Quotes about mask (383 quotes, page 2) | Quotes of famous people

“The Operative tried to implement the Purusey breathing technique, which has been proven effective at fooling polygraphs. There is no conclusive evidence as to
whether it is effective at masking the internal lie detectors of fifteen-year-old boys.”

Ally Carter I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Source: I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Lie , Fools , Boy

“… because when people have seen you at their worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

People

“Always guarding one's real, precious self in a cocoon of tranquility within a thousand masks.
Life itself had become a secret affair.”

Mary Balogh (1944) Welsh-Canadian novelist

Source: A Secret Affair

Life , Secret

“Some people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly
off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy.”

Luke Davies (1962) Australian writer

Source: Candy

People , Joy , Flying , Madness

“Who? Who is but the form following the function of what, and what I am is a man in a mask.”

Alan Moore V for Vendetta

Source: V for Vendetta

“I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy. My nightly bloodlust overflowed into my days and I had to leave the city. My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage. This was the bone season for me and I needed a vacation.”

Bret Easton Ellis book American Psycho

Source: American Psycho

Season

“Don't cross me Scooby-Doo. I'm not an old man in a mask waiting to be thwarted by you meddling kids.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Infinity

Waiting

“… all cynicism masks a failure to cope.”

John Fowles book The Magus

Source: The Magus

Failure

“I learned that the world didn't see the inside of you, that it didn't care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

World , Dreams , Hope , Learning

“And to the casual observer it looks like I have moved on since I go around wearing my little happy mask all day. I smile and laugh and carry on like my heart's still in one piece, but beneath it all, I am dying.”

Melody Carlson (1956) American writer

Source: Deep Green: Color Me Jealous

Smile , Heart , Happiness

“Give us this day our daily mask.”

Tom Stoppard book Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Source: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it.”

Alan Moore V for Vendetta

Source: V for Vendetta

Forgetting

“Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Source: Girl With Curious Hair

Love , Men , Hope

“I understand better than she'd imagine that history is indelible. You can mask it; you can patch it smooth and clear; but you always know what's hidden underneath.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Vanishing Acts

Imagination , History , Understanding

“There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized world. Society is a masked ball where everyone hides his real character, then reveals it by hiding”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Secret , World

“Masked, I advance.”

René Descartes (1596–1650) French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist

“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 to avoid this?”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Variant: Don't you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this?
Source: Either/Or, Part I

Life , Thinking

“What term do you employ when you speak of your progenitor?"
I answered with the term I'd always wanted to employ.
"Sonovabitch."
"To his face?" she asked.
"I never see his face."
"He wears a mask?"
"In a way, yes. Of stone. Of absolute stone.”

Erich Segal book Love Story

Source: Love Story

Way

“All falsehood is a mask; and however well made the mask may be, with a little attention we may always succeed in distinguishing it from the true face.”

Alexandre Dumas book The Three Musketeers

Source: The Three Musketeers

“The question of the stranger in a society which estranges everybody from it--while forcing everybody to assimilate their own alienation--takes cover under dubious and sinister masks.”

Norman Manea (1936) Romanian writer

Question

“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 (1888–1923) New Zealand author

Letter to her future husband, John Middleton Murry (July 1917), from The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, vol. I

“She had never imagined that curiosty was one of the many masks of love.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Love , Imagination

“All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.”

Steven Millhauser (1943) American novelist and short story writer

“The mask was a thing on it's own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.”

William Golding book Lord of the Flies

Source: Lord of the Flies

“The trouble with a mask is it never changes”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Change

“behind the mask of ice that people wear, there beats a heart of fire.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: Warrior of the Light

People , Heart

“God, it was good to let go, let the tight mask fall off, and the bewildered, chaotic fragments pour out. It was the purge, the catharsis.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

God

“She was the stone-faced queen, then and ever after. She had needed the mask to rule, and she had been glad to have it. She wondered if Eugenides was glad of his.”

Megan Whalen Turner The Queen of Attolia

Source: The Queen of Attolia

“.. we wear the mask that grins and lies,
it hides our cheeks and shades our eyes-
this debt we pay to human guile;
with torn and bleeding hearts we smile.”

Paul Laurence Dunbar book The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar

We Wear The Mask, in the 1913 collection of his work, The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar.
Context: We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

Smile , Heart

“Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face.”

