What It Seems Quotes

#1. [...] it seems you don't understand that words are the labels we stick on things, not the things themselves, you'll never know what the things are really like, nor even what their real names are, because the names you gave them are just that, the names you gave them [...]

Jose Saramago

#2. I think a writer should always be surprised; and the more I write, the more it seems that the language itself, when explored with humility, is always deeper and more accurate than what the author thought he had in mind.

Ciaran Carson

#3. Since Pawlow and his pupils have succeeded in causing the secretion of saliva in the dog by means of optic and acoustic signals, it no longer seems strange to us that what the philosopher terms an 'idea' is a process which can cause chemical changes in the body.

Jacques Loeb

#4. Twitter seems just to be constant updates; it seems to me as promotional tool where people talk themselves up, and I don't want it to take over what I'm doing.

Tristan MacManus

#5. Hey, er ... " said Zaphod, "what's your name?"
The man looked at them doubtfully.
"I don't know. Why, do you think I should have one? It seems very odd to
give a bundle of vague sensory perceptions a name.

Douglas Adams

#6. Obama sees himself as such a huge change that he can be cautious about other societal changes. But what he doesn't realize is that legalizing gay marriage is like electing a black president. Before you do it, it seems inconceivable. Once it's done, you can't remember what all the fuss was about.

Maureen Dowd

#7. Things aren't always what they seem
You're only seeing part of me
There's more than you could ever know
Behind the scenes.

Francesca Battistelli

#8. What we love is that Glenn Geller admits to being a superfan of Big Brother and obviously he seems to be a big fan of reality TV, which is fabulous. He's been really, really excited and has just been smiling through all of our meetings so it's always a lot of fun.

Allison Grodner

#9. I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.

Jeanette Winterson

#10. It seems that England's royal family is running out of money. They are down to just $1.6 million. Well sure, that's what happens when nobody in your family has had a job for the last thousand years.

Jay Leno

#11. Drink and be thankful to the host! What seems insignificant when you have it, is important when you need it.

Franz Grillparzer

#12. What's called art now probably has some legitimate things happening in it, but I've become more and more distrustful of a lot of it because it seems like an extension of the fashion trade and the stock market.

Art Spiegelman

#13. The desert wears ... a veil of mystery. Motionless and silent it evokes in us an elusive hint of something unknown, unknowable, about to be revealed. Since the desert does not act it seems to be waiting
but waiting for what?

Edward Abbey

#14. It seems like hours pass, both of us staring into each others eyes. I have no idea what she sees that holds her, but I can't look away either. She's giving me the look again, the one that makes me feel like a superhero.

Ashley Stoyanoff

#15. When I say that consciousness is an illusion I do not mean that consciousness does not exist. I mean that consciousness is not what it appears to be. If it seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed experiences, happening one after the other to a conscious person, this is the illusion.

Susan Blackmore

#16. The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable - it could not have been any other way
a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable

Robert James Waller

#17. How many Christians live for appearances? Their life seems like a soap bubble. The soap bubble is beautiful, with all its colours! But it lasts only a second, and then what?

Pope Francis

#18. The essence of a religious approach to the world, it seems to me, is to be found, not in the imposition of theological dogma, but in the recognition of what is actually there.

John Barton

#19. A man can make himself put down what comes, even if it seems nauseating nonsense; tomorrow some of it may not seem wholly nonsense at all.

F.L. Lucas

#20. We cannot say what reality is, only what it seems like to us.

Gaston Bachelard

#21. It seems to me I spent my life in car pools, but you know, that's how I kept track of what was going on.

Barbara Bush

#22. I only read on my phone and the whole "let's see if we can get people to do it" idea seems less "wouldn't it be cool if we could get people to do it" and more "what else would people do."

Nathan Lowell

#23. You get quick money, it's beautiful, there's sunshine, but at the end of the day, you find out it's all a masquerade, baby. It's not what it seems.

Wyclef Jean

#24. Avoid contempt, both of others and of yourself: what seems bad to you in yourself is purified by the very fact that you have noticed it in yourself.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#25. It is possible, it seems, to affirm everything the creed says - especially Jesus's "divine" status and his bodily resurrection - but to know nothing of what the gospel writers were trying to say. Something is seriously wrong here.

