Duplicity Quotes

Even French pilferage has not relegated Italian culinary genius to the darker corners of gastronomy. Marie de' Medici brought Italian cookery to France, where Gallic duplicity quickly undermined the integrity of good ingredients with unctuous sauces. The French will always confuse egregious decorative effects with creative integrity. They have a genius for appearances. Trompe l'oeil will do for a Frenchman, but not for an Italian. ~ Roland Delicio

My mother's hands were sixty-four years old, weathered, beautiful. They were soft and hard and they held no duplicity of emotion. They didn't love and hate. They were not tender and violent. They never offered me the world and handed me hell. They were constant: I miss them purely. ~ Maggie MacKellar

Heavenly Father - take to thee The supreme iniquity Fashioned by thy candid Hand In a moment contraband - Though to trust us seem to us More respectful - We are Dust - We apologize to thee For thine own Duplicity. ~ Emily Dickinson

We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves. ~ Blaise Pascal

The word 'image' is in bad repute because we have thoughtlessly believed that a drawing was a tracing, a copy, a second thing, and that the mental image was such a drawing, belonging among our private bric-a-brac. But if in fact it is nothing of the kind, then neither the drawing nor the picture belongs to the in-itself any more than the image does. They are the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, which the duplicity of sensing makes possible and without which we would never understand the quasi-presence and imminent visibility which make up the whole problem of the imaginary. The picture, the actor's mimicry--these are not extras that I borrow from the real world in order to aim across them at prosaic things in their absence. The imaginary is much nearer to and much farther away from the actual. It is nearer because it is the diagram of the life of the actual in my body, its pulp and carnal obverse exposed to view for the first time...And the imaginary is much further away from the actual because the picture is an analogue only according to the body; because it does not offer to the mind an occasion to rethink the constitutive relations of things, but rather it offers to the gaze traces of the vision of the inside, in order that the gaze may espouse them; it offers to vision that which clothes vision internally, the imaginary texture of the real. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

A duplicitous country with a duplicitous leadership is going to give us more duplicity. And that duplicity is going lead us off an abyss. That's going to happen. ~ Matt Shea

As the map of the Great Plain was being redrawn by a young Shazarian councillor, the ageing Shylonian king interrupted mid-speech to ask him his name. With a piercing glare and a haughty flick of his cloak, he retorted 'Lord Ratilla, Shazarian Imperial Secretary, and who might you be?' Behind the gasps of horror, the message was clear. It was Shazaria who now bestrode the Amaran world, henceforth the office of Shazarian minister now held greater prestige than even that of foreign monarchs. What became even clearer were the depths of Shazarian treachery. The impudent youth who stood before the kings of Amara stripping them of ancient provinces, was the same adolescent reputed to have delivered an eloquent speech which swayed the Shazarian councillors in favour of war.
Had this been their intention all along? ~ A.H. Septimius

You have to be closer to religious origins
the generation of the 20's was truly secular in that it still knew its theology and its varieties of religious experience. We are post-secular, inventing new faiths, without any sense of organizing truths. The truths we accept are so multiple that honesty becomes little more than a strategy by which you manage your tendencies toward duplicity. ~ Ann Douglas

History is the poisoned well, seeping into the ground-water. It's not the unknown past we're doomed to repeat, but the past we know. Every recorded event is a brick of potential, of precedent, thrown into the future. Eventually the idea will hit someone in the back of the head. This is the duplicity of history: an idea recorded will become an idea resurrected. Out of fertile ground, the compost of history. ~ Anne Michaels

A wartime Minister of Information is compelled, in the national interest, to such continuous acts of duplicity that even his natural hair must grow to resemble a wig. ~ Claud Cockburn

Only yesterday I was no different than them, yet I was saved. I am explaining to you the way of life of a people who say every sort of wicked thing about me because I sacrificed their friendship to gain my own soul. I left the dark paths of their duplicity and turned my eyes toward the light where there is salvation, truth, and justice. They have exiled me now from their society, yet I am content. Mankind only exiles the one whose large spirit rebels against injustice and tyranny. He who does not prefer exile to servility is not free in the true and necessary sense of freedom. ~ Kahlil Gibran

All you who draw near to serve God in prayer, learn to be like Him, meek, humble, and true of heart; do not let there be any deceitfulness or duplicity nor coldness in your soul. ~ John Of Kronstadt

The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research "childhood."

There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher's heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises "adolescence." The feeling haunts people all their lives.

Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. ~ Michael Chabon

Nothing more completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity, than straightforward and simple integrity in another. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

I think the conscientious pursuit of happiness by itself can validate decisions to change, to try again, especially when failure to change will lead to lives of duplicity, dishonesty, and deceit. ~ Ben Bradlee

Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!
Give me back my book and take my kiss instead.
Was it my enemy or my friend I heard,
"What a big book for such a little head!"
Come, I will show you now my newest hat,
And you may watch me purse my mouth and prink!
Oh, I shall love you still, and all of that.
I never again shall tell you what I think.
I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly;
You will not catch me reading any more:
I shall be called a wife to pattern by;
And some day when you knock and push the door,
Some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy,
I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me. ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

The history of medicine proves that in so far as man seeks to know himself and face his whole nature, he has become free from bewildered fear, despondent shame, or arrant hypocrisy. As long as sex is dealt with in the current confusion of ignorance and sophistication, denial and indulgence, suppression and stimulation, punishment and exploitation, secrecy and display, it will be associated with a duplicity and indecency that lead neither to intellectual honesty nor human dignity. ~ Alfred Kinsey

There's a special place in hell for men who convince women their intuition is insecurity to protect their duplicity. ~ Dream Hampton

Their heart does not allow them to practise duplicity: if they see their friend straying from the road, or committing any faults, they will speak to her about it; they cannot allow themselves to do anything else. ~ Teresa Of Avila

Deliver us from evil - from moral duplicity and weakness, from laziness and spiritual complacency, from those lies we tell ourselves from our fear of facing the truth. ~ Rich Mullins

The life that I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place and time my touch will be felt. Our lives are linked together. No man is an island.

But there is another truth, the sister of this one, and it is that every man is an island. It is a truth that often the tolling of a silence reveals even more vividly than the tolling of a bell. We sit in silence with one another, each of us more or less reluctant to speak, for fear that if he does, he may sound life a fool. And beneath that there is of course the deeper fear, which is really a fear of the self rather than of the other, that maybe truth of it is that indeed he is a fool. The fear that the self that he reveals by speaking may be a self that the others will reject just as in a way he has himself rejected it. So either we do not speak, or we speak not to reveal who we are but to conceal who we are, because words can be used either way of course. Instead of showing ourselves as we truly are, we show ourselves as we believe others want us to be. We wear masks, and with practice we do it better and better, and they serve us well –except that it gets very lonely inside the mask, because inside the mask that each of us wears there is a person who both longs to be known and fears to be known. In this sense every man is an island separated from every other man by fathoms of distrust and duplicity. Part of what it means to be i ~ Frederick Buechner

She was afraid of numbers the way some people are of spiders. The sight of them made her want to hide. What I loved about them, their clarity, was for her duplicity. Behind an innocent 2,or 5, or 9, she spied a mass of traps and pitfalls. ~ Margot Livesey

Q.Do you have any positive message, in your opinion?
A.Indeed I do think that I do.
Q.Such as what?
A.The crying, almost screaming, need of a great worldwide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better, well enough to concede that no man has a monopoly on right or virtue any more than any man has a corner on duplicity and evil and so forth. If people, and races and nations, would start with that self-manifest truth, then I think that the world could sidestep the sort of corruption which I have involuntarily chosen as the basic, allegorical theme of my plays as a whole. ~ Tennessee Williams

If you ask the other John and Peggy (my parents) how they've managed to stay married for well over half a century, they'll credit an uncompromising level of honesty with each other. If you press them, though, you'll learn that their commitment to the truth did not extend to their children. Indeed, when it came to raising three boys on a public school teachers salary, my parents lied like rugs./
It was a strange sort of snobbery to develop at such an early age - this sympathy for the more fortunate - but that's precisely what my parents engendered. With duplicity and guile, they Turn envy to pity. By the time I was eleven, I felt nothing but compassion for classmates of mine who had been forced to wear the latest fashions. Sadly, they had no older cousins to provide them with a superior wardrobe of "softer, sturdier, broken-in alternatives. ~ Mike Rowe

I was a precocious actress in her eyes; she sincerely looked on me as a compound of virulent passions, mean spirit, and dangerous duplicity. ~ Charlotte Bronte

