Pretense Quotes

Pretense cannot sustain blind power.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

Flag up your courage high and your fears will salute it in humility. Your fears are like walls without foundations, they are afraid to go down and hence pretend to be strong! Exercise Courage!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Knowledge of Self is very important, you can't be living in a world pretending to be someone you're not. No one will ever believe in you, when you don't have the courage to believe in yourself. You can not live to impress others solely not giving thought to express your true being. No one wants to interact with a pretender, a fake, a wannabe.

~ Amaka Imani Nkosazana

Fiction: a game of pretend.

~ Marty Rubin

Novelists are basically inviting their readers to play a game of pretend. That's what fiction is: a game of pretend.

~ Marty Rubin

To give herself a measure of credible autonomy, she had decided to invent a husband. Then, in a subsequent flash of inspiration, she had just as quickly killed him off.

~ Tracy Anne Warren

My correspondence has certainly the charm of variety, and the humbler are usually the more interesting. This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Everyone is watching you. If you don’t believe it, just pretend to fail and you’ll see many mockers. For this reason, work hard as if you are doing everyone’s business!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Perfect' - the most misattributed word in English languageA 'perfect' thing can never be improved - at least by what the meaning implies. Why should anyone want to be perfect?Unfortunately, this happens to be my greatest flaw. Turning a relative idea into an absolute one. Seeking perfection in others - or should I say 'subconsciously seeking perfection in myself' and projecting a benchmark based in fantasy on others.Makes one come across as judgmental, intolerant, arrogant or impatient - in short, a platinum-class jerk. But you, my friend, are too kind to tell me. Or you'd rather bear for the moment and cuss me roundly when I'm gone. That's unfair to us both.If I have ever done this to you, I am sincerely sorry.Accept my profound apologies

~ Eniitan Akinola

When things are like hunky dory, every enemy comes in the name of friend, but when things are twisted like turmoil, every friendly enemy shows you their colour.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Whatever is above will be managed by the powers above you. Don’t live as a man, pretending to be God. Do what you can do; leave what you can’t to God!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Cowardice is when you hide away from your real self, and wear another self in pretense. Be yourself; that is bravery. If yourself is not better for you to be, change yourself and live in that changed self!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

I was thinking that being a demon and a ghost must be very difficult, even for Charles; if he ever forgot, or let his disguise drop for a minute, he would be recognized at once and driven away; he must be extremely careful to use the same voice every time, and present the same face and the same manner without a slip; he must be constantly on guard against betraying himself. I wondered if he would turn back to his true self when he was dead.

~ Shirley Jackson

Like a Columbus of the heart, mind and soul I have hurled myself off the shores of my own fears and limiting beliefs to venture far out into the uncharted territories of my inner truth, in search of what it means to be genuine and at peace with who I really am. I have abandoned the masquerade of living up to the expectations of others and explored the new horizons of what it means to be truly and completely me, in all my amazing imperfection and most splendid insecurity.

~ Anthon St. Maarten

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

~ Susan Sontag

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

Some human beings in their craftiness thought they can pretend to be good when they are actually bad.

~ Bamigboye Olurotimi

To put an arrogant 'famous' writer in his place: pretend to be illiterate.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mold my message, not my voice. By my voice, whatever it says, the other will recognize that something is wrong with me. I am a liar (by preterition), not an actor. My body is a stubborn child, my language is a very civilized adult...

~ Roland Barthes

Well, do you suppose I made up my mind then that what I had seen was something sickening? Not a bit of it. 'If it was done with such assurance and everyone thought it was necessary, then they must have known something I didn't,' was what I thought, and I tried to find out what it was. But I couldn't, no matter how hard I exerted myself. And since I couldn't, I couldn't join the army as I'd planned to, and not only did I not join the army, I couldn't find a place for myself anywhere in society, and ended up being no good for anything, as you can see.'Oh yes, we know all about how you're no good for anything,' said one of us, 'But tell us: how many men would be no good for anything if it weren't for the likes of you?

~ Leo Tolstoy

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

~ Alan Moore

Adopting the language of a pretense only serves to ease participation in it.

~ Bartok

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

~ Vera Nazarian

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

Pretension, dear love, does not buy truth into lies, nor alter its course.

~ Sreesha Divakaran

The vice president (Nixon) seems like a man who is acting like a nice man rather than being one.

~ Ann Whitman

I live there...where the birds are infiniteeverywherewhere they fleeit's a place your eyes can wanderbut never seeWhere everyone accepts me,Without any pretenseIt's a place your mind can picturebut never really comprehend.

~ Sanober Khan

The heart of the world is breaking under this load of pride and pretense. There is no release from our burden apart from the meekness of Christ.

~ A.w. Tozer

As they walked out of the store, Ifemelu said, “I was waiting for her to ask ‘Was it the one with two eyes or the one with two legs?’ Why didn’t she just ask ‘Was it the black girl or the white girl?’”Ginika laughed. “Because this is America. You’re supposed to pretend that you don’t notice certain things.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

There are two kinds of love: the love that is and the love that isn't.

~ Marty Rubin

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

~ James Patterson

The Jews have made him [Yahweh] the assassin of the human species, to make room for the religion of the Jews. The Christians have made him the murderer of himself, and the founder of a new religion to supersede and expel the Jewish religion. And to find pretence and admission for these things, they must have supposed his power or his wisdom imperfect, or his will changeable; and the changeableness of the will is the imperfection of the judgement.

~ Thomas Paine

[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

It is better to lack the semblance of honor but possess it than to possess the semblance and lack the honor.

~ Lynn Flewelling

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort of choice.

~ Tom Perrotta

To put an arrogant 'famous' singer in her place: pretend to be deaf.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The problem with wearing a facade is that sooner or later life shows up with a big pair of scissors.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

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

First one tells a lie, then one believes it, then one becomes it.

~ Marty Rubin