N. T. Wright

#26. So all I'm saying is, everything that seems important
our quarrels, or philosophical differences
in the end, it doesn't matter much. You know? In the end, what matters is what remains.

Thrity Umrigar

#27. Now you are deep in what seems to me a peculiarly selfless service. The spiritual training of children must be that. You work for the years you will not see. You work for the Invisible all the time, but you work for the Eternal. So it is all worthwhile.

Amy Carmichael

#28. But it's there in his face, a fleeting reluctance that matches her own. They stand there together for a long time, for too long, for what seems like forever, each unwilling to part ways, letting the people behind them stream past like a river around rocks. Page: 91

Jennifer E. Smith

#29. The world sometimes seems a chessboard where the pieces move themselves. I'm never sure what square to go to. Yet it can't be a difficult game, most folk play it instinctively.

Alasdair Gray

#30. All children are beautiful: the thing they do with their eyes that seems so dazzling when they take you all in, or seem to take you all in; it's like being looked at by an alien, or a cat - who knows what they see?

Anne Enright

#31. I'm 77. The only reason I'm ever shy about it is that people tend to think of you in terms of what they think that age is. I certainly don't feel any different than I did when I was 35, and my energy seems to be more than it was then.

Robert Osborne

#32. A kind of memory that tells us that what we're now striving for was once nearer and truer and attached to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath. After the first home the second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#33. Growing up in South London, we went to a school where there were not that many Jewish kids. I love being Jewish in L.A.; it feels really normal. The culture seems to be integrated into Hollywood. Everyone uses Yiddish words like 'schlep' and 'schmooze.' That's what I love about New York, too.

Hannah Ware

#34. What teens will realize is always a mystery to me. I'm still realizing so many things myself, very belatedly, that it seems unwise to think I have any right to be showing people things in hopes that they'll realize them.

Diane Duane

#35. Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Al Alvarez

#36. It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question "Who am I?" than by some such riddle as "Where is here?

Northrop Frye

#37. Now, having had this experience, I can't say really what they were looking for. I don't know their minds. But every time I see a reality show, it seems that the most entertaining parts on other reality shows are when they make their guests look foolish.

Liza Minnelli

#38. Recently we've been hearing a lot about women "having it all." Myself, I think that is not really an accurate description of female lives today. It seems to me that what we have been up to is DOING it all.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett

#39. I'm a parent, and I try to take care of my health and keep my life in order. In the last few years I've really had to decide what's important to me, and it seems to me that my family and my health are top on the list. And those have nothing to do with show business.

Diana Ross

#40. It is astonishing what an effort it seems to be for many people to put their brains definitely and systematically to work.

Thomas A. Edison

#41. Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.

Robert Morgan

#42. Obama's the most thoughtful-sounding president I can remember. He seems to be saying what he wants to say, and that is a great relief. He always sounds like he's thinking about what he's saying while he's saying it, and that's a rare thing in politicians.

Roy Blount Jr.

#43. I want people to do what they want to do because when they feel comfortable it seems to translate better on screen. It is when you put people in a straitjacket that it doesn't seem to translate very well at all. The individuals I work with are usually people I know.

Steve McQueen

#44. What we've done, it seems to me, is allow women to get older, but not to age.

Caryl Rivers

#45. Yes, that's what I meant to say. If this seems a bit circular to you, well, it is, but it has deep meaning.

Kip S. Thorne

#46. No matter what a situation or circumstance looks like; know that nothing is ever what it seems. Never loose hope.

Barbara Hart

#47. If someone feels negative about the way society or culture seems to be going, what it probably suggests is that it's just moving away from the state that they are comfortable with or used to. It's understandable why someone would feel that way.

Chuck Klosterman

#48. What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible? Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life.

Henri Nouwen

#49. Back then I knew exactly what I wanted. Now that I've gotten it ... I don't know, it seems the cleverer you are, the more goals there are just outside one's reach.

Richard Finney

#50. Although I get a lot of ideas from things that have happened in my life, I see the final product as a place where my imagination meets my experience. What I love about photography is that nothing is really as it seems.

