Concealment Quotes

“Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“Never hide things from hardcore thinkers. They get more aggravated, more provoked by confusion than the most painful truths.”
― Criss Jami

“I imagine that the intelligent people are the ones so intelligent that they don't even need or want to look 'intelligent' anymore.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Elizabeth had never been more at a loss to make her feelings appear what they were not. It was necessary to laugh, when she would rather have cried.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“When in the presence of someone with whom you have a bond, and to whom you have entrusted your feelings, it is hard to lie and get away with it. The truth just wants to come flowing out. This is especially the case when you are trying to hide your sadness or vulnerability. It is much easier to conceal sadness from a stranger, or from someone you don't trust.”
― Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Tales from the Café

“Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy — that is a hermit's judgment: "There is something arbitrary in his stopping here to look back and look around, in his not digging deeper here but laying his spade aside; there is also something suspicious about it." Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word also a mask.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Just as some people may conceal their own sinfulness thus seeming better than the norm, others expose their own sinfulness thus seeming worse than the norm.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“To live with tremendous and proud composure; always beyond —. To have and not to have one's affects, one's pro and con, at will; to condescend to them, for a few hours; to seat oneself on them as on a horse, often as on an ass — for one must know how to make use of their stupidity as much as of their fire. To reserve one's three hundred foregrounds; also the dark glasses; for there are cases when nobody may look into our eyes, still less into our "grounds." And to choose for company that impish and cheerful vice, courtesy. And to remain master of one's four virtues: of courage, insight, sympathy, and solitude.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Culture is a symbolic veil with which we hide our animal nature from ourselves … and other animals.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“There’s no such thing as a good or bad person: there are just people who have each been or seem to have been good or bad to you, someone, or some people, thus far.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“This man had something to hide, some shame in his past, and those with a past can always be bought.”
― Ian Rankin, Blood Hunt

“ Any relationship with long-term potential has a honeymoon period, however brief, marked by the happy illusion that one's lover might be uniquely perfect. This fool's paradise is sustained by the elaborate deception artfully employed in every courtship: the diplomatic dodging of difficult issues, the careful concealing of unflattering flaws, and the strategic stressing of charming virtues. But as trust increases and each person grows weary of maintaining this initial beguilement, the blissfully blurry lens through which the other is perceived eventually refocuses to a clearer picture.”
― Zack Love, Sex in the Title: A Comedy about Dating, Sex, and Romance in NYC

“Men employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.”
― Voltaire, Dialogues satiriques philosophiques: suivis du sermon des cinquante

“I am courteous enough to assume that everyone in this so aesthetically voluptuous age, so potent and aroused that conception occurs as easily as with the partridge which, Aristotle says, needs only to hear the voice of the cock or its flight overhead - to assume that at the mere sound of the word 'concealment' everyone can easily shake a dozen romances and comedies from his sleeve.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“Of what is concealed can also be revealed.”
― Pushpa Rana, Just the Way I Feel

“It is axiomatic that the attempt to become a Sufi through a desire for personal power as normally understood will not succeed.”
― Idries Shah, The Sufis

“It is not only temporality that is concealed although something like time always announces itself; even more well-known phenomena, like that of transcendence, the phenomena of world and being-in-the-world, are covered over. Nevertheless, they are not completely hidden, for the Dasein knows about something like ego and other. The concealment of transcendence is not a total unawareness but, what is much more fateful, a misunderstanding, a faulty interpretation. Faulty interpretations, misunderstandings, put much more stubborn obstacles in the way of authentic cognition than a total ignorance. However, these faulty interpretations of transcendence, of the basic relationship of Dasein to beings and to itself, are no mere defects of thought or acumen. They have their reason and their necessity in the Dasein's own historical existence. In the end, these faulty interpretations must be made, so that the Dasein may reach the path to the true phenomena by correcting them.”
― Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology

“Our fellowman either may voluntarily reveal to us the truth about himself, or by dissimulation he may deceive us as to the truth. No other object of knowledge can thus of its own initiative, either enlighten us with reference to itself or conceal itself, as a human being can. No other knowable object modifies its conduct from consideration of its being understood or misunderstood.”
― Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies

“In its essence, language is not the utterance of an organism; nor is it the expression of a living thing. Nor can it ever be thought in an essentially correct way in terms of its symbolic character, perhaps not even in terms of the character of signification. Language is the clearing-concealing advent of Being itself.”
― Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings

“A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rock-cleft valley. The building encloses the figure of the god, and in this concealment lets it stand out into the holy precinct through the open portico. By means of the temple, the god is present in the temple. This presence of the god is in itself the extension and delimitation of the precinct as a holy precinct. The temple and its precinct, however, do not fade away into the indefinite. It is the temple-work that first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being.”
― Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings

“Deceit, distortion, misdirection, and concealment are all lies in altered masks.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Being Bold: Quotes, Poetry, & Motivations for Every Day of the Year

“Baxter knows a lot more than I do, I told her.
Yes, said Baxter, but I will never tell people all of it.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“Lately I have come to believe that an as yet undiscovered human need and even a property of matter is the desire for revelation. The truth within us has a way of coming out despite all conscious efforts to conceal it. I have heard stories from those in the generation after the war, all speaking of the same struggle to ferret truth from the silence of their parents so that they themselves could begin to live.”
― Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“It’s not what people are showing that’s worrying, it’s what they are concealing and the extent of the concealment.”
― Et Imperatrix Noctem, Kintsugi

“Why say it, Mr. Cohen? Dammit? Why’d you say it! The pressure! You pinned me! We can’t move anymore!' thought Andrei.

Sometimes you must arrest the tongue to let your heart run free.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost

“An inspired lie could be preferred to a malignant truth.”
― Sven Holm, Termush

“If you want to hide your face, you don't need to wear a mask, just wear a very different shoe and people will look at your feet! The most creative art of hiding is to direct people's attention elsewhere and hide something that you do not want to be seen by others, while it is clearly visible to others!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan