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What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes & Sayings

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What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Henrik Ibsen

I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts ... it is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us. — Henrik Ibsen

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Maria Montessori

Praise, help, or even a look, may be enough to interrupt him, or destroy the activity. It seems a strange thing to say, but this can happen even if the child merely becomes aware of being watched. After all, we too sometimes feel unable to go on working if someone comes to see what we are doing. The great principle which brings success to the teacher is this: as soon as concentration has begun, act as if the child does not exist. Naturally, one can see what he is doing with a quick glance, but without his being aware of it. — Maria Montessori

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Frederick Buechner

If we only had eyes to see and ears to hear and wits to understand, we would know that the Kingdom of God in the sense of holiness, goodness, beauty is as close as breathing and is crying out to born both within ourselves and within the world; we would know that the Kingdom of God is what we all of us hunger for above all other things even when we don't know its name or realize that it's what we're starving to death for. The Kingdom of God is where our best dreams come from and our truest prayers. We glimpse it at those moments when we find ourselves being better than we are and wiser than we know. We catch sight of it when at some moment of crisis a strength seems to come to us that is greater than our own strength. The Kingdom of God is where we belong. It is home, and whether we realize it or not, I think we are all of us homesick for it. — Frederick Buechner

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Jorge Luis Borges

What is a book?
A book seems, like a picture, to be a living being; and
yet if we ask it something, it does not answer. Then we
see that it is dead.In order to make the book into a
living thing, he invented - happily for us - the Platonic
dialogue, which forestalls the reader's doubts
and questions. — Jorge Luis Borges

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Czeslaw Milosz

There was a time when only wise books were read helping us to bear our pain and misery. This, after all, is not quite the same as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics. And yet the world is different from what it seems to be and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings. — Czeslaw Milosz

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By C.S. Lewis

I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Everyone there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes. But this is near the stage where the road passes over the rim of our world. No one's eyes can see very far beyond that: lots of people's eyes can see further than mine. — C.S. Lewis

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Leon Kass

But veteran lawmakers torn apart by PTSD don't have a choice about being Exhibit A in the case against Washington politics. When you see what can happen to a page or a junior congressman, it passes on in a very real way, not in a history-class sense, that reality of what political power really is, .. Who are we to impose this emotional albatross on public servants? As a nation, we pretend to elect our leaders. It seems unjust to make them a special class to suffer for our sins over wrongheaded laws, or pay a continuing emotional price for securing their future careers. — Leon Kass

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Alan W. Watts

We have been accustomed to make this existence worth-while by the belief that there is more than the outward appearance
that we live for a future beyond this life here. For the outward appearance does not seem to make sense. if living is to end in pain, incompleteness, and nothingness, it seems a cruel and futile experience for being who are born to reason, hope, create, and love. man, as a being of sense, wants his life to make sense, and he has found it hard to believe that it does so unless there is more that what he see
unless there is an eternal order and an eternal life behind the uncertain and momentary experience of life-and-death. — Alan W. Watts

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Anchee Min

I felt tired, but I pitched the ball back at her. You want me to talk about myself, right? Let me tell you what 'self' means to me. The self, myself, the self as I see it, is composed mainly of selected memories from my history. I am not what I am doing now. I am what I have done, and the edited version of my past seems more real to me than what I am at this moment. I don't know who or what I really am. The present is fleeting and intangible. No one in China wants to talk about his past, because nobody wants to paint his face black. Our past is not a flattering picture, and no one wants to look at it for long. Yet what we were in fixed and final. It is the basis for predictions of what we will be in the future. To tell you truth, I identify with what no longer exists more than what actually is. We have lied about what we actually are, and that, unfortunately, will be your book. So would you still like me to talk about myself? — Anchee Min

