Philip Sidney Quotes

You can read everybody. It's not even interesting to tell the truth because to some extent it's false.

We do not see people as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

Appearances do not deceive if there are enough of them.

You think the shadow is the substance.

Your mind and a computer have one thing in common: neither of them know the difference between the truth... and what you tell it.

Perception is real even when it is not reality.

First appearance deceives many.

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.

I realize that nothing's as it seems.

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

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

A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.

The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently.

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.

All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true.

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

Everything's fine today, that is our illusion.

Gossip is called gossip because it's not always the truth.