#mask

Boldness is a mask for fear, however great. ↗

— John Dryden

#fear #great #however #mask

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served. ↗

— Jane Jacobs

#dishonest #disorder #even #exist #ignoring

Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face - for me that would be deserving of an award. ↗

— Elfriede Jelinek

#deserving #draft #employing #exposing #expression

The leader of men in warfare can show himself to his followers only through a mask, a mask that he must make for himself, but a mask made in such form as will mark him to men of his time and place as the leader they want and need. ↗

— John Keegan

#form #him #himself #his #leader

After that I could never pass a dead man without stopping to gaze on his face, stripped by death of that earthly patina which masks the living soul. And I would ask, who were you? Where was your home? Who is mourning for you now? ↗

— Ernst Toller

#ask #could #dead #death #earthly

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#him #himself #his #least #man

Masquerades disclose the reality of souls. As long as no one sees who we are, we can tell the most intimate details of our life. I sometimes muse over this sketch of a story about a man afflicted by one of those personal tragedies born of extreme shyness who one day, while wearing a mask I don’t know where, told another mask all the most personal, most secret, most unthinkable things that could be told about his tragic and serene life. And since no outward detail would give him away, he having disguised even his voice, and since he didn’t take careful note of whoever had listened to him, he could enjoy the ample sensation of knowing that somewhere in the world there was someone who knew him as not even his closest and finest friend did. When he walked down the street he would ask himself if this person, or that one, or that person over there might not be the one to whom he’d once, wearing a mask, told his most private life. Thus would be born in him a new interest in each person, since each person might be his only, unknown confidant. ↗

— Fernando Pessoa

#life

I would have loved to have been in The Stand. I would also loved to have been in The Mask. ↗

— Richard O'Brien

#been #i #loved #mask #stand

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull. ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#honesty #mask #people #satan

Horror is the removal of masks. ↗

— Robert Bloch

#masks #horror