Gregory Maguire book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

World

“If Jacob was right and clothes were costumes and makeup a mask, then our attitudes and habits must be our shields.”

Justina Chen (1968) American writer

Source: North of Beautiful

Clothes

“If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask… with nothing beneath it?”

Jodi Picoult book Nineteen Minutes

Source: Nineteen Minutes

Life , World , Forgetting

“Boredom is a mask frustration wears.”

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Source: Anathem

“3104. Insolence is Pride, with her Mask pulled off.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

“The old Rounder in the iron mask slipped me the master key, somebody had to unlock your heart, he said it was up to me.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Biograph (1985), Up to Me (recorded 1974)

Heart

“The mask, like the side-show freak, is mainly participatory rather than pictorial in its sensory appeal.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 352

“My dreams are the problems of the day stepped up to absurdity, a little like men dancing, wearing the horns and masks of animals.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), unplaced by chapter

Men , Dreams , Problem , Animals

“The idea of natural order, in effect, masks the state’s role. … Robert Hale … demonstrated the extent to which the distribution of income and wealth is the product of legal rules we choose to impose. Hale trained our attention on the foundational rules of property and contract law, showing how free, voluntary, compensated exchange is in fact a product of the legal coercion that the government establishes through its role in defining property rights.”

Bernard Harcourt (1963) American academic

Source: The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (2011), p. 32

Law , Idea , Nature , Training

“Man is a mimic animal, happiest acting a part, needing a mask to tell the truth.”

Subhash Kak (1947) Indian computer scientist

The Prajna Sutra (2007)

Truth , Animals , Parting

“O Death, our masked friend and maker of opportunities, when thou wouldst open the gate, hesitate not to tell us beforehand; for we are not of those who are shaken by its iron jarring.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Karma

Death

“Most of the drivers, however, had the sense to stay put, fuming behind their blank windshields as they calculated the cost of repairs and repainting. Practically all of them were armed, but not one was stupid enough to pull a gun. It had been tried during a Trainite demonstration in San Francisco last month. A girl had been shot dead. Others, anonymous in whole-head masks and drab mock-homespun clothing, had dragged the killer from his car and used the same violent acid they applied to glass to write MURDERER on his flesh.
In any case, there was little future in rolling down a window to curse the demonstrators. Throats didn’t last long in the raw air.”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

December “A ROOST FOR CHICKENS”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Stupidity , Cars , Girl , Sense

“Culture has become a system of defense against technics. This defense appears as a defense of man based on the assumption that technical objects contain no human reality. We should like to show that culture fails to take into account that there is a human reality in technical reality and that, if it is to fully play its role, culture must come to incorporate technical entities into its body of knowledge and its sense of values. Recognition of the modes of existence of technical objects should be the result of philosophical thought, which in this respect has to achieve what is analogous to the role it played in the abolition of slavery and in the affirmation of the value of the human person. The opposition established between culture and technology, between man and machine, is false and is not well-founded; what underlies it is mere ignorance or resentment. Behind the mask of a facile humanism it hides a reality that is rich in human efforts and natural forces, a reality that constitutes the world of technical objects, mediators between nature and man.”

Gilbert Simondon (1924–1989) 20th century French philosopher

Source: Du mode d'existence des object technique (1958), p. 1 (http://www.academia.edu/4184556)

World , Nature , Knowledge , Reality

“Goodness was more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That's why they became evil. That's why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love. even of people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, he said, it had to be fought for.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book One: A Fear of Love

Love , Men , People , Truth

“The glitz and propaganda, the ridiculous obsessions imparted by our electronic hallucinations, and the spectacles that pass for political participation mask the deadly ecological assault by the corporate state. The worse it gets, the more we retreat into self-delusion. We convince ourselves that global warming does not exist. Or we concede that it exists but insist that we can adapt. Both responses satisfy our mania for eternal optimism and our reckless pursuit of personal comfort. In America, when reality is distasteful we ignore it. But reality will soon descend like the Furies to shatter our complacency and finally our lives. We, as a species, may be doomed. And this is a bitter, bitter fact for a father to digest.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

Truthdig, Life Is Sacred, Sep 3, 2012 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/life_is_sacred_20120903/

Optimism , Reality , Personality

“The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

War: Realities and Myths http://www.antiwar.com/orig/hedges.php?articleid=6294

War

“I had recklessly dared to do what I wouldn't dare to do today. The knight performs his morning prayer. When he is ready to pack up his chess set, he turns around, and there stands Death. 'Who are you?' asks the knight. 'I am Death.' Bengt Ekerot and I agreed that Death should have the features of a white clown. An amalgamation of a clown mask and a skull. It was a delicate and dangerous artistic move, which could have failed. Suddenly, an actor appears in whiteface, dressed all in black, and announces that he is Death. Everyone accepted the dramatic feat that he was Death, instead of saying, 'Come on now, don't try to put something over us! You can't fool us! We can see that you are just a talented actor who is painted white and clad in black! You're not Death at all!”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

But nobody protested. That made me feel triumphant and joyous.
Images : My Life in Films (1990)

Death , Fools , Feeling , Appearance

“If you are like most people, you have an assortment of friends and family you can call upon in times of trouble. For instance, if you woke up in the middle of the night and saw a masked woman trying to crawl through your bedroom window, you might call your mother or father to help you push her back out. If you found yourself hopelessly lost in the middle of a strange city, you might ask the police to give you a ride home. And if you were an author locked in an Italian restaurant that was slowly filling up with water, you might call upon your acquaintances in the locksmith, pasta, and sponge businesses to come and rescue you.”

Daniel Handler book The Hostile Hospital

Lemony Snicket
The Hostile Hospital (2001)

People , Family , Home , Business

“For the adult, all the world is a stage and the personality is the mask one wears to play the assigned role. The outlaw quietly takes a seat in the back row of the theater of the mind and watches.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), pp. 135-136

World , Personality

“p>GUIN
GUINN
GUINNESS IS
white bird lying unnoticed in a corner
splattered feathers
blood running merged with the neonsigns
in a puddle
GUINNESS IS GOOD
GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR
Masks Masks Masks Masks Masks
GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU</center”

Adrian Henri (1932–2000) British poet

"The Entry of Christ into Liverpool", from British Poetry since 1945 (1970), Ed. Edward Lucie-Smith.<p>

Lying , Bird

“For as long as possible, the learned collegium has tried to defend its integrity against the close combat of ideologico-critical exposures. Do not unmask, lest you yourself be unmasked could be the unspoken rule. It is no accident that the great representatives of critique—the French moralists, the Encyclopedists, the socialists, and especially Heine, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—remain outsiders to the scholarly domain. In all of them there is a satirical, polemical component that can scarcely be hidden under the mask of scholarly respectability. These signals of a holy nonseriousness, which remains one of the sure indexes of truth, can be employed as signposts to the critique of cynical reason.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 18

Truth , Learning

“Ritual is intimately connected with the mask, either in the wearing that hides the true face, or in the adoption of a public face.”

Subhash Kak (1947) Indian computer scientist

The Wishing Tree (2015)

“Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable; in its basic dimension, it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our reality itself; an illusion which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

45
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Support , Reality

“Behind the top hats, a little lady wearing lila-coloured tights was balancing on a tightrope in the middle of all that blue-grey tobacco-laden air. I sauntered in among the standing clientele. I was on the lookout for an attractive girl. Yes – that one wasn’t bad. When she became aware of my gaze her facial expression changed to that of a frozen mask and she stared emptily into space. I found a stair – and collapsed into it – tired and listless. Everyone clapped. The Lila-clad tightrope-walker curtsied, smiled and disappeared. A group of Romanian singers took her place. There was love and hate – and longing and reunion – and lovely dreams – and that soft music melting together with the colours. The melted notes became green palm trees and steely blue water floating in the blue haze of the room. An artwork is a crystal. A crystal has a soul and a mind, and the artwork must also have these.”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

a note of Munch, written in Ekely, 1929; Munch Museum
1896 - 1930

Love , Hate , Smile , Dreams

“There is no mask that temptation cannot wear, and the idea that Satan is purely a logician is an illusion held by not a few naive people. Many a shifty old man sees him as an opponent in an academic argument, but if he does the observer is still at the stage of games and trifles. Sometimes, though not often, the black desire to harm wins out over quicker and less bitter delights. When that happens, evil shows itself for what it truly is, not a way of life, but an attack on life itself.”