As we read through this small pile of correspondence, a curious duplicity gradually emerges. In their language, the letters are among Kierkegaard's most outstanding achievements so far as a writer. The pen no longer pauses with the ink bleeding onto the paper; the creaky Latin syntax that once could force Kierkegaard's language into lackluster constructions is here replaced by a beguiling suppleness that lifts the lines from the page. They steal gently around their subject and draw on well-known Danish writers, such as Johannes Ewald, Jens Baggesen, Adam Oehlenschläger, Christian Winter, and Poul Martin Møller. Far from being ordinary communication, these letters are art.
Therein lies the triumph and the tragedy. For the letters, by virtue of their undeniably aesthetic quality, almost cry out to the writer that a husband is not at all what he is to become, but an author. This makes them in effect letters of "farewell that try, with great discretion and an ingenious indirectness, to make the recipient understand that the man who celebrates her up and down the page has long ago vanished from her life because he has lost himself in recollection of her. His love is bound in artifice and imagination, and he has to accept the truth of the situation, that he is in real life unsuited to the married state. From the recollection that gives life to imagination there spreads also the death that parts the lovers. ~ Joakim Garff

Avoid duplicity, that is, do not let your heart be divided between attachment to God and attachment to earthly things, 'You cannot serve God and mammon' (Mt. 6:24); cling to God alone, put your trust in Him alone; for the Devil, by inciting us to duplicity, seeks himself to gain possession of our heart, which is single and indivisible. ~ John Of Kronstadt

Why croak with dishonesty when your target subject discovers, listens, and witnesses beyond the veil of your duplicity?

Your proliferation of misinformation, disinformation, gossips, polemics, planted intrigues, lies, calumny, misjudgement, and all other forms of smear campaign, may deceive gullible hearts but you cannot destroy the unparalleled truth which is in the hands of your target victim. ~ Angelica Hopes, K.H. Trilogy ~ Angelica Hopes

The Allegory of the Wolf Boy" ("At tennis and at tea/Upon the gentle lawn, he is not ours,/But plays us in a sad duplicity"). ~ Oliver Sacks

For this can be said of men in general: that they are ungrateful, fickle, hypocrites and dissemblers, avoiders of dangers, greedy for gain; and while you benefit them, they are entirely yours, offering you their blood, their goods, their life, their children,...when need is far away, but when you actually become needy, they turn away. (translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn) ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

They were so absorbed in their plotting that they did not hear Boule de Suif return. But the Comte's whispered 'shh!' made them all look up. There she was. A sudden silence fell, and at first a feeling of embarrassment prevented them from speaking to her. At last, however, the Comtesse, more of an adept than the rest in social duplicity, asked her: 'Did you enjoy the christening? ~ Guy De Maupassant

The cause of all suffering is when we forget our identity with god. That is called Maya, or illusion. God is everywhere. You need not search to find him. If you call him with sincerity, he will reveal himself to you. God sees within the heart not the externals. There must be no duplicity. You may wander through the jungles your whole life, but god is within your heart. When you meet him there, you will see that he is everywhere. ~ Radhanath Swami

Those who blamed aggression formed Amity.'…
'Those who blamed ignorance became the Erudite.'…
'Those who blamed duplicity created Candor.'…
'Those who blamed selfishness made Abnegation.'…
'And those who blamed cowardice were the Dauntless. ~ Veronica Roth

There is more than duplicity in scope-less-ness. There is the fraudulent manifest of falsehood as generosity. ~ Dew Platt

He wished . . . He didn't know what he wished. That he hadn't seen the intentions behind those honey-colored eyes of hers? That he hadn't predicted her duplicity so easily? Or maybe, stupid as he was, he wished that he could stop himself from the inevitability of hurting her? But wishes were for children, and he'd grown up a long time ago. Only one of them could win this game, and it had to be him. ~ Lisa Maxwell

When we walk away from global warming, Kyoto, when we are irresponsibly slow in moving toward AIDS in Africa, when we don't advance and live up to our own rhetoric and standards, we set a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy. ~ John F. Kerry

The upside of being in the closet is that you develop skills of duplicity, which are great for big-time politicians. ~ Kirby Dick

What he confessed was this. He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles. He had been on a satanic quest.
These were some of James Jesus Angleton's dying words. He delivered them between fits of calamitous coughing - lung-scraping seizures that still failed to break him of his cigarette habit - and soothing sips of tea. "Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars," Angleton told Trento in an emotionless voice. "The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. . . . Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it."
He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day - Dulles, Helms, Wisner. These men were "the grand masters," he said. "If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell."
Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup. "I guess I will see them there soon. ~ David Talbot

Three or four threads may be agitated, like telegraph wires, at the same time, and if I were to tap them all I would reveal such a mixture of innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and courage, I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four journals at once. ~ Anais Nin