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By George MacDonald

I am always hearing ... the sound of a far off song. I do not exactly know where it is, or what it means; and I don't hear much of it, only the odour of its music, as it were, flitting across the great billows of the ocean outside this air in which I make such a storm; but what I do hear, is quite enough to make me able to bear the cry from the drowning ship. So it would you if you could hear it.'
'No it wouldn't,' returned Diamond stoutly. 'For they wouldn't hear the music of the far-away song; and if they did, it wouldn't do them any good. You see you and I are not going to be drowned, and so we might enjoy it.'
'But you have never heard the psalm, and you don't know what it is like. Somehow, I can't say how, it tells me that all is right; that it is coming to swallow up all the cries ... It wouldn't be the song it seems if it did not swallow up all their fear and pain too, and set them singing it themselves with all the rest. — George MacDonald

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By D. A. Carson

These pressures make it difficult for many Christians to draw lines. How many of us want to be classified with fundamentalist Muslims? Why not emphasize the communal and pragmatic values of our faith, in order to gain respect and avoid unnecessarily offending the people of our generation? Why not defend "the truth" merely as it appears to us? After all, that is in fact what we are doing, isn't it - defending the truth as it appears to us? So why make offensive claims about the universality of truth claims? Why draw lines? It is painful to do so; it also seems impolitic. Why alienate people? Why should it be thought necessary to draw lines, when drawing lines is rude? In these few pages, my concern is not how to proceed with the evangelistic task (see chap. 12), but to ponder briefly some of the reasons why drawing lines is utterly crucial at the moment. — D. A. Carson

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Jane Hirshfield

It is, of course, we who house poems as much as their words, and we ourselves must be the locus of poetry's depth of newness. Still, the permeability seems to travel both ways: a changed self will find new meanings in a good poem, but a good poem also changes the shape of the self. Having read it, we are not who we were the moment before ... Art lives in what it awakens in us ... Through a good poem's eyes we see the world liberated from what we would have it do. Existence does not guarantee us destination, nor trust, nor equity, nor one moment beyond this instant's almost weightless duration. It is a triteness to say that the only thing to be counted upon is that what you count on will not be what comes. Utilitarian truths evaporate: we die. Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy. — Jane Hirshfield

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Shawn Anthony Levy

One that we can admire aesthetically and participate viscerally in. So the goal here, and we've had some early, small screenings, what seems to be kind of happening is that you come in thinking you're going to see a cool robot boxing movie, you don't expect this emotional underdog, father/son movie. And it's not one that's soft and overly sentimental, but hopefully it's one that's poignant. — Shawn Anthony Levy

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Lawrence Eagleburger

What I can't quite see at this stage is that the evidence, even to the president, seems to be that clear. And if it is that clear, I can't understand why we are not capable of convincing our closest allies that given that evidence, they ought to join us in this effort. — Lawrence Eagleburger

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Anne Enright

And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy
and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see. — Anne Enright

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Eric Metaxas

The more science learns, the clearer it is that although we are here, we shouldn't be. Once we begin considering the details of it all, the towering odds against our existence begin to become a bit unsettling. When we come to see the superlatively extreme precariousness of our existence, and begin to understand how by any accounting, we ought not to exist, what are we to think or feel? Our existence seems to be not merely a virtually impossible miracle but the most outrageous miracle conceivable, one that makes previously amazing miracles seem like almost nothing. — Eric Metaxas

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Pope Francis

Time, my brothers and sisters, seems to be running out; we are not yet tearing one another apart, but we are tearing apart our common home. Today, the scientific community realizes what the poor have long told us: harm, perhaps irreversible harm, is being done to the ecosystem. The earth, entire peoples and individual persons are being brutally punished. And behind all this pain, death and destruction there is the stench of what Basil of Caesarea called "the dung of the devil". An unfettered pursuit of money rules. The service of the common good is left behind. Once capital becomes an idol and guides people's decisions, once greed for money presides over the entire socioeconomic system, it ruins society, it condemns and enslaves men and women, it destroys human fraternity, it sets people against one another and, as we clearly see, it even puts at risk our common home. — Pope Francis

