Henry David Thoreau Quotes

A single moment spent in a business meeting or at a pub is more than enough to reveal the basic human truth that we are all faking it most of the time. We congratulate a rival on a triumph when actually we are choking on spite. We are cordial and attentive to crashing bores.

There is none who does not lie hourly in the respect he pays to false appearance.

Men take more pains to mask than mend.

…She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul.

Truth is for tailors and shoemakers. I, on the contrary, have always held that the Lord has a penchant for masquerades.

Truth looks tawdry when she is overdressed.

The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.

Beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.

Nothing is what it seems on the surface of Heroes.

Oh my God, sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth, I wish I could just stay up here and rest and be kind." But somebody brought up some wine and that started me off.

It is not uncommon to charge the difference between promise and performance, between profession and reality, upon deep design and studied deceit; but the truth is, that there is very little hypocrisy in the world.

Dreck is dreck and no amount of fancy polish is going to make it anything else.

On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.

Be careful what you're doing, because no one is ever who you want them to be.

Conversation is the wall we build between ourselves and other people, too often with tired words like used and broken bottles which, catching the sunlight as they lie embedded in the wall, are mistaken for jewels.

Always scorn appearances and you always may.

The candid camera is the greatest liar in the photographic family.... It is anarchic, naïve, and superficial.

Wine invents nothing; it only tattles.

When he admitted this to me, I found myself almost annoyed. It was as if he'd hidden this part of himself in order to deceive me, pretending-- as do many people I've discovered--to be what he is not. No one I've ever known is what he appears to be on the surface.

The solitary knows the essence of the thought, the scholar in society only its fair face.

That excitement about Kossuth, consider how characteristic, but superficial, it was!--only another kind of politics or dancing. Men were making speeches to him all over the country, but each expressed only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stood on truth. They were merely banded together, as usual one leaning on another, and all together on nothing.

Man, in spite of his tendency towards mendacity, has a great respect for what he calls the truth. Truth is his staff in his voyage through life; commonplaces are the bread in his bag and the wine in his jug.

people who personify the system are indeed well known for not being what they seem to be; they have achieved greatness by embracing a level of reality lower than that of the most insignificant individual life- and everyone knows it.

Boasting, like gilded armour, is very different inside from outside.

It's a Barnum and Bailey world, Just as phony as it can be...