W. H. Auden Quotes

We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?

Fewer possess virtue, than those who wish us to believe that they possess it.

Virtue sometimes pretends. Vice is always sincere.

Piety is the tinfoil of pretense.

Personally, I didn't think there was anything wrong with sadness. Just the opposite – hypocrisy made people happy and truth made them sad.

Take the humbug out of this world, and you haven't much left to do business with.

No power can be maintained when it is only represented by hypocrites.

To seem natural rather than to be natural.

You cannot make a business case that you should be who you are not

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.

Men who ape the saint and play the sinner.

Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue.

It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.

You know a man can play the part of a saint just so long for a day comes when his true, his true self unfolds.

Often a noble face hides filthy ways.

Asleep, nobody is a hypocrite

Most people love you for who you pretend to be.

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.

And I loathe people who find it harder to put up with a gown askew than with a soul askew and who judge a man by his bow, his bearing and his boots.

One can ever assume to be what he is not, and to conceal what he is.

A fair face without a fair soul is like a glass eye that shines and sees nothing.

The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving the shell of edifying behavior. Suddenly I discover that I am ministering to AIDS victims to enhance my resume. I find I renounced ice cream for Lent to lose five excess pounds... I have fallen victim to what T.S. Eliot calls the greatest sin: to do the right thing for the wrong reason.

We all wear some disguise, make some professions, use some artifice, to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom.

A rogue does not laugh in the same way that an honest man does; a hypocrite does not shed the tears of a man of good faith. All falsehood is a mask; and however well made the mask may be, with a little attention we may always succeed in distinguishing it from the true face.