One pretends to do something, or copy someone or some teacher, until it can be done confidently and easily in what becomes one's own style
The only thing worse than a coach or CEO who doesn't care about his people is one who pretends to care. People can spot a phony every time.
Where there is much pretension, much has been borrowed; nature never pretends.
There is nothing more contemptible than a bald man who pretends to have hair.
We hear a lot about identity theft when someone takes your wallet and pretends to be you and uses your credit cards. But the more serious identity theft is to get swallowed up in other people's definition of you.
Ah, bien je prétends que les courbes des quatre areêtes du monument, telles que le calcul les a fournies, donneront une grand impression de force et de beauté. Well, I think the curves of the four pillars of the monument, as the calculations have provided them, give it a great sense of force and beauty.
I can't wait to see the debate between Ryan and Joe Biden. Biden is said to be already trying out different strategies. So far the one that Obama likes is where Biden pretends to have food poisoning and they cancel the debate.
The people we care about are always worth more to us than the people we don't. No matter what anyone pretends.
A superstition which pretends to be scientific creates a much greater confusion of thought than one which contents itself with simple popular practices.
Flattery in courtship is the highest insolence, for whilst it pretends to bestow on you more than you deserve, it is watching an opportunity to take from you what you really have.
The stream of thinking has enormous momentum that can easily drag you along with it. Every thought pretends that it matters so much.
Psychobabble is. . . a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It's an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations, that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems.
Fanaticism is a monster that pretends to be the child of religion
When Prince Charles speaks, everybody pretends to be fascinated, even though he has never said anything interesting except in that intercepted telephone conversation wherein he expressed the desire to be a feminine hygeine product.
Immodest creature, you do not want a woman who will accept your faults, you want the one who pretends you are faultless - one who will caress the hand that strikes her and kiss the lips that lie to her.
It is hard to deal with someone who smiles and pretends to like you to your face and sticks that eight inch blade in your back when you turn around.
However the world pretends to divide itself, there are only two divisions in the world today - human beings and Germans.
Every creative act draws on the past whether it pretends to or not. It draws on what it knows. There's no such thing, really, as a creative act in a vacuum.
Every actor pretends that they hate sex scenes, and the truth is that they all love them, and they're lying.
In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political -- especially that which pretends not to be.
