“Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing.” - Edmund Burke

“Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"There is no sense of 'I' without its correlative sense of you, or he, or they." - Charles Horton Cooley

"As we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass, and are interested in them because they are ours, and pleased or otherwise with them according as they do or do not answer to what we should like them to be, so in imagination we perceive in another's mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it." - Charles Horton Cooley

"Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time."

"Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves."

"The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind."

“One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)
We Wear the Mask

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!




"We are not ourselves. We are merely what others perceive us to be." - Me