Laurel Nakadate

#51. It seems an odd idea to my students that poetry, like all art, leads us away from itself, back to the world in which we live. It furnishes the vision. It shows with intense clarity what is already there.

Helen Bevington

#52. In the country It seems as if every tree Said to me 'Holy! Holy!' Who can ever express The ecstasy of the woods! Almighty One, In the woods I am blessed. Happy every one in the woods. Every tree speaks through Thee. O God! What glory in the woodland.

Ludwig Van Beethoven

#53. A tawdry, cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular. What we once regarded as a *kind* of sexual expression we now regard *as* sexuality.

Ariel Levy

#54. Long before 9/11 and the war in Iraq, a lot of people hated the United States and the West. But what the Iraqi war seems to have done, at least in ... I mean, I'm just reporting what I see from the people on the ground, is that it has silenced many pro-American forces in the Muslim world.

Yaroslav Trofimov

#55. There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? Mor come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#56. This is what I like," said Jesse. "Everything seems better when we have to work to get it.

Gertrude Chandler Warner

#57. It seems like we are moving towards something, some kind of point and it is probably going to be an important point in our development or dissolution. That is what everybody seems to be thinking.

Terry Riley

#58. Forgiving other people who have wronged us or hurt us or embarrassed us is not easy. In fact, sometimes it seems impossible. But that is what God did for us and what He asks us to do for others.

Korie Robertson

#59. What seems like a flaw is merely our higher consciousness telling us we're not looking at it in the right light yet.

A.J. Darkholme

#60. So then do you think it's true that he killed someone? And what about the part where he wishes he could die?"
"If it IS true that he killed someone, that's bad."
In any case, "it seems like something is bothering Shuji" was now a contender for the Understatement of the Century.

Mizuki Nomura

#61. What makes me laugh about politics, sometimes, is it seems like once we get to a point where our problems are seemingly unsolvable, it's because we're looking through a wrong point of view. If we turn the thing on its head, then maybe we might see it differently.

Dave Davies

#62. For thence a paradox Which comforts while it mocks, - Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me: A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.

Robert Browning

#63. Indeed, it has to be said that the percentage of old human sayings and proverbs that are actually true is very far from 100 percent. Seems it may be less important that it be true than that it rhyme, or show alliteration or the like. What goes around comes around: really? What does this mean?

Kim Stanley Robinson

#64. It seems to me that it's every man's obligation to make what contribution he can. You live each day as best you can. That, to me, is what makes life interesting.

Rod McKuen

#65. What we call evil, it seems to me, is simply ignorance bumping its head in the dark.

Henry Ford

#66. The truth, in so far as a human being is able to attain such a thing, lies in a statement which it seems impossible to disprove. It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.

Alain De Botton

#67. Children once settled and confident can mostly be left, it seems, to manage their difficulties without us. Only what we must do, always and unalterably, is hold their hand firmly in general goodwill, then they themselves seem to deal with their own particular troubles far better than we can.

Nan Fairbrother

#68. Never mind what I knew, nothing seems to matter now
Ooh, who I was without you, I can do without
No one knows where it ends, how it may come tumbling down
But I'm here with you now
I'm with you now

Sara Bareilles

#69. It seems no matter what I read I think this is not harry potter.

Hank Green

#70. No matter what the results, it is my choices that define me. And I will fight for them, even when it seems that failure is inevitable. Perhaps most especially then.

Cat Hellisen

#71. But I cannot bring myself to believe that I was intended for a musician, because it seems so small a business in comparison with other things which, it seems to me, I might do. Question here: 'What is the province of music in the economy of the world?'

Sidney Lanier

#72. If I don't like someone and I start reading their stuff, it seems like my brain will just automatically start criticizing everything that's there. It's really hard to read a book without having all this outside information telling you what to think about it.

Tao Lin

#73. What I read told me that the Mankindman was a strange creature which stand on to legs. It seems to be a man from both sides; maybe all sides are man!

Ahmad Amani

#74. It seems weird to me that here we are, alive, not knowing why we are alive, and just going about our business, sort of ignoring that fact. How are we all not looking at each other all the time just like, Yo, what the fuck?

