Dissemble meaning

Verb: dissemble

Pronunciation:  (di’sem-bul)

Dissemble meaning:

• Make believe with the intent to deceive

Synonyms: feign, sham, pretend, affect

• Hide under a false appearance

Synonyms: cloak, mask

• Behave unnaturally or affectedly

Synonyms: pretend, act

Derived forms: dissembles, dissembled, dissembling
Quotations:

1. Carl Sagan – Fireflies out on a warm summer’s night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometres away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower’s orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometres away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other’s nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives. To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since.
2. Milan Kundera – A person is nothing but his image. Philosophers can tell us that it doesn’t matter what the world thinks of us, that nothing matters but what we really are. But philosophers don’t understand anything. As long as we live with other people, we are only what other people consider us to be. Thinking about how others see us and trying to make our image as attractive as possible is considered a kind of dissembling or cheating. But does there exist another kind of direct contact between my self and their selves except through the mediation of the eyes? Can we possibly imagine love without anxiously following our image in the mind of the beloved? When we are no longer interested in how we are seen by the person we love, it means we no longer love.
3. Robert Frost – The trial by existence even the bravest that are slain shall not dissemble their surprise on waking to find valor reign, even as on earth, in paradise.
4. William Shakespeare – There’s no trust, no faith, no honesty in men; all perjured, all forsworn, all naught, all dissemblers.
5. Junot Díaz – Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a baby’s be-shattered diaper. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die.
6. Francis Bacon – For friends do but look upon good books: they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble.
7. 
   Susan Cain,
   – Should we become so proficient at self-presentation that we can dissemble without anyone suspecting?
8. Truman Capote – And since gin to artifice bears the same relation as tears to mascara, her attractions at once dissembled.
9. Julie Johnson – I’d felt it that moment when a person you need more than air or water or sustenance steps into your orbit and everything subtly shifts, like a camera finally sliding into focus. That person, who used to mean less than nothing, enters your life and rearranges your entire atmosphere around them, as if every atom and cell that makes you you isn’t your property anymore. Suddenly, every part of you becomes theirs your particles dissembled and rearranged to align perfectly with someone who you don’t even know or understand yet. You cease to exist as you once were, and that person who meant nothing is suddenly, overwhelmingly, everything.
10. Courtney Milan – It was fascinating to watch her spin the tale. She’d adjusted her accent yet again, adding just a twitch of country. She looked up at him with just the right amount of girlish adoration. As if they were deeply in love and barely beginning to discover one another.He couldn’t help looking back with the same expression. He wasn’t dissembling.

Sample sentences:

1. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die.
2. Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
3. The years drifted over like clouds in the heavens; The ladies went by me like snow on the wind. I charmed and I cheated, deceived and dissembled.
4. Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.
5. I knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I would be with the people. I know this, I see it printed in the night sky that I, eclectic dissembler of doctrine and psychoanalyst of dogma, howling like one possessed, will assault the barricades or the trenches , will take my bloodstained weapon, and consumed with fury, slaughter any enemy who falls into my hands.
6. A person is nothing but his image. Philosophers can tell us that it doesn’t matter what the world thinks of us, that nothing matters but what we really are. But philosophers don’t understand anything. As long as we live with other people, we are only what other people consider us to be. Thinking about how others see us and trying to make our image as attractive as possible is considered a kind of dissembling or cheating. But does there exist another kind of direct contact between my self and their selves except through the mediation of the eyes? Can we possibly imagine love without anxiously following our image in the mind of the beloved? When we are no longer interested in how we are seen by the person we love, it means we no longer love.
7. Trust the story, the storyteller may dissemble and deceive, the story can’t: the story can only ever be itself.
8. Love deeply grounded, hardly is dissembled.
9. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken my everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that, whatsoever might be the future date of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.
10. What Americans value and strive for is straight talking, plain saying. They don’t go in for ambiguity or dissembling, the etiquette of hidden meaning, the skill of the socially polite lie.
11. You’ve been kidding yourself about yourself for so long, you’re someone else. Your you is just a fragile fabrication. Every morning, you have to wake up, assemble this busy, dissembling monster, and get him or her on his or her feet again for another round of fantasy.
12. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.