Dissimulation

“ for surely the continual habit of dissimulation is but a weak and sluggish cunning, and not greatly politic. ”

“ These properties, of arts or policy, and dissimulation or closeness, are indeed habits and faculties several, and to be distinguished. For if a man have that penetration of judgment, as he can discern what things are to be laid open, and what to be secreted, and what to be showed at half lights, and to whom and when (which indeed are arts of state, and arts of life, as Tacitus well calleth them) , to him, a habit of dissimulation is a hinderance and a poorness. But if a man cannot obtain to that judgment, then it is left to him generally, to be close, and a dissembler. ”

“ The great advantages of simulation and dissimulation are three. First, to lay asleep opposition, and to surprise. For where a man's intentions are published, it is an alarum to call up all that are against them. The second is, to reserve to a man's self a fair retreat. For if a man engage himself by a manifest declaration, he must go through or take a fall. ”

“ But before we discourse of this vice, it will be necessary to observe, that the learned make a difference between simulation and dissimulation. [52] Simulation is a pretence of what is not, and dissimulation a concealment of what is. The latter is our present affair. When you look round you in public places in this island, you see the generality of mankind carry in their countenance an air of challenge or defiance: and there is no such man to be found among us who naturally strives to do greater honours and civilities than he receives. ”

“ The darker passions of treachery, revenge, cherished animosities, cunning watchfulness for opportunity to gratify a grudge, and the practice of dissimulation were, of course, as human proclivities, found in their full power among the men of the woods. ”

“ In war, practice dissimulation, and you will succeed. ”

“ Dissimulation is the atmosphere in which they live159jealousy is the food on which they prey—and, while they are urging on the chariot of their own fortunes, they are sure to have some luckless rival impaled upon one of the spokes of its uncertain wheel. ”

“ Our lack has always been that we have had no [adequate] leader, not because any harm has occurred by his command, but because he has passed it by. Consequently, dissimulation is no longer sufficient to remedy the matter. ”

“ XXXIII. An habitual dissimulation proceeds, partly from a defect in the understanding, and partly from the natural talents being vitiated. Those who cannot distinguish when it is proper to observe silence, nor when it is requisite, and when hazardous, to be open and explicit; upon a short reflection, either decide upon keeping silence totally; or else on all occasions, never to venture more than a very diminutive explanation; like blind people, who even when they are walking on plain ground, for fear of slipping, proceed with great caution. ”

“ Dissimulation is but a faint kind of policy, or wisdom; for it asketh a strong wit and a strong heart to know when to tell truth, and to do it; therefore it is the weaker sort of politicians that are the great dissemblers. ”

“ For that reason, we urge the publication of these truths, that the struggle may no longer be waged in ignorance and doubt and confusion.”
“Does ‘massed forces of destructive purpose’ imply some combination, or co-operation, or co-ordination, among disintegrating forces?” Mary K. was asked, at another time.
[272]
“Yes, they combine every appealing force, as we do. One man may answer to doubt, fear, cupidity, and envy. Another to malice, doubt, and lust. Any forces that can reach him mass themselves in attack and call on their purposes in him to respond.” ”

“ A daily growing despotism, the fear we all felt of it—a fear which consisted simply in our dread of receiving a rebuke for the smallest fault—and the silence we observed on every subject, placed the various inhabitants of the Tuileries on the same level. ”

“ I am living under a reign of terror, where dissembling is an art, and must be practiced, though self-bemeaning to an honest mind. The crushing incubus is upon us, and must be borne as best it can be. It would be comparatively easy to float with the current here if one's sympathies were with it. ”

“ Malice, Envy, Doubt, Falsehood, Ignorance, Lust, Cupidity, Fear. All these make for Destruction, which is the strong purpose that moves them all. Each of these is divided and subdivided into myriad motives of disintegration, many of which disguise themselves before daring to enter the consciousness of man. ”

“ My uneasiness (whatever may have been the nature of theirs) consisted in a participation in the distresses of those persons, whose private feelings had been so deeply and (as I fear they supposed) cruelly wounded; and in the reflection, that the disgusting subject of human disinterment must be again agitated, commented upon, written upon; a subject which, of all others, whether relating to a necessity or not, ought to be kept profoundly silent, and almost mysteriously secret. ”

“ This action of opposing forces with regard to the more primitive aspects of the mind is termed Repression Repression and so far as it manifests itself in consciousness finds its most usual expression in the emotions of disgust, anger and fear. ”

“ It is concussion, or the rushing together of air to fill a vacuum, which makes a noise. The great events to which all things consent, and for which they have prepared the way, produce no explosion, for they are gradual, and create no vacuum which requires to be suddenly filled; as a birth takes place in silence, and is whispered about the neighborhood, but an assassination, which is at war with the constitution of things, creates a tumult immediately. ”

“ The origin of the late tumult is to be traced not to rapacity or disaffection, feelings which have driven many armies into civil strife, much less to any shrinking from, or fear of danger. It was your excessive affection for me that roused you to act with more zeal than discretion. For even honourable motives of action, unless directed by judgment, are followed by disastrous results. ”

“ The atmosphere was charged with a strange emotion—the emotion that, as it were a sudden fever, sometimes grips a mob, cutting it free from the restraints men impose upon themselves, casting it back into the primitive conditions of self-defence and self-assertion. ”

“ For days after I knew the secret of how to dissipate, not once, but repeatedly, and so forever, the Creeping Mist, I struggled with my decision. If I kept my secret to myself, millions of human beings would die in the submersion. ”

“ For, the longer the dissension endures, the wider and deeper it grows by the fallibility and irascibility of human nature: these are not confined to either side, and finally the invariable end is reached—both in the wrong. ”

