Isabelle Adjani Quotes

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

Hypocrisy is great fodder for comedy.

The politician is an acrobat. He keeps his balance by saying the opposite of what he does.

Be a hypocrite if you like, but don't talk like one.

Hypocrites are more enraging than extremists, as every campaign operative knows.

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.

Publicly, we say one thing....Actually, we do another.

I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath made me mad.

When men think and believe in one set of symbols and act in ways which are contrary to their professed and conscious ideas, confusion and insincerity are bound to result.

It's the old American Double Standard, ya know: Say one thing, do somethin' different. And of course this country is founded on the double standard. That's our history. We were founded on a very basic double standard: This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free.

The people heard it, and approved the doctrine, and immediately practiced the contrary.

The commonplace expression that life is nothing but a play is verified above all in this: the world speaks absolutely consistently in one way and acts absolutely consistently in another.

But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.

How can we bless at one moment and curse at another?

Most illogical Irrational nature of our womanhood, That blushes one way, feels another way, And prays, perhaps another!

The English are the people of consummate cant.

The hypocrite recognizes the honest man as his deadly enemy.

A humanitarian is always a hypocrite.

Whatever is born is the work of God. So whatever is plastered on, is the devil's work.... How unworthy of the Christian name it is to wear a fictitious face - you on whom simplicity in every form is enjoined! You, to whom lying with the tongue is not lawful, are lying in appearance.

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.

There is no more dangerous experiment than that of undertaking to be one thing before a man's face and another behind his back.

Cottages have them (falsehood and dissimulation) as well as courts, only with worse manners.

The minute you try to talk business with him he takes the attitude that he is a gentleman and a scholar, and the moment you try to approach him on the level of his moral integrity he starts to talk business.

You seem to be going in for sincerity today. It isn't becoming to you, really — except as an obvious pose. Be as artificial as you are, I advise. There's a sort of sincerity in that, you know. And, after all, you must confess you like that better.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral.