The world is a masked ball. [ Mery ]

Masked balls are a merciful institution for ugly people.

The crudest foe is a masked benefactor. The wars which make history so dreary have served the cause of truth and virtue. [ Emerson ]

The difference between you and me, said a philosopher, is that you say to masked hypocrites, I know you, while I leave them with the idea that they have deceived me. [ Chamfort ]

Man is the will and woman is the sentiment. In this ship of humanity, Will is the rudder and Sentiment the sail; when woman affects to steer, the rudder is only a masked sail. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

However powerful one may be, whether one laughs or weeps, none can make thee speak, none can open thy hand before the time, O mute phantom, our shadow! specter always masked, ever at our side, called Tomorrow. [ Victor Hugo ]

Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment placing its victim naked on a bed of briars and bristles, thinly covered with rose-leaves, adorning his brow with a crown of gold, which burns into his brain; teasing, and fretting, and riddling him through and through with incessant discharges of hot shot from a masked battery; laying bare the most sensitive and shrinking nerves of his mind, and then blandly touching them with ice, or smilingly pricking them with needles. [ E. P. Whipple ]