Laura Riding Quotes

I realize that nothing's as it seems.

Look! Don't be deceived by appearances - men and things are not what they seem. All who are not on the rock are in the sea!

Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.

You need to be real enough to be believable, but you don't necessarily have to be real enough to be real. There is a distinction.

Truth: An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance …

Everything you see is not always real.

Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.

Don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality!

Always scorn appearances and you always may.

In Shakespeare's world, characters cannot trust their senses. Is the ghost in Hamlet true and truthful, or is it a demon, tempting young Hamlet into murderous sin? Is Juliet dead or merely sleeping? Does Lear really stand at the edge of a great cliff? Or has the Fool deceived him to save his life?

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The theater is unnatural, a place of imagination. But the theater tells the audience something true: that the world requires judgments.

Success has always been a great liar.

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn't mean it is simple.

Appearances are a glimpse of the unseen.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

I always see that there's a - from a philosophical point of view - there's the appearance of things that everybody wants you to think is happening, then there's the reality underneath it.

Image is what people perceive my life to be. It's nothing like the truth.

Everything's fine today, that is our illusion.

A hair divides what is false and true.

To be called one thing, is oftentimes to be another.

Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?

I'm nothing more than what you actually see, but I am also the complete opposite.

How little do they see what is, who frame their hasty judgments upon that which seems.