The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.

Yes, there is no good pretending, it is hard to leave everything.

I used to think that once a writer became a man of letters, if only for a half hour, he was done for. And here I am now, at the very moment of such an odious, though respectable, danger.

Very probably, it was not part of the sofa vaudeville of a showoff but, rather, the private, exposed achievement of a young man who, at one time or another, might have tried shaving himself left-handed.

Those who wish to seem learned to fools, seem fools to the learned.

Pretending is a virtue. If you cant pretend, you can't be king.

It is in vain that we get upon stilts, for, once on them, it is still with our legs that we must walk. And on the highest throne in the world we are still sitting on our own ass.

Foreign diplomats could have modeled their conduct on the way the Negro postmen, Pullman porters, and dining car waiters of Roxbury [Massachusetts] acted, striding around as if they were wearing top hats and cutaways.

Affectation is an awkward and forced imitation of what should be genuine and easy, wanting the beauty that accompanies what is natural.

The qualities we have do not make us so ridiculous as those which we affect.

Nothing prevents our being natural so much as the desire to appear so.

Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy, affectation part of the chosen trappings of folly; the one completes a villain, the other only finishes a fop.

We all wear some disguise, make some professions, use some artifice, to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom.

Some degree of affection is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body; we must overact our part in some measure, in order to produce any effect at all.

All human beings have gray little souls-and they all want to rouge them up.

Excusations, cessions, modesty itself well governed, are but arts of ostentation.

Almost every man wastes part of his life in attempts to display qualities which he does not possess, and to gain applause which he cannot keep.