Seneca the Younger Quotes

When you do an interview with me, you're talking to a cheap imitation of the person that I really am. There's no magic in my words, it's just me talking.

The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.

To carry a false persona is an extra burden. Who needs that?

Yet she felt an impostor, and already the mask had begun to bite into her face.

If we took as much pains to be what we ought, as we do to deceive others by disguising what we are; we might appear as we are, without being at the trouble of any disguise.

Most people love you for who you pretend to be.

We can never see who someone really is underneath the skin.

I'm not good at fake.

It was really tiring always pretending to be someone else. Not my life, not my real name, nothing.

I'm a terrible faker.

I'm committed to an honest expression, not necessarily a performance.

It's such a horrible feeling to not be honest to who you are.

He would be the finer gentleman that should leave the world without having tasted of lying or pretence of any sort, or of wantonness or conceit.

I feel inauthentic at a party. ... Going to a party is a 'low' activity - the authentic self is compromised, fragmented - one plays 'roles.' One isn't fully present, beyond role-playing. One doesn't (can't) tell the full truth, which means one is lying, even if one doesn't literally tell lies.

You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.

Men take more pains to mask than mend.

The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself

It is never persuasive to argue that you are not the kind of person who does what you are actually doing.

It doesn't ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.

The trouble with a mask is it never changes

Perhaps one never seems so much at ones ease as when one has to play a part.

One is what one is, and the dishonesty of hiding behind a degree, or a title, or any manner and collection of words, is still exactly that: dishonest.

Aspire to be the man you pretend to be when you're trying to get laid.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

Most of our occupations are low comedy.... We must play our part duly, but as the part of a borrowed character. Of the mask and appearance we must not make a real essence, nor of what is foreign what is our very own.