Robert G. Ingersoll Quotes

We often pretend to fear what we really despise, and more often despise what we really fear.

I fear that many a man's good resolutions only need the ordinary fire of daily life to make them melt away. So, too, with fine professions and the boastings of perfection which abound in this age of shams.

The better day, the worse deed.

It is bad for the soul to know itself a coward, it is apt to take refuge in mere wordy violence.

We're going to have to let truth scream louder to our souls than the lies that have infected us.

We often shed tears that deceive ourselves after deceiving others.

Whoever is a hypocrite in his religion mocks God, presenting to Him the outside and reserving the inward for his enemy.

Piety is not an end, but a means: a means of attaining the highest culture by the purest tranquility of soul. Hence it may be observed that those who set up piety as an end and object are mostly hypocrites.

Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.

Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.

Lying is a terrible vice, it testifies that one despises God, but fears men.

You know, that might be the answer - to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail.

No one and nothing can harm us, child, except what we fear and love.

Most of us are aware of and pretend to detest the barefaced instances of that hypocrisy by which men deceive others, but few of us are upon our guard or see that more fatal hypocrisy by which we deceive and over-reach our own hearts.

It is the wisdom of the crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour.

How frightened hypocrisy hastens to defend itself.

But the problem is to make the soul into a monster

I don't belong. Not here. Not now. I have to get back there. The bet was rigged, he made me believe. Now there's darkness in my soul. I want to die . . . again. But I choose to come back, why?

Why, I can smile and murder whiles I smile, And cry 'content' to that which grieves my heart, And wet my cheeks with artificial tears, And frame my face for all occasions

Saintliness is also a temptation.

If you scratch some saints you will find the devil.

We act empty and innocent but we are fueled by distortions of lives led in discontent trading misfortunes cause faith is one thing that is hard to deliver it feels funny being free.

A spoiled saint, a Pharisee, an inquisitor, or a magician, makes better sport to Hell than a mere common tyrant or debauchee.

Pure truth, like pure gold, has been found unfit for circulation because men have discovered that it is far more convenient to adulterate the truth than to refine themselves.

My father told me that some voices are so true they can be used as weapons, can maneuver the weather, change time. He said that a voice that powerful can walk away from the singer if it is shamed. After my father left us, I learned that some voices can deceive you. There is a top layer and there is a bottom, and they don't match.