Pretenses Is Quotes & Sayings

Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there. — Eric Hoffer

< ... > the persons who get to the consulting rooms of psychotherapists and psychoanalysts are not a cross-section of the population. By and large they are the ones for whom the conventional pretenses and defenses of the society no longer work. Very often they are the more sensitive and gifted members of the society; they need to get help, broadly speaking, because they are less successful at rationalizing than the "well-adjusted" citizen who is able for the time being to cover up his underlying conflicts. — Rollo May

Any company? Or was Olga here?" "No." I shrugged. "That requires no practice." I leaned to her a little. "Look, Mrs. Jaffee, I might as well admit it. I'm here under false pretenses. I said we wanted information, Mr. Wolfe and I, and we do, but we also want help. Of course you know of the provisions of Priscilla's father's will? Now that she is dead, you know that five people - Helmar, Brucker, Quest, Pitkin, and Miss Duday - you know that they will own most of the Softdown stock?" "Yes, certainly." She was frowning, concentrating at me. — Rex Stout

You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That'€s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world. — Octave Mirbeau

The easiest and cheapest trick for any leader is to take his country to war on false pretenses. — John Le Carre

The crafty person is always in danger; and when they think they walk in the dark, all their pretenses are transparent. — John Tillotson

BDSM is about dropping the pretenses; I want you completely exposed. — Sierra Cartwright

I will never again go to people under false pretenses even if it is to give them the Holy Bible. I will never again sell anything, even if I have to starve. I am going home now and I will sit down and really write about people. — Henry Miller

In careless ignorance they think it civilization, when in reality it is a portion of their slavery ... To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false pretenses, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace. — Tacitus

Your problem, dear chap, as I have had occassion to remind you, is that you see but you do not observe; you hear but you do not listen. For a literary man, Watson - and note that I do not comment on the merit of your latest account of my little problems - for a man with the pretenses of being a writer, you are singularly unobservant. Honestly, sometimes I am close to despair. — Edward B. Hanna

Despite all of our pretenses and fantasies, we always have been and will remain a biological species tied to this particular biological world. Millions of years of evolution are indelibly encoded in our genes. History without the wildlands is no history at all. — Edward O. Wilson

As you recover, you will find yourself letting go of many of your negative beliefs. You will discover that many of the so-called truths you were raised with and forced to believe are not truths at all. With this perspective, you will come to see, for example, that the names you were called as a child are simply not true. You are not 'stupid,' 'lazy,' 'ugly,' or a 'liar'. You can discover just who you really are. You can let go of your pretenses and masks and discover who the real person is underneath. — Beverly Engel

When people say the word "convention," they are usually referring to large gatherings of the employees of companies and corporations who attend a mass assembly, usually in a big hotel somewhere, for the purpose of pretending to learn stuff when they are in fact enjoying a free trip somewhere, time off work, and the opportunity to flirt with strangers, drink, and otherwise indulge themselves. The first major difference between a business convention and a fan-dom convention is that fandom doesn't bother with the pretenses. They're just there to have a good time. The second difference is the dress code - the ensembles at a fan convention tend to be considerably more novel. — Jim Butcher

I mean honestly, who just sits around in a house with a bunch of short guys waiting for their prince to come? So your mom is a bitch and wants to kill you because her mirror told her to? Cry me a river why don't you? Your big plan is sitting around cleaning house waiting for the other shoe to drop? And speaking of shoes, everyone has been picked on by mean girls. You do not wait for some old lady to pop in and transmogrify some innocent rodents just so you can sneak in to a dance under false pretenses. And let's say you do sneak in. For the love of all that is holy take your mask off and look the guy in the face and say. "Hi, I'm Cindy from down the street, I have this thing at midnight. Can we do coffee later?" This nonsense with a shoe and searching the entire village for one girl, it's crap. — John Goode

Sometimes a god comes," Selver said. "He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another. — Ursula K. Le Guin

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

Afternoon tea needn't stand on ceremony. Anything that becomes more important than sweet fellowship, whether lace or linen or the china itself, is pretense. How much more we enjoy life when the pretenses are discarded! — Paul F. Kortepeter

But is it really you
behind the pretenses
beyond dust and distances
beneath the salt and the siren
announcements and ancient
impurities and decays
that claim to be you — W.S. Merwin

