Merle Shain Quotes

Through tattered clothes, small vices do appear. Robes and furred gowns hide all.

This age thinks better of a gilded fool Than of a threadbare saint in wisdom's school.

Whenever there are great virtues, it's a sure sign something's wrong.

The trappings of lifestyle are often that; traps.

Vice, in its true light, is so deformed, that it shocks us at first sight; and would hardly ever seduce us, if it did not at first wear the mask of some virtue.

We must put up with our clothes as they are - they have their reason for existing. They are on us to expose us - to advertise what we wear them to conceal. They are a sign; a sign of insincerity; a sign of suppressed vanity; a pretense that we desire gorgeous colors and the graces of harmony and form; and we put them on to propagate that lie and back it up.

Maidens, like moths, are ever caught, by glare, And Mammon wins his way where seraphs might despair.

High rank and soft manners may not always belong to a true heart.

In Hollywood people lie to each other and cheat each other and then go and play tennis. But I don't want to be a tennis player.

Virtue must be valuable, if men and women of all degrees pretend to have it.

I would wear the blue overalls of the fieldworker and often wore round, rimless glasses known as Mazzawati teaglasses. I had a car, and I wore a chauffeur's cap with my overalls. The pose of chauffeur was convenient because I could travel under the pretext of driving my master's car.

Men make counterfeit money; in many more cases, money makes counterfeit men.

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

Fashion is the science of appearance, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.

In our lives in a lot of ways it's all about fake. You've got people wanting things for fake reasons.

Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

Beauty is only skin deep, but it's a valuable asset if you're poor or haven't any sense.

Putting on someone else's clothes is like putting on a mask.

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

Clothes make the poor invisible. America has the best-dressed poverty the world has ever known.

The seven blunders that human society commits and cause all the violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principles.

We have a Sunday code and a weekday code. We preach good and practice evil. We clothe the wolf of our actions in the sheep's clothing of our beautiful phrases.

We judge of entire nations by the productions of a few mechanical arts, and think we are talking of men, while we are boasting of their estates, their dress, and their palaces. The sense in which we apply the terms, great, and noble, high rank, and high life, show, that we have, on such occasions, transferred the idea of perfection from the character to the equipage; and that excellence itself is, in our esteem, a mere pageant, adorned at a great expense, by the labors of many workmen.

A wise man poor Is like a sacred book that ’s never read,— To himself he lives, and to all else seems dead. This age thinks better of a gilded fool Than of a threadbare saint in wisdom’s school.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.