Georges Bernanos (1888–1948) French writer

Source: L'imposture (The Impostor), 1927, pp.74–75

Life , People , Way , Game

“A day out from the bay of Saardos, Drokler honored the brass Rorn god in the prow with a pound of incense.
The blank god mask stared back at them through the pall of sweet blue smoke…. It gazed in myopic stillness out over the long shock of the waves, ignoring their words, their presence, their costly offering.”

Tanith Lee book The Storm Lord

Book 4, “Hell’s Blue Burning Seas” Chapter 15 (p. 208)
The Storm Lord (1976)

God

“Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Moon and Sixpence

Source: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Ch. 42, p. 147

People , Personality , Perfection

“I was reading an article about this case in California, where two lesbians were fighting over the custody of children that genetically were traceable to one, but which the other had raised. You know what? Nobody even thought about or mentioned, nobody asked a simple question about whether the father of those children should have any claim, because, very often in these relationships, they are conducted in such a way and conception occurs in such a way as to intentionally mask who the father might be, so that children must grow up without knowing who their father is. And that means that an incestuous situation could easily arise in our society, it's more than likely to arise--not to mention every other kind of incestuous complication.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

Rally in defense of marriage, Boston, Massachusetts, May 14, 2004. http://www.renewamerica.us/archives/speeches/04_05_14boston.htm.
2009

Children , Way , Question , Reading

“That microscopic look at village life taught me to hear the heart-beat of reality. To me the common man’s society is a maskless society. He does not carry that thick mask which the professional people, the upper classes, wear so that they might look nice and beautiful. Very often they do not dare to say what they really think and feel.”

Baba Amte (1914–2008) Indian freedom fighter, social worker

His fondness for the common man page=3
Baba Amte: A Vision of New India

Life , People , Beauty , Feeling

“Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

National Post, Dec. 8 2000 p. A18.
2000

Appearance , Country

“The persona can eventually become ourselves, or an aspect of ourselves, to the point where we don't know which is the mask and which is the I.”

F. David Peat (1938–2017) British physicist

From Certainty to Uncertainty (2002)

“All things are but masks at God's beck and call,
They are symbols that instruct us that God is all.”

Attar of Nishapur book The Conference of the Birds

As translated by Raficq Abdulla
The Conference of the Birds (1177)

God

“I know that even the meanest person has still at his disposition high-sounding words wherewith to mask his real character.”

Henryk Sienkiewicz book Without Dogma

11 July
Without Dogma (1891)

Personality

“A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift —
A Love in desolation masked; — a Power
Girt round with weakness; — it can scarce uplift
The weight of the superincumbent hour;
It is a dying lamp, a falling shower,
A breaking billow; — even whilst we speak
Is it not broken? On the withering flower
The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek
The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

St. XXXII
Adonais (1821)

Love , Life , Smile , Beauty

“And pomp, and feast, and revelry,
With mask, and antique pageantry,
Such sights as youthful poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream.
Then to the well-trod stage anon,
If Jonson's learned sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,
Warble his native wood-notes wild,
And ever, against eating cares,
Lap me in soft Lydian airs,
Married to immortal verse
Such as the meeting soul may pierce,
In notes with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Source: L'Allegro (1631), Line 127; comparable to: "Wisdom married to immortal verse", William Wordsworth, The Excursion, book vii

Youth , Dreams , Soul , Learning

“I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.”

Marguerite Yourcenar book Memoirs of Hadrian

Je savais que le bien comme le mal est affaire de routine, que le temporaire se prolonge, que l'extérieur s'infiltre au dedans, et que le masque, à la longue, devient visage.
Source: Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), p. 97

Time

“I am aware that this last statement may be disputed and individual testimony perhaps adduced to show that in ante-bellum days the ballot was as untrammelled in the south as in any section of the country; but in the face of any such contradiction I reassert the statement. The shot-gun was not resorted to. Masked men did not ride over the country at night intimidating voters; but there was a firm feeling that a class existed in every State with a sort of divine right to control public affairs. If they could not get this control by one means they must by another. The end justified the means. The coercion, if mild, was complete.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

Source: 1880s, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885), Ch. 16.

Men , Feeling , Night , Country

“Encounters between strangers in the desert, while rare, were occasions of mutual suspicion, and masked by initial preparations on both sides for an incident that might prove either cordial or warlike.”

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

Ch 1
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Homo

“That’s what violence was: emotion leaking out from consciousness into the physical world, linking up with the muscles of the arms and shoulders and diaphragm and, inevitably, the face. Stifle emotion during an act of violence and the face becomes a blank, unreadable mask.”

