33 Quotes Tagged: appearance

Why do people respect the package rather than the man?

They agree with the current customs. They consent with an impure age. Their principles have a semblance of right-heartedness and truth. Their conduct has a semblance of disinterestedness and purity. All men are pleased with them, and they think themselves right, but you cannot enter into the Way of Yao and Shun with them. For this reason they are called “The thieves of virtue.

There are people who believe that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition; there are times when the appearance of it are worth six of it.

If we could only get rid of consciousness. What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. To be part of the animal kingdom under the conditions of this earth is very well — but as soon as you know of your slavery, the pain, the anger, the strife — the tragedy begins. We can't return to nature, since we can't change our place in it. Our refuge is in stupidity [...] There is no morality, no knowledge, and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that [...] is always but a vain and floating appearance.

Your ultimate reason for staying in this crooked world is not to imitate its devastating physique, but trying do something about its ugly appearance.

the rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two, has all the appearance of might it ever had.

To be unique calls for being unique in such a way that your uniqueness doesn't make others appear inferior, and a uniqueness that doesn't crave for anything apart from your own thing.

(...) I, for one, prize less
The name of king than deeds of kingly power;
And so would all who learn in wisdom’s school.

Nothing prevents us being natural so much as the desire to appear so.

Where's the use of looking nice, when no one sees me but those cross midgets, and no one cares whether I'm pretty or not?

A homely face does not guarantee a homely character. Appearance is the body, character is the spirit, and the soul bears the most vital qualities.

There are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherein he that cannot read A, B, C may read our natures.

I don't mind making jokes, but I don't want to look like one.

A thorough inspection of someone you believed to be loveable will send you back into your shell if all you saw in their life was all bullshit.

I look in the glass sometimes at my two long, cylindrical bags (so picturesquely rugged about the knees), my stand-up collar and billycock hat, and wonder what right I have to go about making God's world hideous. Then wild and wicked thoughts come into my heart. I don't want to be good and respectable. (I never can be sensible, I'm told; so that don't matter.) I want to put on lavender-colored tights, with red velvet breeches and a green doublet slashed with yellow; to have a light-blue silk cloak on my shoulder, and a black eagle's plume waving from my hat, and a big sword, and a falcon, and a lance, and a prancing horse, so that I might go about and gladden the eyes of the people. Why should we all try to look like ants crawling over a dust-heap? Why shouldn't we dress a little gayly? I am sure if we did we should be happier. True, it is a little thing, but we are a little race, and what is the use of our pretending otherwise and spoiling fun? Let philosophers get themselves up like old crows if they like. But let me be a butterfly.