He pretended to suspect me, of course. We can see now, thanks to you, that his whole life has been one long hypocrisy, that he has been pretending to be an artist, just like any other fraud. His deadly earnestness about it only made it worse; I see that now.

Edward Kelly (Aleister Crowley), The Artistic Temperament

Hermetic quote Kelly Crowley The Artistic Temperament pretended suspect whole life one long hypocrisy pretending artist fraud deadly earnestness made worse

Consider also:

  1. “a prototypic American, one whose view of honor and dignity was circumscribed by lust for gain. He thought of Americans as a decadent people whose idea of refinement is fluffy toilet paper. Affluent children who race about their highways, playing with their CB radios, pretending to be World War II pilots. Where is the fiber in a people whose best-selling poet is Rod McKuen, the Howard Cosell of verse?”
  2. “But they were entirely free from the malignant envy, the panic born of prejudice and the perverse passions produced by hypocritically pretending to suppress natural instincts, which one associates with tradesmen in the West End of London and ministers of religion.”
  3. “She was silky and sullen and swift and perverse, loving to tease her master with pretended indifference, only to overwhelm him with the greater vehemence at the end, like a cat playing with a mouse. She had all the stealth and self-possession of a cat, moreover; and Cleon thought himself lucky to be beloved of one so skilled in every art of pleasing and exciting.”
  4. “I despise him, and as such, I will have a hard time pretending not to enjoy every second of his downfall and humiliation. That’s my burden to bear.”
  5. “‘Astral’ Beings may thus be defined in the same way as ‘material objects’; they are the Unknown Causes of various observed effects. They may be of any order of existence. We give a physical form and name to a bell but not to its tone, though in each case we know nothing but our own impressions. But we record musical sounds by a special convention. We may therefore call a certain set of qualities ‘Ratziel’, or describe an impression as ‘Saturnian’ without pretending to know what anything is in itself. All we need is to know how to cast a bell that will please our ears, or how to evoke a ‘spirit’ that will tell us things that are hidden from our intellectual faculties.”