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Douglas J. Moo

At first sight, Paul's command that slaves obey their masters seems simply to endorse the status quo. But we need to see that what he writes here also subtly undermines it. First, it is significant that Paul chooses to address slaves at all, implying not only that they are assembled with the other Christians of the Colossian church to hear the letter being read but that they are responsible people who need to choose a certain kind of behavior. Second, Paul clearly relativizes the status of the slave's master by repeatedly reminding both slave (vv. 22, 23, 24) and master (4:1) of the ultimate "master" to whom both are responsible: the Lord Jesus Christ. Third, Paul never hints that he endorses the institution of slavery. He tells slaves and masters how they are to conduct themselves within the institution, but it is a bad misreading of Paul to read into his teaching approval of the institution itself. (For — Douglas J. Moo

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Anne Ursu

Now, the world is more than it seems to be. You know this, of course, because you read stories. You understand that there is the surface and then there are all the things that glimmer and shift underneath it. And you know that not everyone believes in those things, that there are people - a great many people - who believe the world cannot be any more than what they can see with their eyes. But we know better. — Anne Ursu

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By David Kinnaman

When outsiders claim that we are unchristian, it is a reflection of this jumbled (and predominately negative) set of perceptions. When they see Christians not acting like Jesus, they quickly conclude that the group deserves an unchristian label. Like a corrupted computer file or a bad photocopy, Christianity, they say, is no longer in pure form, and so they reject it. One quarter of outsiders say therefore most perception of Christianity is that the faith has changed for the worse. It has gotten off-track and is not what Christ intended. Modern-day Christianity no longer seems Christian. — David Kinnaman

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Michael Flynn

Everything in the universe is older than it seems. Blame Einstein for that. We see what a thing was when the light left it, and that was long ago. Nothing in the night sky is contemporary, not to us, not to one another. Ancient stars exploded into ruin before their sparkle ever caught our eyes; those glimpsed in glowing "nurseries" were crones before we witnessed their birth. Everything we marvel at is already gone.
Yet, light rays go out forever, so that everything grown old and decayed retains somewhere the appearance of its youth. The universe is full of ghosts.
But images are light, and light is energy, and energy is matter; and matter is real. So image and reality are the same thing, after all. Blame Einstein for that, as well. — Michael Flynn

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Alaya Dawn Johnson

What is this, Enki?" says the Queen. "Do you not honor me?"
Enki's smile is wide and bright. "I give you the greatest honor," he says.
"You are dressed in the manner of a slave," says she, "in a city where there are none."
"There aren't," he agrees, though now his smile seems too sharp for his words. "But there is the verde."
"And what of it?"
"I am dressed in the manner of my people."
"Are we not your people?" And we see that the Queen is torn between amusement and anger. Enki is leading her in a dance, but has not tapped out its rhythm.
"You are everything to me."
"And yet you come before us hardly as a king."
"I come before you," says Enki, "as a simple verde boy." He takes a quick step back, almost skipping, and his dust-lightened hair bobs around his ears. "I will leave you as a king." And when the drums start, that's how he dances: as a king. — Alaya Dawn Johnson

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Ellen Hopkins

Losing It
Some days I think
I'm losing my mind.
What seems so
clear
most of the time
becomes a big question mark.
Am I really
the way
I percieve myself, or
is the person others see
the truth of me? I wait
for
answers, but inside
I know I have to go out
and find them. And
answers
like knowledge, are
not always where we
first look for them. — Ellen Hopkins

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Eric Kraft

A statement about luck is a statement about the mind, not about the world ... We find what seems to have been the lucky break or the big mistake, and so we thank our lucky stars that we took the road less traveled or curse the fates that sent that little wavelet that flipped us on our backs. With hindsight, we seem to see that everything preceding the pivotal point was leading up to it, tending toward it, and that everything following it grew from it.
To any observer outside the lucky one himself, however, luck is simply chance. Chance is neutral. — Eric Kraft

