Unmasked Quotes & Sayings

It is infinitely better that the profane and loose be unmasked than to be muffled up under the veil and hood of traditional hypocrisy, which turns and dulls the very edge of all conscience either toward God or man. — Roger Williams

She fit her hand around the curve of his whiskered jaw. "I'm sorry. But I knew you would not leave otherwise - "
"Damn right I would not have left," he said gruffly. "Don't you understand what you mean to me? You are everything. Never doubt that. My place is with you, only you. — Monica McCarty

I love you, June, and you know how acutely, how desperately. You know that no one can say or do anything to shake my love. I have taken you into myself, whole. You need have no fear of being unmasked, only loved. — Anais Nin

Captain Crawford didn't like the idea of any kind of murder, but he went at it patiently and honestly and with none of the stupidity and bombast and rubber-hose techniques that Los Angeles crime fiction writers had led me to expect. I'd gotten the impression that unless a gifted amateur in love with the lady got himself almost beaten to a pulp and practically inside the lethal gas chamber before he unmasked the venal and brutalized constabulary, any innocent bystander they could get their hands on was a gone duck. — Leslie Ford

You don't need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Don't even listen, simply wait. Don't even wait. Be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you. To be unmasked, it has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet. - Franz Kafka — Tom Robbins

The boy unmasked the gaping void in Franz's life even as he helped fill it. — Jon Krakauer

Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it (rather than its threat) terrifies you. It was so new I could not take my eyes from the man's face. I felt like saying: What in God's name are you doing to yourself? — John Howard Griffin

The laughter in response to my question unmasked the double standard our deconstructionists espouse. And that is precisely the double standard of atheism! It is possible to dress up and romanticize our bizarre experiments in social restructuring while disavowing truth or absolutes. But one dares not play such deadly games with the foundations of good thinking. — Ravi Zacharias

Pure knowledge is not imparted by another; it comes unmasked. It is the one that is listening: it is your own true nature. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

One must read all writers twice
the good as well as the bad. The one kind will be recognized; the other, unmasked. — Karl Kraus

Finally, our new brain needs a purpose. A purpose is expressed as a series of goals. In the case of our biological brains, our goals are established by the pleasure and fear centers that we have inherited from the old brain. These primitive drives were initially set by biological evolution to foster the survival of species, but the neocortex has enabled us to sublimate them. Watson's goal was to respond to Jeopardy! queries. Another simply stated goal could be to pass the Turing test. To do so, a digital brain would need a human narrative of its own fictional story so that it can pretend to be a biological human. It would also have to dumb itself down considerably, for any system that displayed the knowledge of, say, Watson would be quickly unmasked as nonbiological. — Ray Kurzweil

Perhaps he was a stand-in for who I was, a primitive version of the me I'd lost track of and sloughed off in America. My shadow self, my picture of Dorian Gray, my mad brother in the attic, my Mr Hyde, my very, very rough draft. Me unmasked, unchained, unleashed, unfinished: me untrammeled, me in rags, me enraged. Me without books, without finish, without a green card. Me with a Kalashnikov. — Andre Aciman

Yet this wasn't like sports, let alone sports movies. The roles weren't fixed, nor the meaning of the scaffolding. It didn't have to be this way. They might have, for instance, all felt stronger. They might have felt stronger and come together. They might have decided that, rather than now, as they'd been mistaken before: that if their enemies cheered the same damage as they, then they weren't their enemies after all. They might have concluded their interests were mutual, that some other force, earlier - some other enemy - had confused and divided them, and that all those who cheered were thus allies unmasked.
Instead they felt bitter, tricked by each other, last-strawed underdogs, suckers on the mend. Their enmity swelled and they fought even harder. — Adam Levin

The Shadow of the Emperor
The Hooded One
Who unmasked night
Who laid the stars like paving stones
Who rode the Thunderbolt
Down the star-cobbled path into day
Was Kane,
The Emperor's twin
Silent, as lightning is silent,
Before the thunder speaks. — Patricia A. McKillip

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. — Kahlil Gibran

The truth is we all want to be known. And we're simultaneously afraid of it. We want to be unmasked, and the person who can unmask us wins our respect. — Erica Jong

Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice. — Tom Robbins

He gave her everything. Everything but the promise of a future. And she met his dark strokes with a plunder of her own, holding his gaze, raking his soul of its secrets. She knew just what she meant to him. — Monica McCarty

