AFFECTATION

Related Subjects: Appearance, Boasting, Elegance, Fop, Form, Hypocrisy, Vanity

1. Affectation is the product of falsehood.—CARLYLE

2. Avoid all affectation and singularity. What is according to nature is best, and what is contrary to it is always distasteful. Nothing is graceful that is not our own.—JEREMY COLLIER

3. Great vices are the proper objects of our detestation, smaller faults of our pity, but affectation appears to be the only true source of the ridiculous.—FIELDING

4. Paltry affectation, strained allusions, and disgusting finery are easily attained by those who choose to wear them ; they are but too frequently the badges of ignorance or of stupidity, whenever it would endeavor to please.—GOLDSMITH

5. Don't attitudenize.—SAMUEL JOHNSON, Boswell: Life

6. Affectation is to be always distinguished from hypocrisy, as being the art of counterfeiting those qualities, which we might with innocence and safety, be known to want. Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy; affectation part of the chosen trappings of folly.—SAMUEL JOHNSON

7. Among the numerous stratagems by which pride endeavors to recommend folly to regard, there is scarcely one that meets with less success than affectation, or a perpetual disguise of the real character by fictitious appearances.—SAMUEL JOHNSON

8. There is a pleasure in affecting affectation.—CHARLES LAMB

9. We are never so ridiculous from the habits we have as from those we affect to have.—LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, Maxims

10. All affectation is the vain and ridiculous attempt of poverty to appear rich.—LAVATER

11. Affectation endeavors to correct natural defects, and has always the laudable aim of pleasing, though always misses it.—LOCKE

12. Affectation hides three times as many virtues as charity does sins.—HORACE MANN

13. Die of a rose in aromatic pain.—POPE

14. I will not call vanity and affectation twins, because, more properly, vanity is the mother, and affectation is the darling daughter. Vanity is the sin, and affectation is the punishment; the first may be called the root of self-love, the other the fruit. Vanity is never at its full growth till it spreadeth into affectation, and then it is complete.—SIR H. SAVILLE