William Merritt Chase Quotes

I'm trying to convey to my audience that you really can't judge a book by its cover, and there's more to the universe than you can see with your eyes.

A pig painted gold is still a pig.

Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--

Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal or a window opening on something other than iteself.

This is reality, whether you like it or not--all those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.

Like" and "like" and "like"--but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?

The underlying tension of a lot of my art is to try and look through the surface appearance of things. Inevitably, one way of getting beneath the surface is to introduce a hole, a window into what lies below.

We cannot see but a small depth into the heart of man, and can only discover the work of his tongue.

It's very rare that people are exactly who they appear to be.

People look at you, and they think they know you. They think they can place you in a certain category by what they think they know about you. But there's so much more to all of us than what we know and what we see at face value.

When you look at people, you should look at more than what you see on the surface; you should try to find a soul.

Everything isn't exactly what it seems from the outside.

You don't ask about what can be seen.

There's a lot of shiny, pretty objects out there that when you actually touch them, they just fall apart. And it's like, you need to be authentic, you need to be yourself.

Spurn not a seeming error, but dig below its surface for the truth.

Reality of things is hidden in the realm of the unseen

Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath.

You know, people seldom go to the trouble of scratching the surface of things to find the inner truth.

The outward is only the outside of that which is within. Men are not concealed under habits, but are revealed by them; they are their true clothes.

Man, when he is merely what he seems to be, is almost nothing.

The desire for total happiness and for ultimate freedom lies dormant in everyone. It is in the form of a seed. It is like a seed that contains a tree within it. In the same way, the fulfillment of man's ultimate desire is hidden in his very nature. In its perfectly developed state, it is our nature to be happy, to be free. Our real nature is the only thing that is true, and only perfecting it can bring complete satisfaction.

The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through.

I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.

You can put lipstick and earrings on a hog and call it Monique, but it's still a pig.

All that's visible springs from causes intimate to you. While walking, sitting, lying down, the body itself is complete truth. If someone asks the inner meaning of this: Inside the treasury of dharma eye a single grain of dust.