Insincerity Quotes

“I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“Being nice merely to be liked in return nullifies the point.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Woodcutters

“You can't let the truth bring out the worst and let it get the best of you.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“A sign of a lover of wisdom is his delight in not running his mouth about things he doesn't know.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

“When you aren't sincere you need to pretend, and by pretending you end up believing yourself; that's the basic principle of every faith.”
― Alberto Moravia, The Time of Indifference

“I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.”
― Jospeh Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“I had trouble listening to adults who didn't really mean anything that they said; it was as if their language poured into my ears only to drain right out a little spigot in the back of my head.”
― Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

“The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don’t—whichever seems likelier to win an effect.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“Miss Bingley's congratulations to her brother, on his approaching marriage, were all that was affectionate and insincere.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“It is a mark of insincerity of purpose to spend one's time in looking for the sacred Emperor in the low-class tea-shops.”
― Ernest Bramah, Wallet of Kai Lung

“I feel like teenagers get a bad rap for changing things up all the time. We're fake or we're insincere or we're superficial. But if you do it to please yourself, what's insincere about that?”
― Agnes Borinsky, Sasha Masha

“The foundation of Hollywood alchemically turned celluloid into gold and insincerity into an art form.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Social conscience is a fashion, it changes every year.”
― Josef Škvorecký, Engineer of Human Souls

“The tide had begun to ebb. Margaret leant over the parapet and watched it sadly. Mr. Wilcox had forgotten his wife, Helen her lover; she herself was probably forgetting. Every one moving. Is it worth while attempting the past when there is this continual flux even in the hearts of men?”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“Some people will rip out your heart with a steak knife then say, “Oops, sorry, do you need a plaster?”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“Many ask: “Why are we so insincere, why are we so hypocrites?”. Well, it is because this is how human nature works. If there was a time and a place where human beings were 100% of the time honest, who always said what they had in mind and who didn’t care to cover their shortcomings by displaying a better persona than the “real” one, it is long since gone, wiped out from the relentless force of natural selection.”
― Giannis Delimitsos, A PHILOSOPHICAL KALEIDOSCOPE: Thoughts, Contemplations, Aphorisms

“dialectics as a symptom of decadence”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Why I Am So Wise

“People say it far too much, 'I'll be eternally grateful' is one of the most vacuous statements ever uttered and yet one hears it often, always with that unvarying epithet, always that same irresponsible 'eternally', another clue to its absolute lack of reality, or truth or meaning”
― Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear / Dance and Dream / Poison, Shadow, and Farewell

“Two of the biggest problems with language is that you can say what you do not mean to say, and that you can say what you do not mean.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, P for Pessimism: A Collection of Funny yet Profound Aphorisms

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. (...) ? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.”
― George Orwell, Orwell on Truth

“Love this quotation I just read:

“Ciao,” the girl said.
Fuck you, ciao. Ciao was the way Katherine and her friends said good-bye and it always struck her as a perfect symbol of their attempts to be what they weren’t.”
― Judith Rossner, Looking for Mr. Goodbar

“Nothing in this world scares me
More than applause!
Yes, I suffer from what can be called
‘Acute Applause Syndrome’!
Applause the bread of the hypocrites
The talent of the frauds
The compliments of liars
For other liars…”
― Louis Yako, أنا زهرة برية [I am a Wildflower]

“Nothing in this world scares me
More than applause!
Yes, I suffer from what can be called
‘Acute Applause Syndrome’!
Applause the bread of the hypocrites
The talent of the frauds
The compliments of liars
For other liars…
…
Each time I hear an applause,
I’m reminded of all the dirty hands
That applauded
Wars
Genocide
And massacres…
I’m reminded of all the hands that applauded
Political parties
Ideologies
And religions
That kills humanity and humans every day…
I feel the clappers holding my breath
And raping me in daylight…”
― Louis Yako, أنا زهرة برية [I am a Wildflower]

“he was terribly sorry for all the things that he couldn’t remember and weren’t his fault”
― John Crace

“Ironically, some of the most foolish, prejudiced comments made were the ones by wits and grumps trying to impress others with their brains.”
― Criss Jami

“Like all fads which come and go, all are familiar with those types of people who want to seem tough, who for some form of acceptance want to impress others with their rigidity; but there is another kind of person that does the same thing when espousing on 'love': while some pretend to be tougher than they really are, others pretend to be lovers when they really aren't.”
― Criss Jami