Marguerite Gardiner Quotes

Do you expect sincerity in man when hypocrisy is the very keynote of human nature? We are nurtured on it; we are schooled in it, we live by it; and we rarely realize it.’ – Book 3, Chapter 16

I am fascinated by that notion of people are never as they seem. And that doesn't make them good or bad. It's just we don't ever really show ourselves if we don't have to.

I can't stand fake people. I can feel it when someone feigns it.

What we want is to be real. Let us not appear to be more than we are. Don't let us put on any cant, any assumed humility, but let us be real; that is the delight of God. God wants us to be real men and women, and if we profess to be what we are not, God knows all about us. God hates sham.

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.

The real self is who you are when you're at home, when you're comfortable, and the false self is what you're pretending - and the reason you pretend is because you want to create a character for the surroundings you're within.

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins

The gentleman is solid mahogany; the fashionable man is only veneer.

Real’ is a dirty word in this place.

Most people love you for who you pretend to be.

If mankind were only just what they pretend to be, the problem of the millennium would be immediately solved.

High rank and soft manners may not always belong to a true heart.

I'm not one of those people who has an act.

In reality most people aren't as perfect as they want to seem.

Out of five hundred who speak glibly of love, not one can spell the first letter of his name.

God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.

Well, I think most people understand that there's a big difference between who you are and who, you know, you play.

I abhor hypocrisy.

Everybody has many people inside of them; I think we tend to present the one we feel is most appropriate at first, in order to gain acceptance or achieve what we want. It gets really interesting when this technique fails, and other levels are revealed.

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

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

Nothing prevents one from appearing natural as the desire to appear natural.

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