Great Throughts Treasury

"Sincerity makes an untruth seem like a truth, while insincerity makes a truth seem like an untruth." - Israel Salanter Lipkin

"Marriage always demands the greatest understanding of the art of insincerity possible between two human beings." - Vicki Baum, fully Hedwig "Vicki" Baum

"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 cuttlefish squirting out ink." - George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair

"There is no wickedness so desperate or deceptive - we can never foresee its consequences. Of all the evil spirits abroad in the world, insincerity is the most dangerous." - James Froude, fully James Anthony Froude

"Nothing is more disgraceful than insincerity." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

"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." - Nathaniel Hawthorne

"The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when it be obeyed." - Nathaniel Hawthorne

"My daughter’s direct, spontaneous, and affectionate nature released me from many of the protective mechanisms I had developed, above all the fear that my love might be exploited. With her I had no need to protect myself. At last I could love, trust, and be tender without any apprehensions about my openness being misused for corrective educational purposes – as was the case with my mother – or my feelings being hurt. As I did not have the good fortune of enjoying an open and warmhearted relationship with my mother, this new opportunity for communication – for all its tragic aspects and the restrictions it brought with it – was more of a blessing than anything else… The spontaneity with which my daughter expressed her childlike, innocent, affectionate nature at whatever age she happened to be, and her sensitivity to insincerity and disingenuousness in whatever form, gave my life new dimensions and new objectives." - Alice Miller, née Rostovski

"Children sense insincerity in exaggerated praise, and soon learn to discount it." - Robert W. Fuller, fully Robert Works Fuller

"One learns to itch where one can scratch." - Ernest Bramah, born Ernest Brammah Smith