Pretense Quotes - Page 4

• Giving advice is many times only the privilege of saying a foolish thing one's self, under the pretense of hindering another from doing one.

  Alexander Pope

  Self, Giving, Advice

  Alexander Pope, Alexander Chalmers (1807). “A Supplementary Volume to the Works of Alexander Pope, Esq: Containing Pieces of Poetry, Not Inserted in Warburton's and Warton's Editions : and a Collection of Letters, Now First Published”, p.122

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• Piety is the tinfoil of pretense.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Piety

  Elbert Hubbard, Bert Hubbard (1923). “Selected writings of Elbert Hubbard: his mintage of wisdom, coined from a life of love, laughter and work”

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• [T]he vast regulatory structure the federal government has erected in the name of the commerce power cannot be ended overnight, in many cases, but the pretense that such programs are constitutional can be ended, even as the programs themselves are phased out over time.

  Roger Pilon

  Government, Names, Program

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• Love is a choice -- not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile.

  Carter Heyward

  Love Is, Choices, Rational

  Carter Heyward (1984). “Our Passion for Justice: Images of Power, Sexuality, and Liberation”

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• Perhaps there is no other knowing than the mere competence of the act. If at the heart of one's being, there is no self to which one ought to be true, then sincerity is simply nerve; it lies in the unabashed vigor of the pretense. But pretense is only pretense when it is assumed that the act is not true to the agent. Find the agent.

  Alan Watts

  Truth, Lying, Heart

  Alan W. Watts, Daniel Pinchbeck (2013). “The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness”, p.38, New World Library

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• Basic anxiety can be roughly described as a feeling of being small, insignificant, helpless, deserted or endangered in a world that is out to abuse, cheat, humiliate, betray, envy... . And special in this is the child's feeling that the parents' love, their Christian charity, honesty, generosity ... may be only a pretense.

  Karen Horney

  Christian, Honesty, Children

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• Music is the one thing in which there is no use trying to deceive others or make false pretenses.

  Confucius

  Trying, Use, Deceiving

  Confucius, Qian Sima (1938). “The wisdom of Confucius”, Modern Library

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

  Victoria Moran

  Home, Where You Are

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• We must put up with our clothes as they are - they have their reason for existing. They are on us to expose us - to advertise what we wear them to conceal. They are a sign; a sign of insincerity; a sign of suppressed vanity; a pretense that we desire gorgeous colors and the graces of harmony and form; and we put them on to propagate that lie and back it up.

  Mark Twain

  Lying, Vanity, Color

  Mark Twain (2015). “Bite-Size Twain: Wit and Wisdom from the Literary Legend”, p.17, St. Martin's Press

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• One may wonder indeed whether the pretense of superior health is not itself rapidly becoming a mental aberration.

  Rene Dubos

  Health, Aberration, May

  René Jules Dubos (1987). “Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change”, p.25, Rutgers University Press

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• In America, after 9/11, and after the death of bin Laden, and after two wars, one of them fought, a lot of people think, on false pretenses, and definitely post the Patriot Act, there are a lot of these questions about what can we do to our citizens in order to prevent the next attack.

  Gideon Raff

  War, Thinking, Order

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

  Val Kilmer

  Normal

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• 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

  Biblical, Order, Brain

  Criss Jami (2015). “Killosophy”, p.34, Criss Jami

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• There are a set of men who go about making purchases upon credit, and buying estates they have not wherewithal to pay for; and having done this, their next step is to fill the newspapers with paragraphs of the scarcity of money and the necessity of a paper emission, then to have a legal tender under the pretense of supporting its credit, and when out, to depreciate it as fast as they can, get a deal of it for a little price, and cheat their creditors; and this is the concise history of paper money schemes.

  Thomas Paine

  Men, Scarcity, Credit

  Thomas Paine (1830). “Brief sketch of the life of Thomas Paine. Common sense. Epistle to Quakers. The crisis. Public good. Letter to the Abbe Raynal. Dissertations on government, the affairs of the bank, and paper money. Miscellaneous”, p.405

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• And this is what has taken place. The delusion of the day is to enrich all classes at the expense of each other; it is to generalize plunder under pretense of organizing it.

  Frederic Bastiat

  Taken, Class, Plunder

  Frederic Bastiat (2017). “The Law”, p.15, Lulu.com

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

  Anna Kendrick

  Valentines Day, Weekend, Long

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• I didn't come from any kind of academic background, but I lived in a college town and I knew people who weren't without pretense. There was this idea in the town that if something was European it would be good.

  Sarah Vowell

  College, Ideas, People

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• Be niggards of advice on no pretense; For the worst avarice is that of sense.

  Alexander Pope

  Advice, Niggard, Worst

  Alexander Pope (2015). “An Essay on Criticism”, p.17, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• One of the easiest forms of pretense to break down is the pretense of enthusiasm for exotic foods. Just bring on the exotic foods.

  Robert Benchley

  Justice, Exotic, Enthusiasm

  Robert Benchley (2016). “My Ten Years in a Quandary and How They Grew”, p.303, Pickle Partners Publishing

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• 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

  Children, Attitude, Action

  Henry Fuseli (1831). “Lectures”, p.77

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• I don’t claim to know an over-arching ‘Meaning of Life,’ but I do operate under the understanding that life should not be lived under the pretense that it is simply a test propagated by an invisible, intangible, Creator-God. And it should not be spent identifying with religious traditions and organized groups that, historically, have been at the root of a tremendous amount of oppression and violence.

  David G. McAfee

  Religious, Roots, Creator God

  FaceBook post by David G. McAfee from Aug 06, 2014

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• Many times Christians state their love for the Lord and their willingness to die for Him. I will make no pretense of knowing the Lord's will in your life, but I do feel that in most cases the Lord is far more interested in our living for Him than He is in our dying for Him.

  Zig Ziglar

  Christian, Knowing, Dying

  Zig Ziglar, Dwight "Ike" Reighard (2013). “The One Year Daily Insights with Zig Ziglar”, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

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• So much of my life has been about self-effacement, pretense, masquerading, concealment, and indirection.

  Marlon Riggs

  Self, Confession, Has Beens

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• The bully mind is not capable of loving or respecting others nor can it love or respect itself. Life's subtleties and the means of survival require its pretense of both these qualities.

  Rick Stein

  Bullying, Mean, Survival

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• 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

  Real, Distance, Taken

  bell hooks (2014). “Black Looks: Race and Representation”, p.170, Routledge

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