Quotes About Appearances

Candidates' wives are supposed to sit cheerfully through their husbands' appearances.

I still find doing portraits a terrific challenge, but even though I've done hundreds of them, I've never stopped questioning the very nature of portraiture because it deals exclusively with appearances. I've never believed people are what they look like and think it's impossible to really know what people are.

In evaluating a person, always look for their ruling principles. What do they pursue? What do they avoid? Don't judge others based on outward circumstances and appearances. Difficult circumstances can befall anyone—what is telling is how a person responds to their circumstances. Their body may be maimed, dirtied, and disfigured, while the light of reason burns bright within.

Few are those who wish to be endowed with virtue rather than to seem so.

Denn wirklich tugendhaft wollen nicht so Viele sein als scheinen.

Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?

We begin to climb and my husband catches up with me again, making one of the brief appearances, framed memories he specializes in: crystal-clear image enclosed by a blank wall.

The disparity between outward appearances and inner disposition had disturbed me all my life.

What the hell does this say about India? Appearances are more important than truths. Gossip is more potent than facts. Loyalty is all one way, from the woman to the man. And when society stacks up all the odds against a woman, she'd better not count on the man's support. She has no way out other than to end her own life. And I'm in love with an Indian. I must be crazy.

Remember what I've told you. Looks can often deceive you. A poor man can don the robes of a prince and a prince can be shoeless in the street. We judge people by what their actions are, not by the clothes they wear. (Eleni)

I'm totally Italian, but I'm not a diva. If you could see the way I'm dressed in daily life, that's not a diva. Appearances are so not important to me.

Someone can be mentally ill, but if they are young and beautiful and their life is going well, people don't notice because at that point the cracks are almost imperceptible.

The use of symbols and metaphors, the endless interplay between illusion and reality, the difficulty of getting at a commonly accepted truth: these are all things that make Italy both frustrating and endlessly intriguing—not least because they raise the tantalizing question of why a people who spend so much of their time peering behind masks and facades should nevertheless be so concerned with appearances, with what they see on the surface.

They had thought him such a 'good' man. They should have learned it was dangerous to trust appearances or take strangers at their word in this shit-hole world.

This was all the average Platonist needed to hear. He didn't care about "saving the appearances," as Aristotelians did—that is, making sure that everything we see and perceive has some explanation in our general theory. The Platonist knows appearances can deceive, because matter changes. Soccer balls come and go; they get run over or get stolen. However, the geometry describing their behavior, whether spinning on their axis or at rest, lasts forever.

But that is the way of life, and that was but one of the first times, among no few to come, that I was taught a useful lesson about how appearances trump truth, and how villains hide their vices behind masks of piety, honour, and decency. And that to denounce evildoers without proof, attack them with weapons, trust blindly in reason or justice, is often the fastest road toward one's own perdition, while the scoundrels who use influence or money as a shield remained untouched.

Things opposite unite and appear to disappear. The potential for both remains. That is one of the greatest principles of the causes of things.

The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.

It had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had brought away no smell of scorching. We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own ease, link us indissolubly with the established order.

Former Olympians also get paid to make appearances. Many of them won their medals in an era when Olympic success didn't go hand-in-hand with financial success.

High-level, big-deal publicity has a way of getting old for me, but what never fails to thrill me is when I make personal appearances.

I don't believe in devils. Indifference and misunderstandings can create evil situations. Most of the time, people who appear to be evil are really victims of evil deeds.

That was just the mindset of the times: that happiness was somehow less important than keeping up appearances.

the mindset of the times: that happiness was somehow less important than keeping up appearances.