Quotes About Pretense

#1. In learning and argumentation, the quality brain is similar to a facility of maximum security. What passes the logic test, free of fallacy and pretense, then must pass the test of biblical accuracy in order to proceed as an adopted, reliable truth.

Criss Jami

#2. Prudishness is pretense of innocence without innocence. Women have to remain prudish as long as men are sentimental, dense, and evil enough to demand of them eternal innocence and lack of education. For innocence is the only thing which can ennoble lack of education.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

#3. Home is the place where you are most thoroughly yourself, with no pretenses.

Victoria Moran

#4. Certainly the best times were when I was alone with mathematics, free of ambition and pretense, and indifferent to the world.

Robert Langlands

#5. Destruction, best expressed in this age in which I write as terrorism, is truly there for its own sake, but the pretense of religion or secular patriotism converts the destructive into the speciously creative.

Anthony Burgess

#6. Expectations are illusions;
Pretense they hang on thin threads.

Kristian Goldmund Aumann

#7. Damoclean, but these were people without pretense or affectation,

John Cheever

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Pretense cannot sustain blind power.

Dejan Stojanovic

#11. 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

#12. The snapshot has no pretense or ambition. Innocence is the quintessence of the snapshot. I wish to distinguish between innocence and ignorance. Innocence is one of the highest forms of being and ignorance is one of the lowest.

Lisette Model

#13. Am I really admitting that my sister is determined to marry a man she has only seen once and doesn't much like the look of? It is half real and half pretense - and I have an idea that it is a game most girls play when they meet an eligible young men. They just ... wonder.

Dodie Smith

#14. 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

#15. In that moment there was no pretense between them, no lingering vestige of reserve or attempt to escape, no denial. It was final and complete.

Anne Perry

#16. 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

#17. Love of another is merely empty flattery and self-deception for one who cannot accept himself without pretense.

L.E. Modesitt Jr.

#18. The best way of successfully acting a part is to be it.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#19. People pretend to be other people because they have never thought of their true selves

Sunday Adelaja

#20. I don't impressed if you're a religious person.
I just wanna know about soul behind that mask.

Toba Beta

#21. Be not intimidated ... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.

John Adams

#22. 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

#23. Nobody knows what they're doing here, so why do so many pretend they do?

Marty Rubin

#24. The world is full of cravens who pretended to be heroes.

George R R Martin

#25. I don't damsel well. Distress, I can do. Damseling? Not so much.

James Patterson

#26. If we get separated there's not much hope of us ever meeting anywhere, but I need to keep up the pretense of hope because that may be all we have.

Susan Ee

#27. Darcy's got the tempestuous masculinity and brooding looks, but Knightley is a kinder, softer man with no pretense or dissimilation.

Katherine Reay

#28. SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander.

Henry David Thoreau

#29. We seldom look like the way we look like when people we like are looking.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#30. Wilderness is not a place of isolation but contemplation. Refuge. Refugees.....Wilderness is a knife that cuts through pretense and exposes fear. Even in remote country, you cannot escape your mind.

Terry Tempest Williams

#31. Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.

Eugene O'Neill

#32. Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance.

George Bernard Shaw

#33. Stereotypes abound when there is distance. They are an invention, a pretense that one knows when the steps that would make real knowing possible cannot be taken or are not allowed.

Bell Hooks

#34. But a system made secure by the protective plating of humor and pretense always runs the risk of having its protection get out of hand. A relationship based on jokes invites jokes; jokes about anything
and jokes about anything are now and then bound to cut too close to the truth.

Ken Kesey

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

Emmet Fox

#36. 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

#37. we can't be filled with the power of God until we let go of the false pretense that we can get by on our own.

Lee Strobel

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. Above the keyhole the door has a latch. It is pretending to be an authentic old latch. The door is pretending to be an authentic old door. Maybe everything there is isn't authentic any more. Maybe everything there is is a kind of pretending.

Ali Smith

#42. Employment is an employee's kissing of an employer's ass. A salary is the employer's pretense to be cleaning his ass.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#43. Can we drop the pretense of Presidents Day and just call it I needed a long weekend because Valentines Day is garbage

Anna Kendrick

#44. A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

Colson Whitehead

#45. I despise the rituals of fake friendship. I wish we could just claw each other's eyes out and call it a day; instead we put on huge radiant smiles and spout compliments until our teeth hurt from the saccharine sweetness of it all.

Jody Gehrman

#46. All actions and attitudes of children are graceful because they are the luxuriant and immediate offspring of the moment - divested of affectation and free from all pretense.

Henry Fuseli

#47. The thing I like about the band [Dead Child] is that there's no pretense. We aren't even trying to be artists or poets.

David Pajo

#48. Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

Thomas Sowell

#49. First one tells a lie; then one believes it; then one becomes it.

Marty Rubin

#50. Hunter walked out of the waves, and without any pretense, he wrapped her in his arms. She looked up at him, her eyes searing his.

He bent his head lower, his voice a raspy whisper. "I've never met anyone like you.

Lisa Kessler

#51. In a world of selfie-addiction smile usually is the brand name for an essential drug called pretense

Munia Khan

#52. I don't have the kinds of relationships that are built on any kind of false pretense, not to say that I haven't. I've had just as many as anybody else, but I haven't had them in a long time.

Bob Dylan

#53. I kept the coffee pot in my office on the pretense of monitoring Cookie's caffeine intake. Actually, it was my answer to potpourri.

