Blaise Pascal Quotes

I don't want people to know me. I want them to believe my version.

If you want to say something and have people listen then you have to wear a mask. If you want to be honest then you have to live a lie.

One face to the world, another at home - makes for misery.

He has to conceal what he would most wish to make public, and make public what he would most wish to conceal.

It is curious that we pay statesmen for what they say, not for what they do; and judge of them from what they do, not from what they say. Hence they have one code of maxims for profession and another for practice, and make up their consciences as the Neapolitans do their beds, with one set of furniture for show and another for use.

I hear it said of somebody that he is leading a double life. I think to myself: Just two?

He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people.

As to conforming outwardly and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that.

I was then at the height of my two-facedness: that is, outside I seemed one way, inside I was another; outside false, inside true.

The English are the people of consummate cant.

For we have thought the longer thoughts And gone the shorter way. And we have danced to devils' tunes, Shivering home to pray; To serve one master in the night, Another in the day.

I think people's soul - I think you can kind of see it - there's what they say and there's what they do.

If people only knew how much I secretly hated them, they'd love me for holding it in.

Of all the human evils, of which we have thousands of years of record and our own contemporary experiences, the most horrible evil of all is hypocrisy. It's this idea that there are those who do bad and there are those who do good, when, in fact, even the people who supposedly do good are saying they do good to mask the fact that they do evil.

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.

Hollywood is full of guys who say one thing, and then do another.

As we see now the American officials, they say something in the morning and they do the opposite in the evening. So, you cannot judge those people according to what they say. You cannot take them at their words, to be frank.

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

Speech gave man a unique power to lead a double life, he could say one thing and do another.

If hatred strikes you, if you get accused, thrown to the lions, you can expect one of two reactions from people who know you: some of them will join in the kill, the others will discreetly pretend to know nothing, hear nothing, so you can go right on seeing them and talking to them. That second category, discreet and tactful, those are your friends. 'Friends' in the modern sense of the term. Listen, Jean-Marc, I've known that forever.

Hillary Clinton believes that it's vital to deceive the people by having one public policy and a totally different policy in private.

The real meaning of persona is a mask, such as actors were accustomed to wear on the ancient stage; and it is quite true that no one shows himself as he is, but wears his mask and plays his part. Indeed, the whole of our social arrangements may be likened to a perpetual comedy; and this is why a man who is worth anything finds society so insipid, while a blockhead is quite at home in it.

Sane and intelligent human beings are like all other human beings, and carefully and cautiously and diligently conceal their private real opinions from the world and give out fictitious ones in their stead for general consumption.

A lot of times in politics you have people look you in the eye and tell you what's not on their mind.

Tend to choose what is popular over what is right when they are in conflict. They desire to fit in both at church and outside of church; they care more about what people think of their actions (like church attendance and giving) than what God thinks of their hearts and lives.