Pretence meaning

Noun: pretence

Pronunciation:  (‘pree,ten(t)s or pri’ten(t)s)

Pretence meaning:

• The act of giving a false appearance

Synonyms: pretense, pretending, simulation, feigning

• Pretending with intention to deceive

Synonyms: pretense, feigning, dissembling

• Imaginative intellectual play

Synonyms: believe

• A false or unsupportable quality

Synonyms: pretension, pretense

• An artful or simulated semblance

Synonyms: guise, pretense, pretext

Derived forms: pretences
Quotations:

1. Jim Morrison – That’s what real love amounts to – letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending, performing. You get to love your pretence. It’s true, we’re locked in an image, an act and the sad thing is, people get so used to their image, they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains. They forget all about who they really are. And if you try to remind them, they hate you for it, they feel like you’re trying to steal their most precious possession.
2. Havelock Ellis – Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.
3. Michael Bassey Johnson – Don’t pretend to be what you’re not, instead, pretend to what you want to be, it is not pretence, it is a journey to self realization.
4. Maggie Stiefvater – I smiled sweetly at his embarrassment, beginning to walk again, kicking up golden leaves. I heard him scuffling leaves behind me. And what was the point of this again? Forget it! Do you like this place or not? I stopped in my tracks, spinning to face him. He raised his eyebrows and stopped in his tracks. You didn’t think Jack would be here at all, did you? His thick black eyebrows went up even farther. Did you even intend to look for him at all? He held his hands up as if a surrender. You were trying to see if I would recognize it, weren’t you? I took another step, closing the distance between us. I could feel the heat of his body, even without touching him, in the increasing cold of the day. You told me about this wood somehow. How did you show it to me? I keep trying to tell you. You wont listen. Because you’re stubborn. It’s how we speak it’s the only words we have. Just pictures. Just simple little pictures. His hands were still raise, but he was starting to grin at me in the failing light. So you brought me here to see this. I stepped forward again, and he stepped back. Do you like it? Under false pretence.
5. Dietrich Bonhoeffer – We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, and straightforward men. Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?
   
6. Seneca – And this, too, affords no small occasion for anxieties – if you are bent on assuming a pose and never reveal yourself to anyone frankly, in the fashion of many who live a false life that is all made up for show; for it is torturous to be constantly watching oneself and be fearful of being caught out of our usual role. And we are never free from concern if we think that every time anyone looks at us he is always taking-our measure; for many things happen that strip off our pretence against our will, and, though all this attention to self is successful, yet the life of those who live under a mask cannot be happy and without anxiety. But how much pleasure there is in simplicity that is pure, in itself unadorned, and veils no part of its character!
7. Charles Dickens – All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself.
8. Cassandra Clare – If you pretend to feel nothing, the pretence may become true. That would be a pity.
9. Mark Lawrence – We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretence of understanding. We paper over the voids in our comprehension with science or religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us. The biggest lies we save for ourselves. We play a game in which we are gods, in which we make choices, and the current follows in our wake. We pretend a separation from the wild. Pretend that a man’s control runs deep, that civilization is more than a veneer, that reason will be our companion in dark places.

Sample sentences:

1. Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretence.
2. Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretence. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.
3. That’s what real love amounts to- letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending- performing. You get to love your pretence. It’s true, we’re locked in an image, an act
4. Don’t be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there’s no poverty to be seen because the poverty’s been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don’t be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there’s no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they’ll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces.
5. Don’t think, he’d said, because it was easier than saying, Take me for who I am.He couldn’t bear that suddenly. He wanted it without pretences, without excuses, his fingers curling hard into Laurent’s hair.
6. Anything can become a children’s book if you give it to a child. Children are actually the best and worst audience for literature because they have no patience with pretence.
7. We ought to punish pitilessly that shameful pretence of friendly intercourse. I like a man to be a man, and to show on all occasions the bottom of his heart in his discourse. Let that be the thing to speak, and never let our feelings be beneath vain compliments
8. How far does a pretence of feeling, maintained with absolute conviction, become authentic?
9. The relations one has with a woman one loves (and that can apply also to love for a youth) can remain platonic for other reasons than the chastity of the woman or the unsensual nature of the love she inspires. The reason may be that the lover is too impatient and by the very excess of his love is unable to await the moment when he will obtain his desires by sufficient pretence of indifference. Continually, he returns to the charge, he never ceases writing to her whom he loves, he is always trying to see her, she refuses herself, he becomes desperate. From that time she knows, if she grants him her company, her friendship, that these benefits will seem so considerable to one who believed he was going to be deprived of them, that she need grant nothing more and that she can take advantage of the moment when he can no longer bear being unable to see her and when, at all costs, he must put an end to the struggle by accepting a truce which will impose upon him a platonic relationship as its preliminary condition. Moreover, during all the time that preceded this truce, the lover, in a constant state of anxiety, ceaselessly hoping for a letter, a glance, has long ceased thinking of the physical desire which at first tormented him but which has been exhausted by waiting and has been replaced by another order of longings more painful still if left unsatisfied. The pleasure formerly anticipated from caresses will later be accorded but transmuted into friendly words and promises of intercourse which brings delicious moments after the strain of uncertainty or after a look impregnated with such coldness that it seemed to remove the loved one beyond hope of his ever seeing her again. Women divine all this and know they can afford the luxury of never yielding to those who, from the first, have betrayed their inextinguishable desire. A woman is enchanted if, without giving anything, she can receive more than she generally gets when she does give herself.
10. The truth is, sir, that men do what their power permits them to do. We are no different from the Pharaohs or the Mongols: the difference is only that when we kill people we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history.
11. All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else’s manufacture, is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make, as good money!
12. What else do you do there except lie – lie to yourself and others, lie about everything you recognize in your heart to be true? You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretences of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.
13. Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind.
14. The liar can pretend to be shocked when his lies are exposed, but his pretence is merely a continuation of his lying strategy. The fake really is shocked when he is exposed, since he had created around himself a community of trust, of which he himself was a member. Understanding this phenomenon is, it seems to me, integral to understanding how a high culture works, and how it can become corrupted.
15. We teach girls shame. Close your legs. Cover yourself. We make them feel as though by being born female, they are already guilty of something. And so girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. Who silence themselves. Who cannot say what they truly think. Who have turned pretence into an art form.