Herman Melville Quotes

I realize that nothing's as it seems.

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

Very few of us are what we seem.

Everything you see is not always real.

I am not what you see and hear.

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

What lies behind appearance is usually another appearance.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the 'fronts' people assume before one another's eyes, and the 'front' a writer puts on the face of reality.

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

No one is ever who they purport to be.

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

I often tend to think that things are not what they seem.

Things are not always as they seem.

Things are not at all what they seem to be: oh no, not at all.

The concept, the label, is perpetually hiding from us all the nature of the real.

Calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg.

Seeing is not always believing.

As a son of a man who pretended to be one thing for 33 years of my life and then was another thing, the questions of 'what is real' and 'what is not real' are very blurrily vivid to me.

Masks are wonderfully paradoxical in this way: while they may hide the physical reality, they can show us how a person wants to be seen.

I'm not acting, but I am acting.

I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.

Illusion is the dust the devil throws in the eyes of the foolish

Get thee glass eyes ;, And, like a scurvy politician, seem To see the things thou dost not.

We're all living in some state of illusion, even if modestly.

I tell people all the time, 'Don't be fooled, because I am a man by day.'