Masked Reality Quotes

Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear - they are merely masks... Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.

Now I am nothing but a veil; all my body is a veil beneath which a child sleeps.

Behind every glorious facade there is always hidden something ugly.

Here too it’s masquerade, I find: As everywhere, the dance of mind. I grasped a lovely masked procession, And caught things from a horror show… I’d gladly settle for a false impression, If it would last a little longer, though.

We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real...and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. (295)

And, after all, what is a lie? 'Tis but the truth in a masquerade.

Many a dangerous temptation comes to us in gay, fine colours, that are but skin-deep.

Everyone saw me on TV or read articles, and it was all about my great marriage, the white picket fence, all this success and my perfect life. But behind the scenes, it was a struggle.

A picture can hide as much as it reveals.

It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.

Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.

People see me as something I'm not.

What audiences see is a curated version of myself.

The truth about a man lies first and foremost in what he hides.

At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that if suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye.

It's very rare that people are exactly who they appear to be. Venice has a lot of that too, but the face of it is quite beautiful, interesting, and textured.

Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face - for me that would be deserving of an award.

I was like a chocolate in a box, looking well behaved and perfect in place, all the while harboring a secret center.

Life is a mask through which the universe expresses itself.

A Fox entered the house of an actor and, rummaging through all his properties, came upon a Mask, an admirable imitation of a human head. He placed his paws on it and said, "What a beautiful head! Yet it is of no value, as it entirely lacks brains."

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.