“There is no such thing as complete unity in a person, and so no one is ever completely sincere or insincere.”

“In order to live at peace with ourselves, we almost always disguise our impotence and weakness as calculated actions and systems, and so we satisfy that part of us which is observing the other.”

Adolfe by Benjamin Contstant

Adolfe, by the way, is a fantastic but little known  French novel, one that seeks to plumb the depths of the human experience, and peal away the masks we inevitably wear in our dealings with one another. Even more importantly it strips away the deceptions with which we approach ourselves.