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Falseness   Listen
Falseness

noun
1.
The state of being false or untrue.  Synonym: falsity.
2.
Unfaithfulness by virtue of being unreliable or treacherous.  Synonyms: faithlessness, fickleness, inconstancy.
3.
The quality of not being open or truthful; deceitful or hypocritical.  Synonyms: hollowness, insincerity.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Falseness" Quotes from Famous Books



... position, and filled with disgust at his betrayal, was in a mood to accept any suspicion, and the evil thought grew fat within him. He pondered every word of his conversation with the Morgans, and fancied that he saw indisputable evidence of the Doctor's falseness in ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton

... very beginning of the Christian era. The time has now come to enquire what part Jewish influence played meanwhile in revolutions. Merely to ask the question is to bring on oneself the accusation of "anti-Semitism," yet the Jewish writer Bernard Lazare has shown the falseness of ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... up the chasms in the chain of the development. The sort of service, however, expected from Pope in such a field, falls in better with the style of his satires and moral epistles than of a work professedly metaphysical. Here, however, most eminently it is that the falseness and hypocrisy which besieged his satirical career have made themselves manifest; and the dilemma for any working-man who should apply himself to these sections of Pope's writings is precisely this: Reading them with the slight and languid attention which belongs to ordinary reading, they ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey

... fancy that it is the result of a preconcerted scheme and intrigue with the Tories, neither of which do I believe to be true. With regard to the latter notion, the absence of Sir Robert Peel, who is travelling in Italy, is a conclusive proof of its falseness. He never would have been absent if he had foreseen the remotest possibility of a crisis, and the death of Lord Spencer has been imminent and expected for some time past. I am convinced that it is the execution of a project ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville

... it has been hinted that the disaster resulted from an accident due to lack of discipline on board the vessel. The utter falseness of this statement is shown by the facts. Just think of a crew, or what was left of it, mustering without confusion on the deck of a sinking, burning vessel, and this vessel likely to be blown to pieces at any moment! Could any better evidence of perfect discipline and heroism ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 10, March 10, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... he assured her. Lavinia turned away with an uncomfortable feeling of falseness. "What do you predict— will Gheta take it, understand, or will ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer

... only the prejudices of the ignorant and vulgar which draw the distinction between yourself and the Christian: enlighten him therefore where requisite; associate as much as possible with him; let your press address him; prove by your acts, your words and dealings, the falseness of his assertions against you, and his sneer loses all its sting from its inapplicability. Let the phrase, "He is a Jew in his dealings," be an honourable testimonial, equally as desirable to you as that "He acts like a Christian," is to our fellow-citizens of the faith ...
— Suggestions to the Jews - for improvement in reference to their charities, education, - and general government • Unknown

... not therefore become afraid of herself, or in the least realise at once the danger of her own position. Her immediate glance at the matter did not go beyond the falseness of men. If it were so, as she suspected,—if Phineas had in truth transferred his affections to Violet Effingham, of how little value was the love of such a man! It did not occur to her at this moment that she also had transferred hers to ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope

... the mode inculcated by the Church is that each one may freely affirm and act upon the highest human conceptions he can attain of the{249} power, wisdom, and goodness of God, His watchful care, His loving providence for every man, at every moment and in every need; for the Christian knows that the falseness of his conceptions lies only in their inadequacy; he may therefore strengthen and refresh himself, may rejoice and revel in conceptions of the goodness of God, drawn from the tenderest human images of fatherly care and love, or he may chasten and abase himself by consideration of the awful ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart

... not bad, not lost, but groping like he was down those vast and naked shores of life. He wept for the hard-faced Mrs. Wrapp, whose ideal had been wealth and who had found prosperity bitter ashes at her lips, yet who preserved in this modern maelstrom some sense of its falseness, its baseness. He wept for Helen, playmate of the years never to return, sweetheart of his youth, betrayer of his manhood, the young woman of the present, blase, unsexed, seeking, provocative, all perhaps, as she had said, that men had made her—a travesty on splendid girlhood. ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey

... doing and what you wish,—and whether you love me. I have not as yet the power of offering you a home, but I trust that the time may come.' These last words were false. He knew that they were false. But the falseness was not of a nature to cause him to be ashamed. It shames no man to swear that he loves a woman when he has ceased to love her;—but it does shame him to drop off from the love which he has promised. He balanced the matter ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope

... revealed theologies—he sums up the proofs on which Christianity rests, miracles, prophecies, and martyrdoms, with great clearness; proves the absurdity of the doctrine of miracles, as taught by Christian writers, shows the falseness of the so-called prophecies, even granting the utmost warping of the real meaning of the Old Testament texts for Christian purposes, which he asserted were to be compared unfavorably with the oracles of Delphos, and points out that the Mohammedan dying for his prophet, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran

... still their eyeballs shrink tormented Back into their brains, because on their sense Sunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-black; Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh —Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous, Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses. —Thus their hands are plucking at each other; Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging; Snatching after us who smote them, brother, Pawing us who dealt them war ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen

... PERICLES. Prithee, speak: Falseness cannot come from thee; for thou look'st Modest as Justice, and thou seem'st a palace For the crown'd Truth to dwell in: I will believe thee, And make my senses credit thy relation To points that seem ...
— Pericles Prince of Tyre • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]

... not seeking any answer to his question, by the very tone of it he suggested that he did not possess that gem which those who hold it prize above all things. "The Scepticism of Pilate" is the title of one of Robertson's greatest sermons. The preacher traces it to four sources: indecision; falseness to his own convictions; the taint of the worldly temper of his day; and that priestly bigotry which forbids inquiry, and makes doubt a crime. Pilate is the typical sceptic, who is worlds removed from the "honest" doubter. Serious doubt, which is pained and ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.

... where he stood with his back toward her. He did not see the passionate gesture with which she strained her clasped hands to her breast a moment and then stretched them out toward him. In a second she withdrew them and let them fall in her lap. Her heart reproached her for the falseness of her tongue, and this had been a passionate impulse of atonement to him for the wrong that she had done. But stronger than her heart was the other voice that told her to make her utmost effort to keep up the deceit, for ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder

... her into a stable and tumbled and tossed her. Pepys having been himself often permitted to take liberties with her, it seemed to him that her indignation with the Dutchman was "the best instance of woman's falseness in the world."[307] He assumes without question that a woman who has accorded the privilege of familiarity to a man she knows and, one hopes, respects, would be prepared to accept complacently the brutal attentions of the first drunken stranger she ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... heartless scenes of fashionable life. The world was new to her, and no wonder if her unpractised eye was dazzled by the splendor of its pageantry. She entered a magic circle, and was borne round the ceaseless course with a rapidity which threw a deceitful lustre on every object, and concealed the falseness of its colors. She became the idol of a courtly throng; poets sung her praises, and admirers sighed around her. Her heart remained uncorrupted by flattery; but, young and inexperienced, buoyant with health and spirits, no wonder that she yielded to the fascinations ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney

... was not the man to remind a woman of her falseness, but something in his eyes made her falter ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice

... a lady of fashion, struggling always with narrow means; and there were times when her son's heart grew sick, remembering the falseness, the meanness, the petty cunning maneuvers she had been ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme

... the court, and that such occasions were rare as miracles, there were not wanting those among her enemies and rivals who declared that for 10,000 crowns a simple gentleman might taste the pleasures of his sovereign, which was false above all falseness, for when her lord taxed her with it, did she not reply, "Abominable wretches! Curse the devils who put this idea in your head! I never yet did have man who spent less than 30,000 crowns ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... my crop, ran down to the extreme end of my toes, and deprived me even of speech, while the boatmen laughed at me. Never have I felt such cold. I danced in my grief and amazement till I could recover my breath and then I danced and cried out against the falseness of this world; and the boatmen derided me till they fell down. The chief wonder of the matter, setting aside that marvellous coldness, was that there was nothing at all in my crop when I had ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling

... disarray, her long hair streaming down her breast! how deadly fair she seemed in the faint light—this woman the story of whose beauty and whose sin shall outlive the solid mass of the mighty pyramid that towered over us! The heaviness of her swoon had smoothed away the falseness of her face, and nothing was left but the divine stamp of Woman's richest loveliness, softened by shadows of the night and dignified by the cast of deathlike sleep. I gazed upon her and all my heart went out to her; it seemed that I did ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard

... and degradation, it is almost a relief to pass for a moment to the harmless mendacity of a contemporary spy, Rob Roy's son, James Mohr Macgregor, or Drummond. This highland gentleman, with his courage, his sentiment, and his ingrained falseness, is known to the readers of Mr. Stevenson's 'Catriona.' Though unacquainted with the documents which we shall cite, Mr. Stevenson divined James Mohr with the assured certainty of genius. From first to last James ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang

... saw a fellow-man, my comrade, fondled by breeze and brightness, and whispered to by all sweet sounds. I saw Iglesias below me, on the slope, sketching. He was preserving the scene at its bel momento. I repented more bitterly of my momentary falseness to Beauty while ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various

... did, and it is evident that to blind the woman was her main object. He also learnt from words the elderly woman casually dropped, that meetings of the same kind had been held before, and that the falseness of the soi-disant Miss Jane Taylor's name had never been suspected by this ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy



Words linked to "Falseness" :   faithlessness, untruthfulness, false, spuriousness, irreality, hypocrisy, unfaithfulness, unreality, sincerity, truth, infidelity



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