A false mind is false in everything, just as a cross eye always looks askant. But one may err once, nay, a hundred times, without being double-minded. There can never be mental duplicity where there is sincerity. ~ Joseph Joubert

Even the world, that despises simplicity, does not profess to approve of duplicity. ~ Bill Vaughan

Duplicity was not the sole province of the capital, Bas knew, but the honest inheritance of the entire species. ~ Daniel Polansky

The barbarity, duplicity and sheer effrontery of the English were often remarked upon. 'Pink, white and quarrelsome' was the splendid description of one group of disgusted Spanish visitors. ~ Linda Porter

One who never anticipates deceit or expects duplicity, and yet is the first to recognize such things – is that not a sage indeed? ~ Confucius

Beckett Rush spotted in London Saturday. 'Tinseltown's It Boy reportedly had three dates with three different girls at La Trattoria ... all over the course of six hours. Two ladies discovered the duplicity, and catfight broke out. Taylor Risdale broke up the fight before storming out. Beckett's camp could not be reached at the moment.'" Mr. Rush laughed. "You know what this means, right?"
"That once again my name is trashed."
"That your DVD sales will spike at least 5 percent. ~ Jenny B. Jones

It is important for a woman to have the duplicity to make good use of whatever gifts she might have, however valueless they might seem... You have to have the inner strength to pursue your goal, and not care how many enemies you make along the road. It is not easy. ~ Anne O'Brien

Now everyone knows that to try to say something in the mainstream Western media that is critical of U.S. policy or Israel is extremely difficult; conversely, to say things that are hostile to the Arabs as a people and culture, or Islam as a religion, is laughably easy. For in effect there is a cultural war between spokespersons for the West and those of the Muslim and Arab world. In so inflamed a situation, the hardest thing to do as an intellectual is to be critical, to refuse to adopt a rhetorical style that is the verbal equivalent of carpet-bombing, and to focus instead on those issues like U.S. support for unpopular client re­gimes, which for a person writing in the U.S. are somewhat more likely to be affected by critical discussion.

Of course, on the other hand, there is a virtual cer­tainty of getting an audience if as an Arab intellectual you passionately, even slavishly support U.S. policy, you attack its critics, and if they happen to be Arabs, you invent evi­dence to show their villainy; if they are American you confect stories and situations that prove their duplicity; you spin out stories concerning Arabs and Muslims that have the effect of defaming their tradition, defacing their history, accentuating their weaknesses, of which of course there are plenty. Above all, you attack the officially ap­ proved enemies-Saddam Hussein, Baathism, Arab na­tionalism, the Palestinian movement, Arab views of Israel. And of course this earns you the expected accolade ~ Edward W. Said

Because it is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions inside the head and express something - perhaps not much, just something - of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are, from the momentary effect of the barometer to the force that created men distinct from trees. Something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies from moment to moment like water in a river. Something of the spirit of the snowflake in the water of the river. Something of the duplicity and the relativity and the merely fleeting quality of all this. Something of the almighty importance of it and something of the utter meaninglessness. And when words can manage something of this, and manage it in a moment, of time, and in that same moment, make out of it all the vital signature of a human being - not of an atom, or of a geometrical diagram, or of a heap of lenses - but a human being, we call it poetry. ~ Ted Hughes

You're right. Your decietfulness far exceeds my modest attempts at dishonesty. I bow-down to your superior duplicity. ~ Aleatha Romig

There is a perfect rout of characters in every man - and every man is like an actor's trunk, full of strange creatures, new & old. But an actor and his trunk are two different things ~ Wallace Stevens

Walter's face was an agony of indecision but, erratic though his thinking might have been, it was no match for Nanny Ogg's meretricious duplicity. He was up against a mind that regarded truth as a reference point but certainly not as a shackle. Nanny Ogg could think her way through a corkscrew in a tornado without touching the sides. ~ Terry Pratchett

A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity. ~ Honore De Balzac

Duplicity is necessary in daily life, in that it covers many unpleasant things from sight, so they may not disturb the pleasure of others. ~ Edouard Rene De Laboulaye

Eilis was fascinated by [ ... ] his sweet duplicity in giving no sign of what had happened before. She was almost glad to know that he had secrets and had ways of calmly keeping them. ~ Colm Toibin

There is too wide a gap, for most of us, between what we say and what we mean. Between our words and our thoughts. The first thing the Prophet Isaiah said when he saw the living and exalted God was, "Woe is me, I am ruined. For I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips" (Isaiah 6:5). Isaiah was one of the most godly men who ever walked the earth. But seeing God, he sees also, abrupt and stark and grief-making, his own duplicity. Then God does what only God can do: he sears his lips clean (Isaiah 6:6-7). And herein lies our hope: truly seeing God, we truly see ourselves, in all our woe-begotten duplicity; but crying out to God, we are truly and greatly helped. ~ Mark Buchanan

