Hypocrisy - christiansquoting.org.uk

Hypocrisy
Darkness reigns at the foot of the lighthouse. Japanese Proverb

The hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. Hannah Arendt On Revolution [1963]

Thus say the common people that know him: "A saint abroad, and a devil at home." --John Bunyan (1628-1688) _The Pilgrim's Progress_ [1678], Part I

A saint abroad, at home a fiend. --Phineas Fletcher, _The Purple Island_ VII (1633)

Whenever I dwell for any length of time on my own shortcomings, they gradually begin to seem mild, harmless, rather engaging little things, not at all like the staring defects in other people's characters.--Margaret Halsey

Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there. Eric Hoffer

Be not too hasty to trust, or to admire, the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels, but they live like men.
Samuel Johnson: Rasselas [the character Imlac]

Men who cannot deceive others are very often successful at deceiving themselves. - Samuel Johnson: Rambler #31

I passed by a party of men in the night of my ascension to heaven. Their tongues were being cut with scissors. I asked them: "Who are you? They said: 'We used to give advice to others for good deeds but we used not to do them. We used to prohibit evil deeds to others, but we used to do them' ".
Mohammed, Hadith

For neither Man nor Angel can discern
Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks
Invisible, except to God alone,
By his permissive will, through Heav'n and Earth.
And oft though wisdom wake, suspicion sleeps
At wisdom's Gate, and to simplicity
Resigns her charge, while goodness thinks no ill
Where no ill seems.
John Milton, PARADISE LOST, Book III, 682-89.
Modern liberalism, even as its philosophers hold that no act is objectively sinful, treats hypocrisy as a serious sin. Why? If nothing is sinful, why is hypocrisy sinful? Hypocrisy is sinful -- that is, damaging to the soul -- if the moral principles the hypocrite voices then violates are true. But liberals tell us those principles aren't true, that humans can depart from them without damage to their character. So what's the moral problem with violating a moral code liberals consider false in the first place?
Hypocrisy is a moral problem, but liberals can't reach that conclusion on the basis of liberal moral philosophy. In order to denounce it, they have to suspend their customary moral relativism and borrow the principles of conservative moral philosophy. Then, once the target of their moral outrage over hypocrisy is thoroughly eviscerated, they abandon those principles and return to a skepticism about right and wrong in which all forms of deception, including hypocrisy, are defensible.--George Neumayr, "Self-Indulgent Liberal Man", _American Spectator_

Hypocrisy is the homage paid by vice to virtue. Duc de la Rochefoucald 1613-1680 Les Maximes 218

Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,
Whiles, like a puffed and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads
And recks not his own rede.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)_Hamlet_ [1600-1601], Act I, Scene III, Line 47

But then I sigh; and, with a piece of Scripture,
Tell them that God bids us do good for evil:
And thus I clothe my naked villany
With odd old ends stol'n forth of holy writ;
And seem a saint when most I play the devil.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)_King Richard III_ [1592-1593], Act I, Scene III, Line 334

O, what may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side! - William Shakespeare

Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.--Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)_First Principles_ [1861]

If we see a speck in a brother's eye, we must first see if there is a log in our own eye; perhaps that speck in our brother's eye is only a reflection of the beam in our own. ... David Watson