Jean de la Bruyere Quotes

Dissimulation creeps gradually into the minds of men.

It is of great consequences to disguise your inclination, and to play the hypocrite well.

Be not caught by the cunning of those who appear in a disguise.

Knavery's plain face is never seen till used.

Vice knows [its] ugly, so [it] puts on [a] mask.

Experience teaches you that the man who looks you straight in the eye, particularly if he adds a firm handshake, is hiding something.

A fraudulent intent, however carefully concealed at the outset, will generally, in the end, betray itself.

The priest is the personification of falsehood.

The art of using deceit and cunning grow continually weaker and less effective to the user.

Knavery and flattery are blood relations.

Secrecy is the badge of fraud.

If Edith Wharton lived in the Age of Innocence, surely we now live in the Age of Deception.

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

The craftiest trickery are too short and ragged a cloak to cover a bad heart.

Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?

Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear - they are merely masks... Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.

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.

A little threat of evil is always the far better way to fill the seats. But sometimes the monsters aren't who we think they are.

Cunning is a short blanket--if you pull it over your face, you expose your feet.

If you fake the funk, your nose will grow.

It is not uncommon to charge the difference between promise and performance, between profession and reality, upon deep design and studied deceit; but the truth is, that there is very little hypocrisy in the world.

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.

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.

Of all the evil spirits abroad at this hour in the world, insincerity is the most dangerous.

Everybody lies...every day, every hour, awake, asleep, in his dreams, in his joy, in his mourning. If he keeps his tongue still his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude will convey deception.