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
About This Quote

A person who has the ability to pretend to be something they are not is a pretender. Someone who can mask their true identity and hide behind a mask of lies is a deceiver. Pretense is different from lies, as those lies are designed to hide the truth. Pretense hides truths, but those truths can still be found by those who look hard enough.

Source: Woodcutters

Some Similar Quotes
  1. Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something. - Rainbow Rowell
  2. It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done. - Vincent Van Gogh
  3. Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep. - Clive Barker
  4. Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you. - Chuck Klosterman
  5. There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people. - Vincent Van Gogh
More Quotes By Thomas Bernhard
  1. Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.
  2. It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.
  3. Those who live in the country get idiotic in time, without noticing it, for a while they think it's original and good for their health, but life in the country is not original at all, for anyone who wasn't born in and for the country...
  4. The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me-- I have no others.
  5. Almost everybody we get together with about a matter, even if it is of the highest importance, is incompetent.
Related Topics