I remained standing in the middle of the room, swaying on my feet as though I had received a blow. I thought of my life and saw what it had been. No one could swim against such a current of mud. I had been a man so horrible that he could have no friend. But wasn't that, I asked myself, because I had always been incapable of wearing a disguise? If all men went through life with unmasked faces, as I had done for half a century, one might be surprised to find how little difference there was between them. But, in fact, no one lives with his face uncovered, no one. Most men ape greatness or nobility. Though they do not know it, they conform to certain fixed types, literary or other. This the saints know, and they hate and despise themselves because they see themselves with unclouded eyes. I should not have been so universally condemned had I not been so defenseless, so open, and so naked. — Francois Mauriac

Death when unmasked shows us a friendly face and is a terror only at a distance. — Oliver Goldsmith

I don't know where to go, I stay planted in front of the cardboard chef. I don't need to turn around to know they are watching me through the windows: they are watching my back with surprise and disgust; they thought I was like them, that I was a man, and I deceived them. I suddenly lost the appearance of a man and they saw a crab running backwards out of this human room. Now the unmasked intruder has fled: the show goes on. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Echoes of memorable emotions smiled at Tess reminding her of passed photos of scribbled pictures of drawn conclusions that had now
been unmasked to reveal the clear unconcluded overall view of a present tense scene that caused a stirring of wonderful contemplation on possible compatibilities that she wondered if could form into something more than mere sideline statistics from observational metaphors. — Calvin W. Allison

A successful actor is praised for never giving up his dreams to become someone else for a living but to dream to be an unmasked artist is a mortal sin in a consumerist society. Artists don't consume; they create things that can't be consumed with riches. You consume art by seeing, by listening, by feeling, never by buying. — Bruce Crown

The incoming of God as expressed in the incarnation represents a beautiful expression of this simultaneous revealing and withdrawal, for in the Incarnation the mystery of God is not dissipated but rather deepened. The mystery is not unmasked, but rather dwells with us, in our midst. The mystery is thus not overcome in the Incarnation but rather encountered there. — Peter Rollins

He who puts on a religious demeanor abroad to gain himself a great name among men, and at the same time lives like an atheist at home, shall at the last be unmasked by God, and presented before all the world for a most detestable hypocrite. — Thomas Brooks

Wise were the kings who never chose a friend till with full cups they had unmasked his soul, and seen the bottom of his deepest thoughts. — Horace

The multiculturalism movement must be unmasked for the fraud that it is. There are superior cultures, and ours is one of them. — Mitt Romney

Women if you want to realise yourselves - you are on the eve of a devastating psychological upheaval - all your pet illusions must be unmasked - the lies of centuries have got to go - are you prepared for the Wrench? — Mina Loy

It seemed there was no bottom to whatever abyss we bordered, and with each step, I vowed if I ever did meet the trail's end and was unmasked and untied, I'd never waste a chance again - if I was going to die, it would be when I could plainly see Kaden as I thrust a knife between his deceitful Vendan ribs. — Mary E. Pearson

I felt very low. I had been unmasked only that morning by Jay Cee herself, and I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true. After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of race. — Sylvia Plath

Sigmund Freud once asserted, "Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge." Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the "individual differences" did not "blur" but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints. — Viktor E. Frankl

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. — Franz Kafka

Over and over, all I had done was say, 'There, I've said it,' though it would leave me feeling only exposed, not unmasked. — Gary Lutz

Much self-condemnation, thus, is a cloak for arrogance. Those who think they overcome pride by condemning themselves could well ponder Spinoza's remark, 'One who despises himself is the nearest to a proud man'. In ancient Athens, when a politician was trying to get the votes of the working class by appearing very humble in a tattered coat with big holes in it, Socrates unmasked his hypocrisy by exclaiming, 'Your vanity shows forth from every whole in your coat'. — Rollo May

He stilled for a moment, savoring the sensation of being buried deep inside her, of filling her, of being joined together in God's heavenly embrace. He held her gaze and pushed deeper, shuddering with a wave of pure tenderness. The look in her eyes stripped him to the core. He couldn't move, wanting to preserve the moment, wanting never to forget how it felt to experience perfection. — Monica McCarty

The desperation meeting the silence with its unmasked wish. — Libba Bray

The fact is that I have lived with the belief that power, any kind of power, was the one thing forbidden to poets ... Power requires that the inner person never be unmasked. No, we poets have to go naked. And since this is so, it is better that we stay private people; a naked public person would be rather ridiculous, what? — May Sarton

Fully revealed, the green eyes pierced her heart. In them, she sensed pain, loneliness and despair. Yet they weren't seeing her. Focused on the movement of the blade, the mesmerizing gaze seemed a world away. Stroke after stroke, the unmasked face appeared in the mirror. — Chris Lange

