Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.

The remark condenses a characteristically Baudrillardian suspicion toward “authentic” interiority. Courage, cowardice, and even love—emotions usually treated as sincere revelations of the self—are framed as performances that inevitably borrow from social scripts and self-images (“a measure of affectation”). The claim that feelings “are never true” does not simply deny emotion; it suggests that emotion is mediated by representation: we experience ourselves feeling through reflected images, expectations, and narratives. “They play with their mirrors” evokes a loop in which affect is produced, recognized, and intensified via its own display—an early statement of the broader idea that signs and simulations can precede and structure what we take to be real experience.