Emily Dickinson Quotes

From a distance it is something; and nearby it is nothing.

A mountain seen in the haze of distance must nevertheless look a solid heavy mountain.

A mountain still in the distance can appear as a molehill.

From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.

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

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

We are led to believe a lie When we see not through the eye.

Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright, But looked to near, have neither heat nor light.

Just as things in a picture, when viewed from a distance, appear to be all in one and the same condition and alike.

When everything seems like its changed…its because things have." Ethan Wate in Beautiful Creatures.

The truths that seem most truthful, if you look at them from all sides, if you look at them close up, turn out to be either half truths or lies.

What looks large from a distance, close up ain’t never that big.

The sun never sets. It is only an appearance due to the observer's limited perspective. And yet, what a sublime illusion it is.

It's lies. It's all lies. Some of them are just prettier than others, that's all. People see what they think is there.

Truth wasn't something you went out and found. It was wide and vast and deep and unending, and all you could hope to see was a tiny part of it. And to see that part and to mistake it for the whole was to make of Truth a lie.

Reality is irrelevant; Perception is everything.

La ve rite , comme la lumie' re, aveugle. Le mensonge, au contraire, est un beau cre puscule qui met chaque objet en valeur. Truth, like light, blinds. A lie, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight which shows the value of each object.

Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.

All the worth of some people lies in their name; upon a closer inspection it dwindles to nothing, but from a distance it deceives us.

Things may look different to you than they did before. I've had that experience myself. But don't let appearances fool you. There's only one reality.

It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was a real mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was but one mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed and changed into itself over and over.

In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

What is true by lamplight is not always true by sunlight.