#pretense

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

— Vera Nazarian

#acting #artifice #falsehood #game #games

Look on beauty, And you shall see 'tis purchased by the weight; Which therein works a miracle in nature, Making them lightest that wear most of it: So are those crisped snaky golden locks Which make such wanton gambols with the wind, Upon supposed fairness, often known To be the dowry of a second head, The skull that bred them in the sepulchre. Thus ornament is but the guiled shore To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word, The seeming truth which cunning times put on To entrap the wisest. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#beauty #falsehood #ornament #pretense #beauty

After we passed a few more houses, the street ceased to mantain any pretense of urbanity, like a man returning to his little village who, piece by piece, strips off his Sunday best, slowly changing back into a peasant as he gets closer to his home. ↗

— Bruno Schulz

#pretense #urbanity #change

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

#beliefs #between #certitude #different #different beliefs

Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense. ↗

— Tennessee Williams

#confidence #especially #feel #i #influenced

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

— Billy Sunday

#good #hell #many #money #obtaining

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

— Edith Wharton

#family #friends #insincerity #kindness #loneliness

Mrs Forrester ... sat in state, pretending not to know what cakes were sent up, though she knew, and we knew, and she knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew that we knew, she had been busy all the morning making tea-bread and sponge-cakes. ↗

— Elizabeth Gaskell

#cakes #humor #modesty #pretense #tea-parties

I was utterly convinced that an intellectual could never be anything but an intellectual, was simply not capable of being anything else, that his intellectuality would, sooner or later, erode his faith or erode whatever he'd masked it with . . . For example, intellectuals like to dress themselves up as peasants . . . but it never works. The intellectual's constitution is impervious to such things - it permits only one object of worship - oneself. Generally speaking, an intellectual in the contemporary version is an exceptionally resourceful and, essentially, pitiful being. ↗

— Leonid Borodin

#intellectualism #intellectuals #posturing #pretense #faith

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

— Susan Sontag

#pretense #self-love #selflessness #love