Gertrude Stein Quotes

People know when you're frontin'.

Affectation hath always had a greater share both in the action and discourse of men than truth and judgment have.

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.

Half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew for no one was ever for a second taken in.

When cleverness emerges There is great hypocrisy.

Only liars manage to always be out during bad times and in during good times.

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true.

Customary use of artifice is the sign of a small mind, and it almost always happens that he who uses it to cover one spot uncovers himself in another.

To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.

Ambition drove many men to become false; to have one thought locked in the breast, another ready on the tongue.

Always be sincere, even if you don't mean it.

Let us not foist this humbug on the world.

I'm candy-coated poison, and you should not believe anything else.

Politicians pretend not to be smart.

Great affectation and great absence of it are at first sight very similar.

Affectation is to be always distinguished from hypocrisy as being the art of counterfeiting those qualities, which we might with innocence and safety, be known to want. Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy; affectation part of the chosen trappings of folly.

I know you're a fool, Jim Hardy, but for heaven's sake pretend you're not for five minutes.

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.

Affected simplicity is an elegant imposture.

Their false compassion is called compassion and their false understanding is called understanding, for this is their most potent spell.

Affected simplicity is a subtle imposture.

I don't like it when someone can look you in the eye and lie to you, or pretend that they're more than you.

Common hypocrites pass themselves off as doves; political and literary hypocrites pose as eagles. But don't be fooled by their eagle-like appearance. These are not eagles, but rats or dogs.

Great vices are the proper objects of our detestation, smaller faults of our pity, but affectation appears to be the only true source of the ridiculous.

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