What is "falseness"

Usage examples of "falseness".

That smile and his laugh made some people vaguely uncomfortable: there was a kind of deliberate falseness in them, as if what he really thought and felt was not to be shared with other men.

And in the end, it led to nothing but falseness and triviality, to the ghosts of passion, and the spectres of sincerity, to the shoddy appearances of conviction and belief in people who had no passion and sincerity, and who were convinced of nothing, believed in nothing, were just the disloyal apes of fashion and the arts.

Seth Flint, it was possible to see the basic falseness of their relation towards life everywhere around them.

And as the years went on, the memory of all their folly, falseness, and hypocrisy was curiously altered and subdued and the memory that grew more vivid and dominant was of a little family, one of millions huddled below the immense and timeless skies that bend above us, lost in the darkness of nameless and unnumbered lives upon the lonely wilderness of life that is America, and banked together against these giant antagonists, for comfort, warmth, and love, with a courage and integrity that would not die and could not be forgotten.

Why do we waste our lives--exhaust our energy--throw everything good away on falseness and lies and emptiness?

Why is it that we are always strangers in this world, and never come to know one another, and are full of fear and shame and hate and falseness, when what we want is love?

And suddenly it seemed to her that she knew all these lonely, strange, and unknown watchers of the night, that she was speaking to them, and they to her, across the fields of sleep, as they had never spoken before, that she knew men now in all their dark and naked loneliness, without falseness and pretence as she had never known them.

I have known all my life, the falseness in a hearty laugh, the envy and the malice in a jesting word, the naked hatred in a jeering eye, and all the damned, warped, poisonous constrictions of the heart--the horrible fear and cowardice and cruelty, the naked shame, the hypocrisy, and the pretence, that are masked there behind the full hearty tones, the robust manliness of the Hortons of this earth .

But if he passed these same people two hours later in the High Street, their lives, their words were stranger than in a dream, or they seemed to have an incredible fictitious quality that made everything they did or said seem false, mannered, and affected, so that when he listened to them he had a feeling of resentment and contempt for them as if they spoke and moved with the palpable falseness of actors.

And in less than an hour, Peron would know the falseness of his final words.

She strived to impress me with the vanity and the falseness of all European creeds, as well as with a sense of her own spiritual greatness: throughout her conversation upon these high topics she carefully insinuated, without actually asserting, her heavenly rank.

And, perhaps, there are very few people in the world who would not rather choose to die than to have all their secret follies, the errors of their judgments, the vanity of their minds, the falseness of their pretences, the frequency of their vain and disorderly passions, their uneasinesses, hatreds, envies, and vexations made known to all the world.

Doubtless, in your hearts, perhaps late at night, in bed, or in the morning, or at odd, lonely moments, in spite of your educations and conditionings, your trainings, you recognized the falseness of these teachings.

Only, we are so far gone into falseness, so acceptant of our limited role, that we never question it at all.

But whoever holds our thinking itself, "the spirit," in other words, responsible for the falseness of the world - an honorable way out which is chosen by every conscious or unconscious advocatus dei - whoever takes this world, along with space, time, form, movement, to be falsely inferred - anyone like that would at least have ample reason to learn to be suspicious at long last of all thinking.