Seneca the Younger Quotes

No one can wear a mask for very long.

Camouflage is a game we all like to play, but our secrets are as surely revealed by what we want to seem to be as by what we want to conceal.

God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.

Very few of us are what we seem.

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.

A man may not always be what he appears to be, but what he appears to be is always a significant part of what he is.

Man is a make-believe animal: he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.

You have to put on more faces to pretend who you are.

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

I'm really good at pretending.

No one is ever who they purport to be.

I'm not acting, but I am acting.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Life is a masquerade.

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

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.

It might be said that the pose of absolute honesty is the most dishonest one of all.

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

A mask tells us more than a face.

This is my disguise, but it doesn't work.

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

Fire is to represent truth because it destroys all sophistry and lies; and the mask is for lying and falsehood which conceal truth.

The trouble with a mask is it never changes

So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.