Darynda Jones

#54. We are tired of the pretense that we have special privileges and the reality that we have none; of the fiction that we are queens, and the fact that we are subjects.

Lillie Devereux Blake

#55. Political Freedom without economic equality is a pretense, a fraud, a lie; and the workers want no lying.

Mikhail Bakunin

#56. 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

#57. Excuse me, there's no pretense here. I happen to be genuinely self-absorbed and deeply shallow.

Stephen Schwartz

#58. It was thus, Archer reflected, that New York managed its transitions; conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then, in all good faith, imagining that they had taken place in a preceding age.

Edith Wharton

#59. How wide is all this long pretense!
There is in love a sweetness ready penned,
Copy out only that, and save expense.

George Herbert

#60. 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

#61. No pretense or wearing masks. No cliques. No hidden agendas, backroom deals, betrayals, secret ambitions, plots, or schemes.

Randy Alcorn

#62. You have yearned to have my affection cloak your delicate spirit, accept the pretense of my craving to consume your soul as a symptom of a greater obsession that can only be extinguished by your merciful hand ...

Philip The Apostle

#63. When wisdom and knowledge appear, great pretense arises.

Laozi

#64. When I passed forty I dropped pretense, 'cause men like women who got some sense.

Maya Angelou

#65. How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!

Susan Sontag

#66. I've lived with myself for a very long time, so I'm aware of what I look like. I'm under no false pretense that I'm a stunner, so if somebody comes up and says something about my physical appearance, it's okay.

Timothy Simons

#67. We understand how dangerous a mask can be. We all become what we pretend to be.

Patrick Rothfuss

#68. Self respect is something that can't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it.

Ayn Rand

#69. It is not poverty so much as pretense that harasses a ruined man - the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse - the keeping up of a hollow show that must soon come to an end.

Washington Irving

#70. 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

#71. When someone loves you for who you are (completely) without judgment, impossible conditions or pretense...your heart awakens, your soul comes alive, your senses are stimulated and you know true happiness.

Carlos Wallace

#72. When all lies, deceit, pretense is stripped away, what remains? The truth of a painting, or a book or a man.

William S. Burroughs

#73. For this was a kiss of definition. A kiss of understanding. For a marriage absent pretense. And a love without design.

Renee Ahdieh

#74. What if, despite all our pretense and disguise, it was necessary to appear in public with the person we loved most of all? Imagine this a prerequisite for social discourse on Earth.

Carl Sagan

#75. He has never known a woman so free from conceit, vanity, ambition, pretense. He has never known a woman so willing to show the world that she is a human being.

Elin Hilderbrand

#76. If the dreamlike visions were stripped of all pretense of order and meaning, then they could safely ignore them. According to the rules: "If I do not remember it, it means, it was not worth remembering." In the jargon of the dreamers these dreams are called "lemons".

Andrzej Sapkowski

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. No one can long hide behind a mask; the pretense soon lapses into the true character.

Seneca The Younger

#80. 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

#81. We talked, she and I. She asked about my work and it was a pretense, she was not interested in my work. And when I answered, it was a pretense. I was not interested in my work either. There was only one thing that interested us, and she knew it. She had made it plain by her coming.

John Fante

#82. Perfection of character: to live your last day, every day, without frenzy, or sloth, or pretense.

Marcus Aurelius

#83. We violated each other's boundaries with verbal missiles of anger disguised in the pretense of "just kidding.

David W. Earle

#84. 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

#85. The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!

Edith Wharton

#86. Of the world and drudgery of business , seeks a pretense of reason to give itself a full and uncontrolled indulgence.

David Hume

#87. The whip degrades; a severe father teaches his children to dissemble; their love is pretense, and their obedience a species of self-defense. Fear is the father of lies.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#88. Why? Why is there a crisis in literature? Because of lies and rottenness. Simplicity and sincerity have been replaced by obsfucation and pretense. Men, of course. They love to create mystery where none exists. It's the way they think.

Alexander McCall Smith

#89. We labored under the pretense that nothing had changed when everything had, and I understood him, but i no longer knew him.

Megan Hart

#90. It's not just the embarrassment of tears. That's part of it, no doubt, but what embarrasses me much more, and always will, is the paralysis that took my heart. A moral freeze: I couldn't decide, I couldn't act, I couldn't comport myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity.

Tim O'Brien

#91. I know you lawyers can with ease, Twist words and meanings as you please; That language, by your skill made pliant, Will bend to favour every client; That 'tis the fee directs the sense, To make out either side's pretense.

John Gay

#92. He ran the back of his hand up her cheek, with the pretense of wiping away sweat. Do you think you could ever love me?
I don't think so.
Because I'm not good enough.
It's not like that.
Because I'm not smart.
No.
Because you couldn't love me.
Because I couldn't love you.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#93. Harder still was the pretense her studies demanded: the need to dissemble, to parrot her professors' orthodoxies, to feign interest in theories that were of no use to her.

John Wray

#94. 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

#95. You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it.

Alan Moore

#96. I don't make any pretense about being normal. I'm not.

Val Kilmer

#97. Or perhaps this hostility of yours is the pretense. Love does make liars out of your kind.

Cassandra Clare

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

William Shakespeare

#99. Humanity's favorite pasttime: pretending to know what it doesn't know.

Marty Rubin

#100. A peculiar sort of chaos looms beneath the pretense of peace.

Margo Kelly