Ryū Murakami book Audition

Source: Audition (1997), Chapter Twelve

World

“I went back to staring tomorrow in the face. Better than looking backward. But tomorrow refused to shed its mask.”

Glen Cook The Black Company

Source: The Black Company (1984), Chapter 1, “Legate” (p. 34)

“.. Is it indisputable that several aesthetic declarations of our French comrades (the Cubists) display a sort of masked academicism. It is not, indeed, a return to the Academy to declare that the subject, in painting, has a perfectly insignificant value?... To paint from the posing model as an absurdity, and an act of mental cowardice, even if the model be translated upon the picture in linear, spherical and cubic forms..”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

Source: 1912, Les exposants au public', 1912, pp. 2, 3.

Painting

“Here is woe, a self and not the mask of woe.”

Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907) American poet, novelist, editor

Andromeda; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“The shot by [Andy] Bathgate nearly ripped my nose off. I told Toe [Blake] I would only return if I could wear the mask, so there was no choice. He never wanted me to wear the mask because he thought it would make me too complacent.”

Jacques Plante (1929–1986) Canadian ice hockey player

Plante refers to November 1, 1959, when he debuted the first practical goaltender mask.
Quoted in Kevin Shea, "One on One with Jacques Plante," http://www.legendsofhockey.net/html/spot_oneononep197802.htm Legends of Hockey.net (2005-05-24)

“If the artist only reproduces superficial features as photography does, if he copies the lineaments of a face exactly, without reference to character, he deserves no admiration. The resemblance which he ought to obtain is that of the soul; that alone matters; it is that which the sculptor or painter should seek beneath the mask of features.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. VII. Of Yesterday and of to-day, p. 121

Soul

“A poet knows war without objective war in the world; it was conflict at the root of his mind that impelled him to the masking of these conflicts in the apparent resolution and order of works of art. In a dialectical sense, all poetry is war.”

Richard Eberhart (1904–2005) American poet

The War Poets

War , World , Art , Sense

“If one aims to judge political movements, their deeds are far more important than their speeches, which are often masking rather than revealing.”

Mario Bunge (1919) Argentine philosopher and physicist

Emergence and Convergence (2003), p. 424.
2000s

“Don't lie to me! Don't seem so normal when I know you have cut yourself off from me in your heart! If you can put on our affectionate closeness like a mask, then I'll never be able to take joy in it again.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Homecoming saga, Earthfall (1995)

Lie , Heart , Joy

“Even so a shepherd, seeking safety for his flock, lures the wolves at night by the bleating of a tethered lamb into the pitfall masked by a slender covering of leafage.”
Haud secus ac stabulis procurans otia pastor in foveam parco tectam velamine frondis ducit nocte lupos positae balatibus agnae.

Silius Italicus Punica

Book VI, lines 329–331
Punica

Night

“…[Bob Kane] had an idea for a character called "Batman", and he'd like me to see the drawings. I went over to Kane's, and he had drawn a character who looked very much like Superman with kind of … reddish tights, I believe, with boots … no gloves, no gauntlets … with a small domino mask, swinging on a rope. He had two stiff wings that were sticking out, looking like bat wings. And under it was a big sign … BATMAN.”

Bill Finger (1914–1974) American comic strip and comic book writer

[Jim Steranko, The Steranko History of Comics, Supergraphics, Reading, Pa., 1970, ISBN 0-517-50188-0, p.44]

Idea , Drawing

“It is said that my art has some typically Nordic features: the curving lines, the convolutions, the magical masks and staring eyes that appear in myths and folk art. This may be. My interest in the dynamics of Jugend style probably also comes into it.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

Quote of Jorn, from: Tecken för liv, tecken till liv [Signs of life, the characters to life], interview by Marita Lindgren-Fridell, in Konstrevy (1963)
1959 - 1973, Various sources

Art , Appearance

“In a 1988 Sports Illustrated interview: "Real freedom is having nothing. I was freer when I didn't have a cent. Do you know what I do sometimes? Put on a ski mask and dress in old clothes, go out on the streets and beg for quarters."”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

http://www.boxing-monthly.co.uk/content/0008/three.htm
On himself

Sport , Freedom , Clothes

“How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing. It seems still more impossible that a quarrel which has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast (27 September 1938), quoted in "Prime Minister on the Issues", The Times (28 September 1938), p. 10
Referring to the Czechoslovakia crisis
Prime Minister