Honesty has a beautiful and refreshing simplicity about it. No ulterior motives. No hidden meanings. An absence of hypocrisy, duplicity, political games, and verbal superficiality. As honesty and real integrity characterize our lives, there will be no need to manipulate others. ~ Charles R. Swindoll

Yes, such has been my lot since childhood. Everyone read signs of non-existent evil traits in my features. But since they were expected to be there, they did make their appearance. Because I was reserved, they said I was sly, so I grew reticent. I was keenly aware of good and evil, but instead of being indulged I was insulted and so I became spiteful. I was sulky while other children were merry and talkative, but though I felt superior to them I was considered inferior. So I grew envious. I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, and I learned to hate. My cheerless youth passed in conflict with myself and society, and fearing ridicule I buried my finest feelings deep in my heart, and there they died. I spoke the truth, but nobody believed me, so I began to practice duplicity. Having come to know society and its mainsprings, I became versed in the art of living and saw how others were happy without that proficiency, enjoying for free the favors I had so painfully striven for. It was then that despair was born in my heart--not the despair that is cured with a pistol, but a cold, impotent desperation, concealed under a polite exterior and a good-natured smile. I became a moral cripple; I had lost one half of my soul, for it had shriveled, dried up and died, and I had cut it off and cast it away, while the other half stirred and lived, adapted to serve every comer. No one noticed this, because no one suspected there had been another half. Now, however, you ha ~ Mikhail Lermontov

Concerning our faith in the Lord, I am convinced that most of us have relied on willpower, self-effort, and religious activities in our attempts to live a holy life. And eventually when we figure out that those things don't work, we do one of two things: we start faking that we're holy and develop lives of duplicity and hypocrisy, or we simply agree with one another that "the bar of holiness" is too high. We convince ourselves and one another that God doesn't really expect us to live up to such impossible standards. ~ Alan De Jager

That was an evil terror
an ugly inmate to have found a nestling-place in Godfrey's kindly disposition; but no disposition is a security from evil wishes to a man whose happiness hangs on duplicity. ~ George Eliot

Though we may not desire to detect fraud, we must not, on that account, endeavor to be insensible of it, for, as cunning is a crime, so is duplicity a fault, and if men dread knaves, they also despise fools. ~ Norm MacDonald

What strength belongs to every plant and animal in nature. The tree or the brook has no duplicity, no pretentiousness, no show. It is, with all its might and main, what it is, and makes one and the same impression and effect at all times. All the thoughts of a turtle are turtles, and of a rabbit, rabbits. But a man is broken and dissipated by the giddiness of his will ; he does not throw himself into his judgments; his genius leads him one way but 't is likely his trade or politics in quite another. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

What we call basic truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others. However that may be, after prolonged research on
myself, I brought out the fundamental duplicity of the human being. Then I realized, as a result of delving in my memory, that modesty helped me to shine,
humility to conquer, and virtue to oppress. I used to wage war by peaceful means and eventually used to achieve, through disinterested means, everything
I desired. ~ Albert Camus

When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, - and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The next morning the sea was calm again, the sun was shining, and the water was so blue and innocent a man might never know that under it my brother floated, dead with all his men. ~ George R.R. Martin

He sat before a note book of blank pages, saying: I swallow my own words. I chew and chew everything until it deteriorates. Every thought or impulse I have is chewed into nothingness. I want to capture all my thoughts at once, but they run in all directions. If I could do this I would be capturing the nimblest of minds, like a shoal of minnows. I would reveal innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and cowardice and courage. I want to tell the whole truth, but I cannot tell the whole truth because I would have to write four pages at once, like four columns simultaneously, four pages to the present one, and so I do not write at all. I would have to write backwards, retrace my steps constantly to catch the echoes and overtones. ~ Anais Nin

But you have no understanding of the depths of Kashmiri duplicity, Musa thought but did not say. You have no idea how a people like us, who have survived a history and a geography such as ours, have learned to drive our pride underground. Duplicity is the only weapon we have. You don't know how radiantly we smile when our hearts are broken. How ferociously we can turn on those we love while we graciously embrace those whom we despise. You have no idea how warmly we can welcome you when all we really want is for you to go away. Your thermometer is quite useless here. ~ Arundhati Roy