(129 quotes found)
“Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself;... In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.”
Soren Kierkegaard
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
Oscar Wilde
“It's a terrible thing to be alone -- yes it is -- it is -- but don't lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath --as terrible as you like --but a mask.”
Katherine Mansfield
“Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
James Arthur Baldwin
“The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.”
Cesare Pavese
“Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking, in need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware, keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.”
Carolyn Kizer
“1)Why do you wear a mask? Were you burned by acid or something? 2)Oh no. It's just they're terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.”
The Princess Bride
“Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked.”
Walter Savage Landor
“And every occasion when a mask was torn off, an ideal broken, was preceded by this hateful vacancy and stillness, this deathly constriction and loneliness and unrelatedness, this waste and empty hell of lovelenessness and despair, such as I had now t”
Hermann Hesse