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Irving Stone

When I was young, Monsieur," he said, "I used to think a lot about God. But He seems to have grown thinner with the years. He is still in that cornfield you painted, and in the sunset by Montmajour, but when I think about men ... and the world they have made ... " "I know, Roulin, but I feel more and more that we must not judge God by this world. It's just a study that didn't come off. What can you do in a study that has gone wrong, if you are fond of the artist? You do not find much to criticize; you hold your tongue. But you have a right to ask for something better." "Yes, that's it," exclaimed Roulin, "something just a tiny bit better." "We should have to see some other work by the same hand before we judge him. This world was evidently botched up in a hurry on one of his bad days, when the artist did not have his wits about him. — Irving Stone

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Alexander Schmemann

The liturgy of the Eucharist is best understood as a journey or procession. It is the journey of the Church into the dimension of the Kingdom. We use the word 'dimension' because it seems the best way to indicate the manner of our sacramental entrance into the risen life of Christ. Color transparencies 'come alive' when viewed in three dimensions instead of two. The presence of the added dimension allows us to see much better the actual reality of what has been photographed. In very much the same way, though of course any analogy is condemned to fail, our entrance into the presence of Christ is an entrance into a fourth dimension which allows us to see the ultimate reality of life. It is not an escape from the world, rather it is the arrival at a vantage point from which we can see more deeply into the reality of the world. — Alexander Schmemann

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By A.S. Peterson

Don't seem right, do it?" said Topper.

"It ain't right," replied Fin. "Not at all."

Jack guzzled his wine and wiped at his beard. "Mayhap it's right and we can't see it..."

Topper scratched his bald head and hummed in thought. "Still don't seem right," he proclaimed when he'd hummed enough.

Jack dropped his flagon to the deck and it rolled away clattering. "Yeah, well, what seems ain't always what is. — A.S. Peterson

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Thomas Aquinas

What can be accomplished by a few principles is not effected by many. But it seems that everything we see in the world can be accounted for by other principles, supposing God did not exist. For all natural things can be reduced to one principle, which is nature, and all voluntary things can be reduced to one principle, which is human reason, or will. Therefore there is no need to suppose God's existence. — Thomas Aquinas

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Plato

Socrates : So you see that ignorance of certain things is for certain persons in certain states a good, not an evil, as you supposed just now.
Alcibiades : It seems to be.
Socrates : Then if you care to consider the sequel of this, I daresay it will surprise you.
Alcibiades :What may that be, Socrates?
Socrates : I mean that, generally speaking, it rather looks as though the possession of the sciences as a whole, if it does not include possession of the science of the best, will in a few instances help, but in most will harm, the owner. Consider it this way: must it not be the case, in your opinion, that when we are about to do or say anything, we first suppose that we know, or do really know, the thing we so confidently intend to say or do?
[144d] — Plato

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Margaret Thatcher

It is sometimes said that because of our past we, as a people, expect too much and set our sights too high. That is not the way I see it. Rather it seems to me that throughout my life in politics our ambitions have steadily shrunk. Our response to disappointment has not been to lengthen our stride but to shorten the distance to be covered. But with confidence in ourselves and in our future what a nation we could be! — Margaret Thatcher

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Os Guinness

The logic behind this drive to deception and self-deception is simple. If sin is the claim to "the right to myself," it includes the claim to "the right to my view of things." And since we are each finite, "my view of things" is necessarily restricted and simply cannot see the full picture. We therefore turn a blind eye to all other ways of seeing things that do not fit ours, and especially to God's view of things. As theologian N. T. Wright points out, trees behave as trees, rocks as rocks and the seas as the seas, but "Only humans, it seems, have the capacity to live as something other than what they are."27 — Os Guinness

What We See Is Not What It Seems Quotes By Patricia Storace

And what does God ask of you?"
"To fly without wings. To do what seems impossible. To cling to our loves through the rapids of our hates. To know that God charges us with the task of making these miracles. They exist between person and person, as flame goes from candle to candle. To know that all we can know of right or wrong is through the way our acts are revealed in the lives of other people. There is no other way to see God. It is not given to us. — Patricia Storace