He remembered that she was pretty, and, more, that she had a special grace in the intimacy of life. She had the secret of individuality which excites--and escapes.
~
Victory
by
Joseph Conrad
"All a man can betray is his conscience."
~
Under Western Eyes
by
Joseph Conrad
Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
~
The Way of All Flesh
by
Samuel Butler
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
~
Adam Bede
by
George Eliot
No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.
~
The Scarlet Letter
by
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.
~
The Moon and Sixpence
by
W. Somerset Maugham
"That's the way we all begin," said Tom Platt. "The boys they make believe all the time till they've cheated 'emselves into bein' men, an' so till they die - pretendin' an' pretendin' "
~
Captains Courageous
by
Rudyard Kipling
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!
~
Great Expectations
by
Charles Dickens
"This above all,--to thine own self be true; and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."
~
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
by
William Shakespeare