Even if Bush could be forgiven for taking America, and much of the rest of the world, to war on false pretenses, and for misrepresenting the cost of the venture, there is no excuse for how he chose to finance it. His was the first war in history paid for entirely on credit. As America went into battle, with deficits already soaring from his 2001 tax cut, Bush decided to plunge ahead with yet another round of tax relief for the wealthy. — Joseph Stiglitz

Booze makes you stupid and like it. It makes you fall around and not care. And eventually, stupid is the only way you know how to be. Cocaine makes you feel important, that life matters, that you matter. That the music is better than it really is. That every conversation
is profound and that all pretenses have been stripped away. Ecstasy makes you dance all night and love your friends so much, in a way that you've never been able to tell them about before. Acid makes you see pretty colours and makes things breathe. But Sadness, there is nothing like Sadness. — Pleasefindthis

Music is the one thing in which there is no use trying to deceive others or make false pretenses. — Confucius

The scientist who yields anything to theology, however slight, is yielding to ignorance and false pretenses, and as certainly as if he granted that a horse-hair put into a bottle of water will turn into a snake. — H.L. Mencken

Sex is full of lies. The body tries to tell the truth. But, it's usually too battered with rules to be heard, and bound with pretenses so it can hardly move. We cripple ourselves with lies. — Jim Morrison

The human heart is like a big mess of embroidery silks, and the more you pull, the more they tangle. The thing is, the threads have only got one end, if that. You can't sort them all out into colors. You just pick the ones you want and hold one to them as best you can. — Rose Lerner

Is it not the artist who - like our dreams - dissolves the pretenses that hide us from ourselves, disclosing both our self-serving fantasies and our unsuspected potentialities? — Dorothy Norman

This world is filled with loud pretenses, sound republics, blind kingdoms, all bare and out of sorts. — Dew Platt

One cannot understand an economy without researching the activities of all its participants, and the process through which they are born, taught, and defended by their families. To try to do so is, quite simply, stupid. That Nobel laureates and entire economic departments pretend to, and that policies in great countries is sometimes made on such pretenses makes it no less stupid. Once that reality is faced, the choice is simple. One may do stupid work on men and individuals only, or do the job right and study women, households, and classes too. — Hill Gates

If there is no hell, a good many preachers are obtaining money under false pretenses. — Billy Sunday

Audiences will see what they want to see. Some will come out, hopefully enjoying two hours of action. Some people will find themselves gravitating towards the emotional dilemma that the characters find themselves in. Other people will see that there is some layer of subversions to the storytelling aspect of poking a finger of judgment at certain governments to the idea of foreign invasion, others maybe false pretenses. — Colin Farrell

Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage. — Iris Murdoch

There is a constant rush to judgment in Foucault. He is filled with specious generalizations, false categories, distortions, fudging, pretenses to knowledge in areas where he was ignorant. He had no ability whatsoever to distinguish among historical sources, where he makes terrible blunders. — Camille Paglia

We still find the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry and grasping at the spoil of the multitude. Invention is continually exercised to furnish new pretenses for revenue and taxation. It watches prosperity as its prey and permits none to escape without a tribute. — Thomas Paine

Perhaps extreme danger strips us of all pretenses, all ambitions, all confusions, focusing us more intensely than we are otherwise ever focused, so that we remember what we otherwise spend most of our lives forgetting: that our nature and purpose is, more than anything else, to love and to make love, to take joy from the beauty of the world, to live with an awareness that the future is not as real a place for any of us as are the present and the past. — Dean Koontz

Home is the place where you are most thoroughly yourself, with no pretenses. — Victoria Moran

If the authorities under various false pretenses, continue curtailing the rights of citizens, so that they merely become serfs to a handful of multinational companies, a global rebellion of ordinary people against super capitalism is certainly not inconceivable. — A.J. Beirens

When you write a book there are no more pretenses or facades to hide behind. It is very liberating to proclaim "this is who I am. — Jonathan Heatt

Am discovering her pretenses. She is always smiling, gay, but underneath she feels unreal, remote, detached from experience. She acts as if she were asleep. She is trying to awaken by falling into bed with anyone who invites her. — Anais Nin

All government, whatever its forms or pretenses, is a dead weight that paralyzes the free spirit and activities of the masses. — Emma Goldman