Pretense meaning

Noun: pretense

Pronunciation:  (‘pree,ten(t)s)

Pretense meaning:

• The act of giving a false appearance

Synonyms: pretence, pretending, simulation, feigning

• Pretending with intention to deceive

Synonyms: pretence, feigning, dissembling

• Imaginative intellectual play

Synonyms: believe

• A false or unsupportable quality

Synonyms: pretension, pretence

• An artful or simulated semblance

Synonyms: guise, pretence, pretext
Derived forms: pretenses

Quotations:

1. Thomas Jefferson – I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
2. Gabriel Garcia Marquez – I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people’s time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.
3. José Micard Teixeira – I no longer have patience for certain things, not because I’ve become arrogant, but simply because I reached a point in my life where I do not want to waste more time with what displeases me or hurts me. I have no patience for cynicism, excessive criticism and demands of any nature. I lost the will to please those who do not like me, to love those who do not love me and to smile at those who do not want to smile at me. I no longer spend a single minute on those who lie or want to manipulate. I decided not to coexist anymore with pretense, hypocrisy, dishonesty and cheap praise. I do not tolerate selective erudition nor academic arrogance. I do not adjust either to popular gossiping. I hate conflict and comparisons. I believe in a world of opposites and that’s why I avoid people with rigid and inflexible personalities. In friendship I dislike the lack of loyalty and betrayal. I do not get along with those who do not know how to give a compliment or a word of encouragement. Exaggerations bore me and I have difficulty accepting those who do not like animals. And on top of everything I have no patience for anyone who does not deserve my patience.
4. Abraham Lincoln – As a nation, we began by declaring that all men are created equal. We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics. When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
5. Laini Taylor – He dropped the pretense, and dropped his head, so his brow came to rest against the sun-warmed top of hers. His arms went around her and drew her in, and Karou and Akiva were like two matches struck against each other to flare starlight. With a sigh, she softened, and it was pure homecoming to melt against him and rest.
6. Janet Frame – I don’t want to inhabit the human world under false pretenses.
7. Maria V. Snyder – In the war room, love? What if someone comes in? I stood and removed his shirt. Then they’ll have a good story to tell. He adopted the pretense of being offended.
8. John Fante – We talked, she and I. She asked about my work and it was a pretense, she was not interested in my work. And when I answered, it was a pretense. I was not interested in my work either. There was only one thing that interested us, and she knew it. She had made it plain by her coming.
9. J.K. Rowling – The mistake ninety-nine percent of humanity made, as far as Fats could see, were being ashamed of what they were, lying about it, trying to be somebody else. Honesty was Fats’ currency, his weapon and defense. It frightened people when you were honest; it shocked them. Other people, Fats had discovered, were mired in embarrassment and pretense, terrified that their truths might leak out, but Fats was attracted by rawness, by everything that was ugly but honest, by the dirty things about which the likes of his father felt humiliated and disgusted. Fats thought a lot about messiahs and pariahs; about men labeled mad or criminal; noble misfits shunned by the sleepy masses.
10. Jonathan Safran Foer – He ran the back of his hand up her cheek, with the pretense of wiping away sweat. Do you think you could ever love me? I don’t think so. Because I’m not good enough. It’s not like that. Because I’m not smart. No. Because you couldn’t love me. Because I couldn’t love you.

Sample sentences:

1. A Woman in harmony with her spirit is like a river flowing. She goes where she will without pretense and arrives at her destination prepared to be herself and only herself.
2. To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.
3. We make them feel as though being born female they’re already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up and this is the worst thing we do to girls they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.
4. If freckles were lovely, and day was night, and measles were nice and a lie warn’t a lie, life would be delight, but things couldn’t go right for in such a sad plight I wouldn’t be I. If earth was heaven and now was hence, and past was present, and false was true, there might be some sense but I’d be in suspense for on such a pretense you wouldn’t be you.
5. You’ve always lived a life of pretense, not a real life a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.
6. Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn’t get you anywhere.
7. What condemnation could possibly be more harsh than one’s own, when self-pretense is no longer possible?
8. 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 pretenses 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.
9. When over the years someone has seen you at your worst, and knows you with all your strengths and flaws, yet commits him- or herself to you wholly, it is a consummate experience. To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.
10. The 1143 year long war hand begun on false pretenses and only because the two races were unable to communicate.
11. Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating other. Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time that someone else. Hours in which honesty is permitted have become rare, and when they arrive one is tired and does not only want to let oneself go but actually wishes to stretch out as long and wide and ungainly as one happens to be. Soon we may well reach the point where people can no longer give in to the desire for a vita contemplation that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends without self-contempt and a bad conscience.
12. Without community, there is no liberation but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.
13. A dozen awful things he could say, or do, went through his mind. One did not slough off a persona so quickly, he had found. He had pretended to be cruel for so many years that the pretense was still what he reached for first, as a man might absently turn his carriage toward the home he had lived in for all his life, despite the fact that he had recently moved.
14. Tea is an act complete in its simplicity. When I drink tea, there is only me and the tea. The rest of the world dissolves. There are no worries about the future. No dwelling on past mistakes. Tea is simple: loose-leaf tea, hot pure water, a cup. I inhale the scent, tiny delicate pieces of the tea floating above the cup. I drink the tea, the essence of the leaves becoming a part of me. I am informed by the tea, changed. This is the act of life, in one pure moment, and in this act the truth of the world suddenly becomes revealed: all the complexity, pain, drama of life is a pretense, invented in our minds for no good purpose. There is only the tea, and me, converging.
15. It’s for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear. We give out the reasons, and we let a few of the ordinary ones in, those that would do in the world; but that’s just protective coloration. Like the church in the Middle Ages, which didn’t give a damn about the laity or even about God, we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive because we have to.
16. Give your heart to everybody you meet. The rest is pretense.
17. It’s way too easy to see the real face of a person. They’re amiable and full of pretense when they want something from you, but the minute you don’t give in, back away or put yourself first like they do is the minute they show you who they really are.