53 Pretense Quotes

Never follow a dog act. You know you're on the skids when you play yourself in the movie version of your life.

How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.

It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.

Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts. Whenever we want something from somebody or when we want to hide something or pretend, we're acting. Most people do it all day long.

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.

Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

A man of true science... uses but few hard words, and those only when none other will answer his purpose; whereas the smatterer in science... thinks, that by mouthing hard words, he proves that he understands hard things.

Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own.

There is nothing so stupid or dangerous or painful that people wont eagerly do it, if by doing it they will make others believe that they are better or stronger or more honorable. I've seen people poison themselves, destroy their children, abandon their mates, cut themselves off from the world, all so that others would think that they were a better sort of person.

Civilisation is a conspiracy. What value would your police be if every criminal could find a sanctuary across the Channel, or your law courts, if no other tribunal recognised their decisions? Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences. And it will succeed till the day comes when there is another compact to strip them bare

Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be. -Ender's Game

It is supposed that there has been progress in the science of textual criticism, and the most frivolous pretender has learned to talk superciliously about 'the old unscientific days'. The old unscientific days are everlasting; they are here and now; they are renewed perennially by the ear which takes formulas in, and the tongue which gives them out again, and the mind which meanwhile is empty of reflexion and stuffed with self-complacency.

Why you gotta act like you know, if you don't know? It's okay if you don't know everything.

You go up to a man, and you say, 'How are things going, Joe?' and he says, 'Oh fine, fine - couldn't be better.' And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn't be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody's having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much.

We pretend to be whatever we must in order to survive.

At last he was what he had always pretended to be. An ordinary, powerless man. He hated it.

She called today, Pretending not to care at all, For days and weeks, Now he's hanging from the ceiling, What a life, Oh what a life, Was it a life? ~ 'Sense'

Whatever sceptic could inquire for, For ev'ry why he had a wherefore; Knew more than forty of them do, As far as words and terms cou'd go. All which he understood by rote And, as occasion serv'd, would quote; No matter whether right or wrong, They might be either said or sung. His notions fitted things so well, That which was which he could not tell; But oftentimes mistook th' one For th' other, as great clerks have done.

Let us invent a character, a nice respectable, middle-class, middle-aged, maiden lady, with time on her hands and the money to help her pass it. She enjoys pictures, books, music, and the theatre and though to none of these arts (or rather, for consistency's sake, to none of these three arts and the one craft) does she bring much knowledge or discernment, at least, as she is apt to tell her cronies, she 'does know what she likes'. Let us call her Aunt Edna.

What you have here is an example of that well known phenomenon, A Bookshop Assistance Who Knows Buggerall But Won't Admit It (probably some kind of arts graduate).

He looked at her with that kind of painted-on seriousness that comedians shift into when they get their chance to play Hamlet.

I cannot talk with civet in the room, A fine puss-gentleman that's all perfume.

'You want a pig,' said Roger, 'like in a real hunt.' 'Or someone to pretend,' said Jack. 'You could get someone to dress up as a pig and then he could act - you know, pretend to knock me over and all that -' 'You want a real pig,' said Robert, still caressing his rump, 'because you've got to kill him.' 'Use a littlun,' said Jack, and everybody laughed.

We're worth a lot of dough. Whatever you see is antiques. This thing here. This is from - I don't remember exactly. I think it's the Renaissance or the Magna Carta or something. But that's where it's from.

The elitist is someone whose education is greater than his intelligence.

Here am I, the often sat on Dancing don; my name is T-TT-N; Like old wine in a new bottle Is my talk on Aristotle.

They never noticed that he was in fact what they only pretended to be

Beside me was Savanna, her robe falling open carelessly (though I knew she was aware of just how much arousal each centimeter of her exposure produced), her finger tickling me unbearably while I pretended not to feel it

Pretending to be happy with each other when they're both so desperately lonely because along week three of their marriage they realized they didn't really know each other and they never would, they'd be strangers together for the rest of their lives. But they couldn't live with that, nobody can, I've seen thousands of marriages and they can't face it that they're paired up with a stranger and so the decent ones, the ones who want to be good, they pretend to be whatever their partner wants them to be, and then they pretend to believe in their partners pretense

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

Well, Aimee Semple McPherson has written a book. And were you to call it a little peach, you would not be so much as scratching its surface. It is the story of her life, and it is called In the Service of the King, which title is perhaps a bit dangerously suggestive of a romantic novel. It may be that this autobiography is set down in sincerity, frankness and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.

'Are you sure?' I said that sure was just what I wasn't anything but.

Each of us assumes everyone else knows what HE is doing. They all assume we know what WE are doing. We don't...Nothing is going on and nobody knows what it is. Nobody is concealing anything except the fact that he does not understand anything anymore and wishes he could go home.

I started to shed the monstrous aesthetic affectation of my youth so as to make room for the monstrous philistine postures of middle age, but it was some years before I was bold enough to decline an invitation to 'Hamlet' on the grounds that I knew who won.

Affectation hides three times as many virtues as charity does sins