“ So profound, then, even in a psychological point of view, and apart from the multiplied phases which the moral aspect presents, appears the discord which reigns in our whole mind as at present constituted! Dissension seems to be interwoven into its fundamental fabric. Instead, therefore, of saying the human consciousness is fourfold, with equal, if not with greater correctness, we might and ought to say, it is divided, or, rather, split, into four or more pieces. ”

“ Open the door." Dead silence. Perfect unbroken silence, and the darkness seemed to wrap round me and envelope me in a thick fog. There was an oppression, a weight in the atmosphere, and I felt an indescribable something that seemed to make it an impossibility either to speak or move. ”

“ In the odd silence that followed we looked at each other in something like alarm, for the populace was silent, too, and a silent populace may so easily be a dangerous one. In a moment, though, they all began shouting, in cumulative waves of noise, louder and more frantically. ”

“ Spectral Silence THE SILENCE GROWS more oppressive, the solitude unbearable. My natural buoyancy is weighted down by a nameless dread. With dismay I realize the failing elasticity of my step, the gradual loss of mental vivacity. ”

“ Some, who could have spoken much that we would now very gladly hear, kept silence; others, in their eagerness to promote an already wide-spread and ever-growing reputation, served as the unconscious agents of a devastation especially malignant because deliberately selective. ”

“ When we hear of the silence which reigns in the seraglio, we are made to believe, that speech itself is become unnecessary; and that the signs of the mute are sufficient to carry the most important mandates of government. ”

“ That is impossible, not only because we are realizing that our system of incomplete silence is mischievous, but because it is based on a confusion which contains within itself the elements of disruption. ”

“ The voice of the calm inquirer, reason, is incapable of being heard amidst the tumult; and the favorite image is animated and enlarged by the glowing fire of the passions. No power remains to control or regulate, much less to subdue, this mental ray, which inflames the whole soul, and exalts it into the fervor of enthusiasm, hurries it into the extravagance of superstition: or precipitates it into the furious frenzies of fanaticism. ”

“ And over and above this chaos, this rout and tumult, there arose a succession of the most appalling screams that ever human ear was condemned to listen to, for they issued from the throats of so many human beings shut up within the death-trap below—so many human beings, for whom all escape was cut off, and who were being literally parboiled alive. ”

“ I think sometimes that our common definition of dissipation is far too narrow. We confine it to crude excesses in the use of intoxicating liquor or the crude gratification of the passions; but often these are only the outward symbols of a more subtle inward disorder. ”

“ Dissension, combined with growing scarcity, gradually produced a feeling of despondence, many began to tremble at the desperate nature of their undertaking, and the magnitude of the power to which they were opposed. ”

“ Dissection and disinterment are both forgotten and forgiven, when agony distorts the features of a beloved sufferer, or when death seems to be impending over him; and when that science which but for Anatomy (and in the present state of things but for disinterment) could not exist, is ready at hand to relieve from torture, or to snatch from death. ”

“ Nevertheless, the noise which a rupture would make, the suspicions which it might awaken in the public mind, the ties of society, of relationship, of friendship, which seem to render the separation impossible without eclat, persuade us that it is not then commanded, and that a danger, become as if necessary, becomes a security to us. ”

“ There are tumults of the mind when like the great convulsions of nature all seems anarchy and returning chaos, yet often in those moments of vast disturbance, as in the material strife itself, some new principle of order, or some new impulse of conduct, develops itself, and controls and regulates and brings to an harmonious consequence, passions and elements which seemed only to threaten despair and subversion. ”

“ New dissipated characters are produced to view, by the knowledge of which, the novice in dissipation is not diverted from his new and baneful career, but finds only his scope of dissipation enlarged, and a wider field to range in. ”

“ There'll be talk—oh, I know human nature, and that it's impossible for things to be otherwise—but at least I may count upon you for stemming the tide a little, until the way is rather clearer. Believe me, there will be a crisis—a solution of some sort will come. I know that the present state of tension can't last. ”

“ In this process which is called sublimation, the energy arising out of conflict is diverted from some channel which leads in an asocial or antisocial direction, and turned into one leading to an end connected with the higher ideals of society. ”

“ Do not deceive yourself. You urge me to discretion in one breath and tax me with timidity in the next. While there was hope that they might call Beauregard back out of their own good sense, I was determined to say nothing to inflame them. Do you call that timidity? Now their intention is clear, and you've heard me speak this morning clearly also. And now you talk about discretion—you, who call what was discretion at the right time, timidity, now counsel timidity at the wrong time, and call it discretion. ”

“ The flame grows and drops away, and where it stood is vapour, and where was the vapour is swift revolution, and where was the revolution is spinning resistance, and where the resistance endured is crystallization. ”

“ Knowledge must precede dissociation, so that dissociation is nothing more than a decision to forget. What has been forgotten then appears to be fearful, but only because the dissociation is an attack on truth. ”

“ They debate, they dispute, they wrangle, they explode—then nerves are relieved, and they are ready to begin over again. Quit the home and quarrelling is less obvious, but it goes on all about one. What proportion of the letters delivered any morning would be found to be written in displeasure, in petulance, in wrath? ”

“ Such discord has been the effect of the unanimity into which so many have of late been seduced or bullied, or into the appearance of which they have sunk through mere despair. They have been told that their dissent from violent measures is an encouragement to rebellion. ”

“ The only inconvenience it occasions, as they tell us, is a slight tendency of the blood to the face, a soft suffusion, which, however, is very transient, since nothing is said by those whom they join calculated to deepen the red on the cheek, but a prudent silence is observed in regard to all the past. ”

“ For out of the desolation would arise a poisoned stench that would choak almost the breath of life, and one low, creeping fog of universal despotism, that would confound the Eastern and the Western world together in darkness that might be felt. ”