War , People , Country

“I was a young man in the ’80s, and I was into medieval weapons, Harleys and Heavy Metal. I even played D&D back when that was supposed to induct players into real-life witchcraft. So I remember all the ridiculous superstition surrounding the secret meanings of ear piercing, the pseudo-paganism of Procter & Gamble, the seemingly Satanic messages in back-masking, and the allegedly suicidal insinuations of some metal albums. I attribute a lot of that to the fact that atheism didn’t have any appreciable presence back then. In those days, if you didn’t buy into Christian dogma and were openly critical of it, then you were a witch. You were either a neo-pagan or (more likely) you were Satanic. The latter would be applied regardless how you might prefer to identify. To my cultural experience, there was no such thing as a skeptic as that is known today. Back then, skeptics were considered cynics who refused to open their minds. It must have been a great time for paranoid Christian conservatives. They actually like Satanists a lot more than atheists. Because Satanists not only play the Christian game; they give Christians the moral high ground. Whereas atheists piss everybody off by pointing out that it is a game and that every believer in any religion is just pretending.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, Satanic Panic and Exorcism in Schools? http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2016/09/21/satanic-panic-and-exorcism-in-schools/ (September 21, 2016)

Life , Secret , Religion , Game

“"Hair loss and retrieval" (Translation of "Pérdida y recuperación del pelo")

To combat pragmatism and the horrible tendency to achieve useful purposes, my elder cousin proposes the procedure of pulling out a nice hair from the head, knotting it in the middle and droping it gently down the hole in the sink. If the hair gets caught in the grid that usually fills in these holes, it will just take to open the tap a little to lose sight of it.

Without wasting an instant, must start the hair recovery task. The first operation is reduced to dismantling the siphon from the sink to see if the hair has become hooked in any of the rugosities of the drain. If it is not found, it is necessary to expose the section of pipe that goes from the siphon to the main drainage pipe. It is certain that in this part will appear many hairs and we will have to count on the help of the rest of the family to examine them one by one in search of the knot. If it does not appear, the interesting problem of breaking the pipe down to the ground floor will arise, but this means a greater effort, because for eight or ten years we will have to work in a ministry or trading house to collect enough money to buy the four departments located under the one of my elder cousin, all that with the extraordinary disadvantage of what while working during those eight or ten years, the distressing feeling that the hair is no longer in the pipes anymore can not be avoided and that only by a remote chance remains hooked on some rusty spout of the drain.

The day will come when we can break the pipes of all the departments, and for months to come we will live surrounded by basins and other containers full of wet hairs, as well as of assistants and beggars whom we will generously pay to search, assort, and bring us the possible hairs in order to achieve the desired certainty. If the hair does not appear, we will enter in a much more vague and complicated stage, because the next section takes us to the city's main sewers. After buying a special outfit, we will learn to slip through the sewers at late night hours, armed with a powerful flashlight and an oxygen mask, and explore the smaller and larger galleries, assisted if possible by individuals of the underworld, with whom we will have established a relationship and to whom we will have to give much of the money that we earn in a ministry or a trading house.

Very often we will have the impression of having reached the end of the task, because we will find (or they will bring us) similar hairs of the one we seek; but since it is not known of any case where a hair has a knot in the middle without human hand intervention, we will almost always end up with the knot in question being a mere thickening of the caliber of the hair (although we do not know of any similar case) or a deposit of some silicate or any oxide produced by a long stay against a wet surface. It is probable that we will advance in this way through various sections of major and minor pipes, until we reach that place where no one will decide to penetrate: the main drain heading in the direction of the river, the torrential meeting of detritus in which no money, no boat, no bribe will allow us to continue the search.

But before that, and perhaps much earlier, for example a few centimeters from the mouth of the sink, at the height of the apartment on the second floor, or in the first underground pipe, we may happen to find the hair. It is enough to think of the joy that this would cause us, in the astonished calculation of the efforts saved by pure good luck, to choose, to demand practically a similar task, that every conscious teacher should advise to its students from the earliest childhood, instead of drying their souls with the rule of cross-multiplication or the sorrows of Cancha Rayada.”

Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) Argentinian writer

Historias de Cronopios y de Famas (1962)

Money , Family , Way , Feeling

“Let us endeavour for a moment to disconnect our thinking selves from the mask of humanity; let us imagine ourselves scientific Saturnians, if you will, fairly acquainted with such animals as now inhabit the Earth, and employed in discussing the relations they bear to a new and singular 'erect and featherless biped,' which some enterprising traveller, overcoming the difficulties of space and gravitation, has brought from that distant planet for our inspection, well preserved, may be, in a cask of rum.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 85

Travel , Imagination , Thinking , Distant

“Within profound Silence, erect, fearless, in pain and in play, ascending ceaselessly from peak to peak, knowing that the height has no ending, sing this proud and magical incantation as you hang over the Abyss:
I BELIEVE IN ONE GOD, DEFENDER OF THE BORDERS, OF DOUBLE DESCENT, MILITANT, SUFFERING, OF MIGHTY BUT NOT OF OMNIPOTENT POWERS, A WARRIOR AT THE FARTHEST FRONTIERS, COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF ALL THE LUMINOUS POWERS, THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE.
I BELIEVE IN THE INNUMERABLE, THE EPHEMERAL MASKS WHICH GOD HAS ASSUMED THROUGHOUT THE CENTURIES, AND BEHIND HIS CEASELESS FLUX I DISCERN AN INDESTRUCTIBLE UNITY.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God

The Saviors of God (1923)

God , Pain , Silence , Suffering

“…his book, Orpheus, or the Way to a Death Mask, of which he had said that he regretted not having written it as a poem.
And with dream-awakened eyes she saw all the beauty around her, saw the sea, felt the sun, and knew: she had to vanish for a while from the human plane and make every sacrifice in order to create her world anew out of the depths.”

Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) German painter

Charlotte's 2th ending, written page in brush, related to JHM no. 4924v https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/Charlotte_Salomon_-_JHM_4924-02.jpg: 'Life? or Theater..', p. 822
Charlotte Salomon - Life? or Theater?

Death , Books , World , Beauty

“This book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge; a genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases, justifications and rules, from which it extends its effects and by which it extends its effects and by which it masks its exorbitant singularity.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter One, The Spectacle of the Scaffold, pp.42

Books , Soul , History

“Let the gossip roll!
What to me are Hamlet's garters,
or the whirlwind of Salome's dance,
or the tread of the Man in the Iron Mask?
I am more iron than they.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Poem without a Hero (1963)

Dance

“I think the enemy is here before us, too. But I think we know the forms and faces of the enemy, and in the knowledge that we know him, and shall meet him, and eventually must conquer him is also our living hope. I think the enemy is here before us with a thousand faces, but I think we know that all his faces wear one mask. I think the enemy is single selfishness and compulsive greed. I think the enemy is blind, but has the brutal power of his blind grab. I do not think the enemy was born yesterday, or that he grew to manhood forty years ago, or that he suffered sickness and collapse in 1929, or that we began without the enemy, and that our vision faltered, that we lost the way, and suddenly were in his camp. I think the enemy is old as Time, and evil as Hell, and that he has been here with us from the beginning. I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land. I think he took our people and enslaved them, that he polluted the fountains of our life, took unto himself the rarest treasures of our own possession, took our bread and left us with a crust, and, not content, for the nature of the enemy is insatiate--tried finally to take from us the crust.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book VII, Ch. 48: Credo
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

Life , People , Hope , Way

“I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope – an impotence, in short and to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all…”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

Failure , Effort

“Evangelical Christianity conspires with technical and economic rationalism. In the end, they both require a commitment to “duty” that masks unspeakable violence and injustice.”

Curtis White (1951) American academic

"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"

“It was an important moment. The old partners of the spectacle of punishment, the body and the blood, gave way. A new character came of the scene, masked. It was the end of a certain kind of tragedy; comedy began, with shadow play, faceless voices, impalpable entities. The apparatus of punitive justice must now bite into this bodiless reality.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), pp. 17

Justice , Way , Reality

“Sabina’s initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in character. What repelled her was not nearly so much the ugliness of the Communist world (ruined castles transformed into cow sheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear — in other words, Communist kitsch.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

World , Beauty , Communication

“The nihilist foreign policy of the National Socialism of today uses ideas as a mask, and has no philosophical basis.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (1939), p. 253