Sometimes serendipity is just intention unmasked. — Elizabeth Berg

I was going to say the beginning is the good part, when it's all sparks and sparkles, before they are inevitably unmasked as assholes. — Laini Taylor

Three weeks was apparently time enough to fall in love, but not long enough to fall out of love. Meg had this unfortunate truth drummed into her head each morning when she woke, hoping this would be the day that she forgot about Alex, this would be the day she could get on with her life and put Edinburgh behind her. She grimaced. Three weeks, three years, it didn't make a difference. She would remember.
Everything. — Monica McCarty

It seemed to him a thousand times worse to stand there as the only one unmasked amid a host of masks, than suddenly to stand naked among those fully dressed. — Arthur Schnitzler

Then, as we ascend into the fifth and final act of the show, we can choose what we want to take back with us: a piece of our underworld self that, frankly, the cheating boyfriend may need to meet, or the boss that doesn't appreciate you, or the terrorizing Bitch at school - or maybe you're the terrorizing Bitch, maybe I am. Some fragments that took their masks off while we were on this underworld journey sometimes walk quietly with me. Only I know that after the show they will be staying with me as my figurative New Renter in my seafront condo, down the street from Pituitary Lane, behind Heart Terrace. Then again, some unmasked Beings that I see during a performance find me once I'm back in my dressing room and receive from me the Okay you, thank you for the perspective and the vision, but in this century you can't just chop people's heads off and feed them to your cats, and I know these guys are bad guys, and thank you for the vision. So you can haunt me during the show again in Indy — Tori Amos

The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them. — Michel Foucault

O Jesus, what a comfort it is that thou hast pleaded our cause against our unseen enemies; countermined their mines, and unmasked their ambushes. Here is a matter for joy, gratitude, hope, and confidence. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

But to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive. No longer young, no longer pretty, no longer loved, or sweet, or lovable, unmasked, writhing on the ground for all to see in my utter ingloriousness, there's no telling what I might do — Claire Messud

If we suspect that a man is lying, we should pretend to believe him; for then he becomes bold and assured, lies more vigorously, and is unmasked. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. — Kahlil Gibran

As more and more architecture is finally unmasked as the mere organization of flow - shopping centers, airports - it is evident that circulation is what makes or breaks public architecture ... — Rem Koolhaas

Her eyes widened. "My." She looked at him hesitantly and then bit her lip. "This might be more difficult than I realized. You're a large man, aren't you?" She blushed. "I mean, all over."
He managed to nod. Yes, damn it. And getting excruciatingly larger by the minute. — Monica McCarty

fear of being unmasked as the incompetent you "really" are is so common that it actually has a clinical name: impostor syndrome. — Megan McArdle

Tonight Must Last Us Forever — Paul Stanley

Black Tragedy lets slip her grim disguise and shows you laughing lips and roguish eyes; but when, unmasked, gay Comedy appears, how wan her cheeks are, and what heavy tears! — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Sensuality, too, which used to show itself course, smiling, unmasked, and unmistakable, is now serious, analytic, and so burdened with a sense of its responsibilities that it passes muster half the time as a new type of asceticism. — Agnes Repplier

A study of animal communities has this advantage: they are merely what they are, for anyone to see who will and can look clearly; they cannot complicate the picture by worded idealisms, by saying one thing and being another; here the struggle is unmasked and the beauty is unmasked. — John Steinbeck

The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt. — C.S. Lewis

Man is at his furthest remove from the animal as a child, his intellect most human. With his fifteenth year and puberty he comes astep closer to the animal; with the sense of possessions of his thirties (the median line between laziness and greediness), still another step. In his sixtieth year of life he frequently loses his modesty as well, then the septuagenarian steps up to us as a completely unmasked beast: one need only look at the eyes and the teeth. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Anarchism is the abolition of exploitation and oppression of man by man, that is, the abolition of private property and government; Anarchism is the destruction of misery, of superstitions, of hatred. Therefore, every blow given to the institutions of private property and to the government, every exaltation of the conscience of man, every disruption of the present conditions, every lie unmasked, every part of human activity taken away from the control of the authorities, every augmentation of the spirit of solidarity and initiative, is a step towards Anarchism. — Errico Malatesta

If you want to realize yourselves all your pet illusions must be unmasked. — Mina Loy

As the pretensions of modernity are unmasked today, it is a good time for us to recover our nerve, "always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks [us] for a reason for the hope that is in [us]" (1Pe 3:15). By breaking into our history, sharing our history, and transforming that history from the inside out, God has indeed made himself the object of our knowledge. — Michael S. Horton