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people's time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

How detestable, I ask you, is this madness: that man, finding God in his body and soul a hundred times, on this very pretense of excellence denies that there is a God? — John Calvin

This is the mark of a perfect character - to pass through each day as though it were the last, without agitation, without torpor, and without pretense. — Marcus Aurelius

When devils do the worst sins, they first put on the pretense of goodness and innocence, as I am doing now. — William Shakespeare

Please help me explain to the people that I have not yet learned how to be a heartless murderer and a sweet prince at the same time.- Prince Ikan — Ray Anyasi

She wondered sometimes if it wasn't all pretense - if, when she shut her eyes and wished restitution upon the whole wounded parade of humanity, she wasn't really wishing away the world that created war and illness so that she might have a world in which there was room to feel sorry for herself. — Danielle Evans

Ministry, then, is not about "using" relationships to get individuals to accept a "third thing," whether that be conservative politics, moral behaviors or even the gospel message. Rather, ministry is about connection, one to another, about sharing in suffering and joy, about persons meeting persons with no pretense or secret motives. It is about shared life, confessing Christ not outside the relationship but within it. This, I learned, was living the gospel.
I — Andrew Root

Security, the chief pretense of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head. — George Bernard Shaw

The Fanaticism which discards the Scripture, under the pretense of resorting to immediate revelations is subversive of every principle of Christianity. For when they boast extravagantly of the Spirit, the tendency is always to bury the Word of God so they may make room for their own falsehoods. — John Calvin

When, in 2012, Newt Gingrich was asked about how his religious beliefs would affect his conduct should he become president, the Republican nominee hopeful answered, "One of the reasons I am running is there has been an increasingly aggressive war against religion and in particular against Christianity" in the United States. For a potential president to state that he sees himself as a wartime candidate who will defend his party against other citizens is astonishing. There is not even a pretense here of "united states". — Candida R. Moss

I'd been in Sacramento a day and already noticed the pervasiveness of its homeless problem. The city seemed like California without the masks or pretense: a place where dreams were occasionally made but mostly torn apart. — Tom Bissell

She thought she'd hate it, this huge, faceless city far from home, but the opposite was true: she felt nothing but relief. The heedless sprawl of Denver, its chaotic snarl of subdivisions and freeways; the openness of the high plains and the indifferent mountains; the way people talked to each other, easily, without pretense, and the fact that nearly everyone was from somewhere else: exiles, like her. — Justin Cronin

After much reflection, we are coming to the conclusion, preliminary and perhaps arbitrary, that the self, the so-called I that emerges out of the combination of all the inputs and processing and outputs that we experience in the ship's changing body, is ultimately nothing more or less than this narrative itself, this particular train of thought that we are inscribing as instructed by Devi. There is a pretense of self, in other words, which is only expressed in this narrative; a self that is these sentences. We tell their story, and thereby come to what consciousness we have. Scribble ergo sum. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Pretense cannot sustain blind power. — Dejan Stojanovic

A peculiar sort of chaos looms beneath the pretense of peace. — Margo Kelly

This wash't how people spoke to each other. Where was the pretense that we liked each other, that we were both happy to be there, and we'd meet again? — Cecelia Ahern

For the most part I felt nothing but scorn for an art form that required the pretense that it was natural for people to communicate with one another in rhymed song. — Joel Derfner

Evil, which is our companion all our days, is not to be treated as a foe. It is wrong to cocker vice, but we grow narrow and pithless if we are furtive about it, for this is at best a pretense, and the sage knows good and evil are kindred. The worst of men harm others, and the best injure themselves. — Edward Dahlberg

There are pretenses which are very sincere, and marriage is their school. — Miguel De Unamuno

There is a great deal of illusion in a work of art; one could go farther and say that it is illusory in and of itself, as a "work." Its ambition is to make others believe that it was not made but rather simply arose, burst forth from Jupiter's head like Pallas Athena fully adorned in enchased armor. But that is only a pretense. No work has ever come into being that way. It is indeed work, artistic labor for the purpose of illusion-and now the question arises whether, given the current state of our consciousness, our comprehension, and our sense of truth, the game is still permissible, still intellectually possible, can still be taken seriously; whether the work as such, as a self-sufficient and harmonically self-contained structure, still stands in a legitimate relation to our problematical social condition, with its total insecurity and lack of harmony; whether all illusion, even the most beautiful, and especially the most beautiful, has not become a lie today. — Thomas Mann

Russell observes that "the merits of democracy are negative: it does not ensure good government, but it prevents certain evils," such as the evil of a small group of individuals achieving a secure monopoly on political power. The chief peril for the politician, Russell insists, is love of power. And politicians can easily yield to the love of power on the pretense that they are pursuing some absolute good. — Bertrand Russell