Idea

“But I would like to think for a moment about a man who in the morning teaches his students that a false attribution of a Watteau drawing or an inaccurate transcription of a fourteenth-century epigraph is a sin against the spirit and in the afternoon or evening transmits to the agents of Soviet intelligence classified, perhaps vital information given to him in sworn trust by his countrymen and intimate colleagues. What are the sources of such scission? How does the spirit mask itself?”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"The Cleric of Treason," The New Yorker (1980-12-08).
George Steiner: A Reader (1984)

Intelligence , Thinking , Drawing , Falseness

“Critical theory … values Freud as a non-ideological thinker and theoretician of contradictions—contradictions which his successors sought to escape and mask. … “The greatness of Freud,” wrote Adorno, “consists in that, like all great bourgeois thinkers, he left standing undissolved such contradictions and disdained the assertion of pretended harmony where the thing itself is contradictory. He revealed the antagonistic character of the social reality.” … A parallel can be established between Marx’s judgment on Ricardo and the post-Ricardians. To Marx, Ricardo was the classic and best representative of bourgeois economics since he articulated the contradictions of bourgeois society without glossing them over.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), pp. 27-28

Reality

“The ideals of liberalism have been divorced from any realities of modern social structure that might serve as the means of their realization. … The detachment of liberalism from the facts of a going society make it an excellent mask for those who do not, cannot, or will not do what would have to be done to realize its ideals.”

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) American sociologist

"Liberal Values in the Modern World," in Power , Politics and People (1963), p. 189.
1960s

Reality

“Someone should put together a ballet under the title Guantanamo, Guantanamo! A corps of prisoners, their ankles shackled together, thick felt mittens on their hands, muffs over their ears, black hoods over their heads, do the dances of the persecuted and the desperate. Around them, guards in olive green uniforms prance with demonic energy and glee, cattle prods and billy-clubs at the ready. They touch the prisoners with the prods and the prisoners leap; they wrestle prisoners to the ground and shove the clubs up their anuses and the prisoners go into spasms. In a corner, a man on stilts in a Donald Rumsfeld mask alternately writes at his lectern and dances ecstatic little jigs.
One day it will be done, though not by me. It may even be a hit in London and Berlin and New York. It will have absolutely no effect on the people it targets, who could not care less what ballet audiences think of them.”

J.M. Coetzee book Diary of a Bad Year

Diary of a Bad Year (2007)

People , Thinking , Dance

“As always, when the opportunity arose, Joe took a long, astute look at the girl whom, if he could have managed it, he would have had as his mistress, or, even better, his wife. It did not seem possible that Wendy Wright had been born out of blood and internal organs like other people. In proximity to her he felt himself to be a squat, oily, sweating, uneducated nurt whose stomach rattled and whose breath wheezed. Near her he became aware of the physical mechanisms which kept him alive; within him machinery, pipes and valves and gas-compressors and fan belts had to chug away at a losing task, a labor ultimately doomed. Seeing her face, he discovered that his own consisted of a garish mask; noticing her body made him feel like a low-class windup toy. All her colors possessed a subtle quality, indirectly lit. Her eyes, those green and tumbled stones, looked impassively at everything; he had never seen fear in them, or aversion, or contempt. What she saw she accepted. Generally she seemed calm. But more than that she struck him as being durable, untroubled and cool, not subject to wear, or to fatigue, or to physical illness and decline. Probably she was twenty-five or -six, but he could not imagine her looking younger, and certainly she would never look older. She had too much control over herself and outside reality for that.”

Philip K. Dick book Ubik

Source: Ubik (1969), Chapter 5 (pp. 58-59)

People , Fear , Color , Feeling

“I had to wear an oxygen mask both in the water and on land because of the carbon monoxide. I fainted four times during the first day of filming. We were shooting the scene in which Godzilla emerges from the water as he approaches Hong Kong. I wasn't warned about the carbon monoxide, so I wasn't wearing an oxygen mask. We were shooting in water, so nobody could just run up to me when they saw me acting strangely. We were filming a long shot, so nobody was very close to me. The members of the staff didn't realize I'd fainted that first time until they started opening up the costume so I could get out.”

Kenpachiro Satsuma (1947) Japanese actor

As quoted by David Milner, "Kenpachiro Satsuma Interview III" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/satsum3.htm, Kaiju Conversations (December 1995)

Water , Time

Quotes about mask page 2

Quotes about mask
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