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Appearance Quotes

Browse 1949 quotes about Appearance.

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Appearance Quotes

“Many people believe letters the most personal and revealing form of communication. In them, we expect to find the charmer at his nap, slumped, open-mouthed, profoundly himself without thought for appearances. Yet, this is not quite true. Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In conversation, those uneasy eyes upon you, those lips ready with an emendation before you have begun to speak, are a powerful deterrent to unreality, even to hope.”

PeopleBelieveMeanSelfEyeFormPurposeSpeakPowerfulReadyCommunicationConversationSpeechIdealsLettersMethodLipsAppearanceRevealingNapsUneasyUnrealityDeterrentCharmers
Book:The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick
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“Girls have long been evaluated on the basis of appearance and caught in myriad double binds: achieve, but not too much, be polite,but be yourself, be feminine and adult; be aware of our cultural heritage, but don't comment on the sexism. . . . Girls are trained to be less than who they really are. They are trained to be what the culture wants of its young women, not what they themselves want to become.”

WantLongYoungCultureGirlToo MuchAchieveAdultsBasesCaughtAppearanceBeing YourselfFeminineSexismCommentHeritageYoung WomenPoliteCultural Heritage
Author:Mary Pipher
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“Scepticism is an ability, or mental attitude, which opposes appearances to judgments in any way whatsoever, with the result that,owing to the equipollence of the objects and reasons thus opposed we are brought firstly to a state of mental suspense and next to a state of "unperturbedness" or quietude.”

WayStatesReasonNextAbilityResultsAttitudeObjectsJudgmentAppearanceSuspenseSkepticismMental AttitudeOwingScepticism
Book:Sextus Empiricus
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“A completely indifferent attitude toward clothes in women seems to me to be an admission of inferiority, of perverseness, or of alack of realization of her place in the world as a woman. Or--what is even more hopeless and pathetic--it's an admission that she has given up, that she is beaten, and refuses longer to stand up to the world.”

WorldSeemsGivenAttitudeFashionClothesRefuseAppearanceRealizationHopelessIndifferentBeatenPatheticGiven UpInferiorityPlaces In The WorldAdmissionPerverseness
Author:Hortense Odlum
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“...There are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never "plain," nor appearances ever "sincere." To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is presumed inviolable in our dance hall of visual politics, and all images are potentially powerful.”

TryingFactsCultureFunPowerfulIssuesDangerousTruth IsWesternAppearancePrimariesVisualsHallsSincereTrustedSheerGorgeousImageryControversialReformationAdvancingAdmiringEccentricityWestern Culture
Author:Dave Hickey
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“The external appearance of any construction projects that are created during the time of the National Socialist Reich must take on the sensibility of our time. Factories are the workplaces of our National Socialist racial comrades. Streets and highways carry the name of the Führer. Settlements today are not isolated communities, but rather parts of greater city-construction plans. Every work site must be properly located within its neighborhood and surrounding setting (i.e., the natural world).”

WorldTodayNamesCommunityNaturalCitiesGreaterPlansStreetsProjectsAppearanceSettingSettingsOur TimeNeighborhoodConstructionFactoriesIsolatedSocialistSensibilitySiteWorkplaceHighwaysNatural WorldComradeSettlementExternal AppearanceConstruction Projects
Author:Fritz Todt
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“There is a conceptual depth as well as a purely visual depth. The first is discovered by science; the second is revealed in art. The first aids us in understanding the reasons of things; the second in seeing their forms. In science we try to trace phenomena back to their first causes, and to general laws and principles. In art we are absorbed in their immediate appearance, and we enjoy this appearance to the fullest extent in all its richness and variety. Here we are not concerned with the uniformity of laws but with the multiformity and diversity of intuitions.”

TryingFirstsWellsArtReasonFormLawScienceCausesEnjoyUnderstandingPrinciplesSeeingDiversityConcernedDepthAppearanceIntuitionAidsVarietyVisualsRichnessUniformity
Author:Ernst Cassirer
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“He who desires or attempts to reform the government of a state and wishes to have it accepted, must at least retain the semblance of the old forms; so that it may seem to the people that there has been no change in the institutions, even though in fact they are entirely different from the old ones. For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities.”

PeopleMayHas BeensDifferentStatesFactsRealitySeemsGovernmentFormDesireWishMankindInstitutionsMajorityAppearanceAcceptedSatisfiedReformSemblance
Author:Niccolo Machiavelli
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“And I want women to be modest in their appearance. They should wear decent and appropriate clothing and not draw attention to themselves by the way they fix their hair or by wearing gold or pearls or expensive clothes. For women who claim to be devoted to God should make themselves attractive by the good things they do.”

WayWantShouldAttentionHairClothesDrawsGoldClaimsGood ThingsAppearanceAttractiveDecentExpensiveAppropriateClothingsDevotedModestPearlsI Want A WomanExpensive Clothes
Author:Paul the Apostle
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“To contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of casuistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples, whitecaps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will. To achieve that, a precondition is a kind of unconsciousness, a kind of drifting, a certain taking-your-eye-off-the-ball, a certain assumptions that things are simpler than they are, almost always precedes what Mircea Eliade called ‘the rupture of plane’ that indicates that there is an archetypal world, an archetypal power behind profane appearances.”

IfsWorldGivingKindEyeCertainBehindsAchieveFlowBallsAppearanceContactPlanesAssumptionCosmicDriftingRippleProfaneUnconsciousnessGiggleRupture
Author:Terence McKenna
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“The time which passes over our heads so imperceptibly makes the same gradual change in habits, manners and character, as in personal appearance. At the revolution of every five years we find ourselves another and yet the same;--there is a change of views, and no less of the light in which we regard them; a change of motives as well as of action.”

YearsWellsCharacterLightActionTimeViewsFiveRevolutionHabitRegardAppearanceMannersMotiveFive YearsPersonal AppearanceGradual Change
Book:Waverley Novels
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“The aim of science is to apprehend this purely intelligible world as a thing in itself, an object which is what it is independently of all thinking, and thus antithetical to the sensible world.... The world of thought is the universal, the timeless and spaceless, the absolutely necessary, whereas the world of sense is the contingent, the changing and moving appearance which somehow indicates or symbolizes it.”

ThinkingWorldMovingObjectsUniversalAimAppearanceThoughtfulSensibleTimeless
Author:Robin G. Collingwood
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“That is the real pivot of all bourgeois consciousness in all countries: fear and hate of the instinctive, intuitional, procreativebody in man or woman. But of course this fear and hate had to take on a righteous appearance, so it became moral, said that the instincts, intuitions and all the activities of the procreative body were evil, and promised a reward for their suppression. That is the great clue to bourgeois psychology: the reward business.”

MenSaidRealCountryBodyHateCoursesEvilSexConsciousnessMoralPsychologyMoralityActivityInstinctRewardsAppearanceIntuitionRighteousClueBourgeoisSuppressionInstinct Intuition
Book:Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)
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“Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game.”

IfsGivingEyeSchoolGamesClassInfluenceBirdUniversityAppearanceEducatedFascinatingMuseumsTraitsAutobiographyMixturesPublic SchoolEnglishmenPietyTediousSlyPrepsFixation
Author:V. S. Pritchett
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“She walked quickly around her one-room apartment. After more than four years in this one home she knew all its possibilities, how it could put on a sham appearance of warmth and welcome when she needed a place to hide in, how it stood over her in the night when she woke suddenly, how it could relax itself into a disagreeable unmade, badly-put-together state, mornings like this, anxious to drive her out and go back to sleep.”

YearsStatesHomeTogetherNightWomenSleepRoomsMorningFourPossibilityNeededAppearanceWelcomeRelaxWarmthAnxiousFour YearsApartmentDisagreeable
Book:The Magic of Shirley Jackson
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“Many great persons have been of opinion that love is no other thing than complacency itself, in which they have had much appearance of reason. For not only does the movement of love take its origin from the complacency which the heart feels at the first approach of good, and find its end in a second complacency which returns to the heart by union with the thing beloved--but further, it depends for its preservation on this complacency, and can only subsist through it as through its mother and nurse; so that as soon as the complacency ceases, love ceases.”

LoveFeelsFirstsHeartPersonsDoeHas BeensEndsReasonMotherLove IsOpinionMovementDependsReturnApproachUnionsAppearanceCeaseBelovedNursePreservationComplacencyGreat Person
Book:The Saint Francis de Sales Collection [16 Books]
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“Governments may change, and opinions, and the very appearance of lands themselves, but the slowest thing to change is religion. What has once been associated with worship becomes holy in itself, and self-perpetuating, always built upon the foundation of mingled awe and attraction which the unknown has for the mind of man.”

MenMindMaySelfGovernmentReligionOpinionLandHolyWorshipBuiltFoundationAppearanceAttractionAwePerpetuating
Book:Personal geography: almost an autobiography
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“Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals--and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am notsure would ever feel this way--some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.”

WayFeelsRealSelfSometimesAmericaStyleAchievementIntellectualBuiltConcernedCriticismAppearanceIdeologyConcreteSophisticatedSuperficialBricksAcademiaMortarTrivia
Author:Lyndon B. Johnson
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“Truth is the most powerful thing in the world, since even fiction itself must be governed by it, and can only please by its resemblance. The appearance of reality is necessary to make any passion agreeably represented, and to be able to move others we must be moved ourselves, or at least seem to be so, upon some probable grounds.”

WorldRealitySeemsTruthAbleMovingPassionPowerfulFictionPleaseTruth IsMovedAppearanceMost PowerfulResemblance
Author:Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury
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