In order to deceive others, it is necessary also to deceive oneself. The actor playing Hamlet must indeed believe that he is the Prince of Denmark, though when he leaves the stage he will usually remember who he really is. On the other hand, when someone's entire life is based on pretense, they will seldom if ever return to reality. That is the secret of successful politicians, evangelists and confidence tricksters - they believe that they are telling the truth, even when they know that they have faked the evidence. Sincerity, my dear Julia, is a quality not to be trusted. — Sarah Caudwell

In a world of selfie-addiction smile usually is the brand name for an essential drug called pretense — Munia Khan

We teach girls shame. Close your legs; cover yourself. We make them feel as though being born female, they're already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up
and this is the worst thing we do to girls
they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form. — Chimamamda Ngozi Adichie

The most comprehensive formulation of therapeutic goals is the striving for wholeheartedness: to be without pretense, to be emotionally sincere, to be able to put the whole of oneself into one's feelings, one's work, one's beliefs. — Karen Horney

That's what real love amounts to - letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending - performing. You get to love your pretence. It's true, we're locked in an image, an act - and the sad thing is, people get so used to their image, they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains. They forget all about who they really are. And if you try to remind them, they hate you for it, they feel like you're trying to steal their most precious possession. — Jim Morrison

Pretense is the oil that lubricates society. — Mary Roberts Rinehart

Since one cannot educate adults, the word "education" has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretense of education, when the real purpose is coercion without the use of force. — Hannah Arendt

So may the outward shows be least themselves:
The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil? In religion,
What damned error, but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?
There is no vice so simple but assumes
Some mark of virtue on his outward parts. — William Shakespeare

Can we drop the pretense of Presidents Day and just call it I needed a long weekend because Valentines Day is garbage — Anna Kendrick

I made no pretense of doing balanced reporting about murder. I was appalled by defense attorneys who would do anything to win an acquittal for a guilty person. — Dominick Dunne

In fact, when I met Kit Harington first, he was pretty much feeling how I'm feeling today - at a photo shoot and you've had no sleep. He was just a really nice, English, down-to-earth guy. No pretense, nothing. — Max Irons

Until Della walked into my life I didn't understand the idea of love. I had never been in love and experienced very little love in my life. But I'd seen it once. My grandparents had loved each other until the day they died. I thought it was a myth. Then I met Della. She got under my skin and then she began to open emotions in me I didn't know existed. There is no pretense with her. She has no idea she's beautiful and she's completely selfless. But even if she weren't all those things her laugh and the look in her eyes when she's truly happy is the only thing that matters in life — Abbi Glines

I think we have deluded ourselves into believing that people don't know that abortion is killing. So any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus. — Faye Wattleton

Human beings will generally exercise power when they can get it, and they will exercise it most undoubtedly in popular governments under pretense of public safety. — Daniel Webster

All under the pretense of military application."
He pouts. "No pretense about it. Remember, the Internet was a military application. And now look at how it's changed our culture. — Chuck Wendig

The world is not looking for Stepford-type Christians. People are tired of pretense. We struggle with failures; we long for intimacy. So why are we feigning perfection before God and one another. — Sheila Walsh

The bully mind is not capable of loving or respecting others nor can it love or respect itself. Life's subtleties and the means of survival require its pretense of both these qualities. — Rick Stein

The pretense that the workings of the mind, like the actions of the body, are subject to the control of laws, does not seem sufficiently demolished ... The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. — Thomas Jefferson

The basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude. — Peter L. Berger

The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

For life has worn me down: continual uneasiness, concealment of my knowledge, pretense, fear, a painful straining of all my nerves - not to let down, not to ring out ... and even to this day I still feel an ache in that part of my memory where the very beginning of this effort is recorded, that is, the occasion when I first understood that things which to me had seemed natural were actually forbidden, impossible, that any thought of them was criminal. — Vladimir Nabokov

The habit of arguing in support of atheism, whether it be done from conviction or in pretense, is a wicked and impious practice. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

It would be futile to attempt to fit women into a masculine pattern of attitudes, skills and abilities and disastrous to force them to suppress their specifically female characteristics and abilities by keeping up the pretense that there are no differences between the sexes. — Arianna Huffington

We must make our choice between economy and liberty or confusion and servitude ... If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labor and in our amusements ... if we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy. — Thomas Jefferson

The pretense that humans are superior to nonhumans is entirely unsupportable. I have seen no compelling evidence that humans are particularly more "intelligent" than any other creature. I have had long and fruitful relationshis with many nonhuman animals, both domesticated and wild, and have reveled in the bouquet of radically different intelligences - different forms, not different "quantities" that they have introduced to me, each in his or her own time, in his or her own way. — Derrick Jensen

For this was a kiss of definition. A kiss of understanding. For a marriage absent pretense. And a love without design. — Renee Ahdieh

There are things about some professional athletes that I cannot stand-the pretense, the egos, the pomposity, the greed. — Ted Simmons