Emil Cioran Quotes

If you want to say something and have people listen then you have to wear a mask. If you want to be honest then you have to live a lie.

Nothing creates such untruth in you as the wish to please.

Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

I was living a life of a lie, I really was.

All I can say is anybody who's spent most of his life living a lie is not somebody I admire.

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

How do men feel whose whole lives (and many men's lives are) are lies, schemes, and subterfuges? What sort of company do they keep when they are alone? Daily in life I watch men whose every smile is an artifice, and every wink is an hypocrisy. Doth such a fellow where a mask in his own privacy, and to his own conscience?

Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself -- in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity -- is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.

...but now the worst crime was pretending to be something you were not.

Petra turned to her. "Everybody lies about who they are. Name one person here who isn't doing that and I will drop out right now!" Shanti felt that snake of truth coil around her legs, threatening to squeeze. "I didn't mean..." "No one ever does." Petra said, shoving the baton back at Shanti.

Every day, I live a lie But not the crocodile kind.

Seriously, I've just realized that almost everyone is a fraud, so I try not to feel too bad about it.

It is easier to pretend to be what you are not than to hide what you really are; but he that can accomplish both has little to learn in hypocrisy.

Nothing is so tiresome to one's self, as well as so odious to others, as disguise and affectation.

We lie to one another every day, in the sweetest way, often unconsciously. We dress ourselves and compose ourselves in order to present ourselves to one another.

One of my weaknesses happens to be lying, and I could tell you that I'm never going to lie again in my life, but that would be a lie.

I was living a complete lie. But unfortunately, guilt doesn't make you stop.

I am not sincere, even when I say I am not.

I was raised to pretend.

Personality is everything that's false in a human: everything that's been added on to him and contrived.

I've been living a lie all my life.

In the ordinary church, it is suppressed by respectability, by a desire to appear better than we really are.

You have to put on more faces to pretend who you are.

We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity.