“Bob Forestier had pretended for so many years to be a gentleman that in the end, forgetting that it was all a fake, he had found himself driven to act as in that stupid, conventional brain of his he thought a gentleman must act. No longer knowing the difference between sham and real, he had sacrificed his life to a spurious heroism.”

"The lion's skin", p. 283
Short Stories, Collected short stories 1

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Bob Forestier had pretended for so many years to be a gentleman that in the end, forgetting that it was all a fake, he …" by W. Somerset Maugham?

W. Somerset Maugham158

British playwright, novelist, short story writer 1874–1965

Related quotes

“All his life he had lived by the law. Often his job had been to stop acts of revenge…. And now revenge was all that life had left for him.”

Vernor Vinge A Fire Upon the Deep (1st edition)

Source: A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), Chapter 33 (p. 428).

“He had never acted in his life, and couldn't play the pin in Pinafore.”

P.G. Wodehouse book The Luck of the Bodkins

The Luck of the Bodkins (1935)

“He was a very dispirited Poet. He had never expected the world to act in a courteous, seemly, or even sensible manner, and the world had seldom done so; often he had taken heart in the consistency of its rudeness and stupidity. But never before had the world shot the Poet in the abdomen with a musket. This he found not heartening at all.”

Walter M. Miller, Jr. book A Canticle for Leibowitz

Ch 23
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Lux

“Nothing, then, would prevent him henceforth from living his life, a purely secular life, according to his nature and his habits, without having to ask himself at every moment whether what he had done was displeasing to God or not. And since he was no longer the sinner whose life, as soon as he acted by his own powers, was but sin, he would be able to enumerate separately the sins which he had committed on a particular occasion.”

Bernard Groethuysen (1880–1946) French literary historian, translator and writer

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 120

“Thus he had a double thought: the one by which he acted as king, the other by which he recognized his true state, and that it was accident alone that had placed him in his present condition.”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

Discourses on the Condition of the Great

“Man—every man—is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

The Ayn Rand Column ‘Introducing Objectivism’

“The duties of kingship among the anthropoids are not many or arduous. … But Tarzan tired of it, as he found that kingship meant the curtailment of his liberty. He longed for the little cabin and the sun-kissed sea — for the cool interior of the well-built house, and for the never-ending wonders of the many books.
As he had grown older, he found that he had grown away from his people. Their interests and his were far removed. They had not kept pace with him, nor could they understand aught of the many strange and wonderful dreams that passed through the active brain of their human king. So limited was their vocabulary that Tarzan could not even talk with them of the many new truths, and the great fields of thought that his reading had opened up before his longing eyes, or make known ambitions which stirred his soul.
Among the tribe he no longer had friends as of old. A little child may find companionship in many strange and simple creatures, but to a grown man there must be some semblance of equality in intellect as the basis for agreeable association.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 12 : Man's Reason

“He had been through a hundred heartbreaks, but he found himself afraid when he thought of Alexander Lightwood breaking his heart.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: What to Buy the Shadowhunter Who Has Everything

“As I understand it, George Peppard later became a nice guy, a gentleman, but when we worked together back then, he was pretentious, egotistical, a brat, and an asshole—and that’s just for starters! He pretended he was seven years younger than he was; he even claimed to be a bachelor and denied he was married—in front of me (I knew better), he denied their existence. The role of Jonas Cord in The Carpetbaggers really went to his big head. He acquired delusions of grandeur—thought he was God’s gift to women and the movies! His attitude towards me was very bizarre—he acted as though we’d never met! Or that I had a husband!”

Carroll Baker (1931) American actress

On co-star George Peppard, interview http://www.westernclippings.com/interview/carrollbaker_interview.shtml with Mike Fitzgerald, Western Clippings

“He had withdrawn solely for his own personal pleasure, only to be near to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid.”

Patrick Süskind (1949) German writer and screenwriter

Source: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

W. Somerset Maugham158

Related quotes

Related topics