Claire Messud Quotes

All you know is what you think you know, but that isn't always what's real.

The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

In order to survive, we cling to all we know and understand. And label it reality. But knowledge and understanding are ambiguous. That reality could be an illusion. All humans live with the wrong assumptions. Isn't that another way of looking at it? That sharingan how much can you really se?

It strikes me how strange people are. You can see them every day - you can think you know them - and then you fшnd out you hardly know them at all.

You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.

No one can penetrate me. They only see what's in their own fancy, always.

We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong.

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.

The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.

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

The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.

Brass shines as fair to the ignorant as gold to the goldsmith.

The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.

It is not easy to distinguish reality from illusion, especially when one lives in a period of the great upheaval.

Most of what we know or assume to know is wrong one way or another.

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

What, then is truth?... Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.

Everything you know could already be wrong.

You have to be careful what you think you know.

Life is not always what we think it is.

It's funny how you can think you know someone pretty well, and then something happens or they do something that makes you understand that you didn't really know them at all.

Sometimes you think you know things, know things very deeply, only to realize you don't know a damn thing.

Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.

What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?

Please remember: things are not what they seem.