Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

Tell a man that he is putting on a stage performance in order to get what he wants, and he will irritably reject your observation. Why? Because most people go through life as cunning actors with a permanent horror of getting found out.

We are never so ridiculous through what we are as through what we pretend to be.

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.

To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe.

You never see what you want to see, forever playing to the gallery.

We all lie to each other, present some sort of front.

Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.

Away, and mock the time with fairest show. False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

We get so much in the habit of wearing disguises before others that we finally appear disguised before ourselves.

Fear wears so many clever disguises it is virtually impossible to always recognize it. Fear disguises itself as the need to be somewhere else, doing something else, not knowing how to do something or not needing to do something.

Many would be cowards if they had courage enough.

Great affectation and great absence of it are at first sight very similar.

With old liars who have been acting all their lives there are moments when they enter so completely into their part that they tremble or shed tears in earnest, although at that very moment, or a second later, they are able to whisper to themselves, "You know you are lying, you shameless old sinner! You're acting now, in spite of your 'holy' wrath.

So you were going to rescue the Prince! Why did you pretend to run away? To deceive the Witch?" "Not likely! I'm a coward. Only way I can do something this frightening is to tell myself I'm not doing it!

Insincerity in a man's own heart must make all his enjoyments, all that concerns him, unreal; so that his whole life must seem like a merely dramatic representation.

We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles.

The monster is never just there where we think he is. What is truly monstrous is our cowardice and sloth.

It needs fanatical faith to rationalize our cowardice.

Passionate people invariably deny their anger, and cowards often boast their ignorance of fear.

It is only in his head that man is heroic; in the pit of his stomach he is always a coward.

Many a time comes when we want to interpret our weakness and cowardice as forgiveness and renunciation.

Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear.

I'm going to rub your faces in things you try to avoid. I don't find it strange that all you want to believe is only that which comforts you. How else do humans invent the traps which betray us into mediocrity? How else do we define cowardice?