Melissa Broder

#75. When we want something that bad, it's easy to mistake what we truly need for the thing we really want. When this sort of thing happens, and it seems to happen to everyone, I've found it's because what God has for us is obscured from view, just around another bend in the road.

Bob Goff

#76. I like dramas and stuff. That's what I watch, but it seems weird that I'd be in it.

Amy Sedaris

#77. Beauty is subjective. You know how sometimes what makes a person attractive is the way they make you laugh or how it seems like they can read your mind?

Kiera Cass

#78. It seems to me there is a change in what audiences want to see. I can only hope that's correct, because there's an awful lot of people of my age around now and we outnumber the others.

Maggie Smith

#79. Saying it's hard is ultimately a justification to do what seems like the easiest thing to do
have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly.

Cheryl Strayed

#80. It seems to me that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China? - Jonathan Harker

Bram Stoker

#81. Then there is the curse of multi-tasking. Doing two things at once seems so clever, so efficient, so modern. And yet what it often means is doing two things not very well. Like many people, I read the paper while watching TV - and find that I get less out of both.

Carl Honore

#82. What a fool I was! and yet, in the sight of angels, are we any wiser as we grow older? It seems to me, only, that our illusions change as we go on; but, still, we are madmen all the same.

J. Sheridan Le Fanu

#83. As so often in life, things are not always what it seems.

Paulo Coelho

#84. But I don't have anything to prove. My reputation is what it is. It seems that a lot of gay men are put off by jazz because either they don't believe it speaks to their own experience or they believe the genre itself to be somehow intolerant of homosexuality.

Fred Hersch

#85. When we're young, it sometimes seems as if our world doesn't exist outside our city, our block, our house, our room. We make decisions based on what we see in that limited world and follow the only models available.

Wes Moore

#86. Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that

Virginia Woolf

#87. Kant's position is extremely subtle - so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.

Roger Scruton

#88. I have a 15-year-old boy, and we are about to give him car keys, which seems like an act of insanity when you know what you know about 15-year-old boy behavior. But in 2018, we'll have self-driving cars, and it will be so much better. My son may be the last generation of kids who learns to drive.

Nick Hanauer

#89. Don't be so fond of what you planned that somehow to change it seems like a violation of your own choice and wisdom. It's just the opposite.

Lee Carroll

#90. It seems to me that whatever path you choose to take, in the end its up to each of us to try, test and live what we find out, to apply it and see what actually works, and that's the exciting and challenging part of this very real adventure.

Linus Roache

#91. It seems to me that the secret of true happiness in life is to know what you are and then be content to be that, in style, head up and proud, and not yearn to be something else ...

Robert A. Heinlein

#92. As for "Don't be evil," we have tried to define precisely what it means to be a force for good-always do the right, ethical thing. Ultimately, "Don't be evil" seems the easiest way to summarize it."

Sergey Brin

#93. What is it, the difference between ordinary people and those with genius? Not just ordinary people either. Intelligent people, sensitive ones, exceptionally talented ones. Even people like Sonja who give everything and then more, who work harder than seems possible on the thing they love.

Anna Smaill

#94. Sometimes," she said, "it seems to me there's just these certain types of people that come around and around in our lives, know what I mean? Easy types and hard types; we run into them over and over.

Anne Tyler

#95. It preoccupies me until it's time to leave. It seems such the right expression of grief. I am sad, so in whatever small way I can, I will tear myself apart. They've taken what's on the inside and made it visible. If I thought it wouldn't be inappropriate I'd do it myself.

Jael McHenry

#96. John the Baptist was supposed to point the way to the Christ. He was just the voice, not the Messiah. So everybody's calling has dignity to it and God seems to know better than we do what is in us that needs to be called forth.

James Green Somerville

#97. The characters I tend to play are a little more interesting than the standard heroes. Romantic leads can be a little more straightforward, I guess. But it just seems to be the parts I get, I don't know what that says about me. I enjoy interesting characters and interesting people, I suppose.

Iwan Rheon

#98. I admire people who re-create themselves. And it seems to me that what gives us all the opportunity to be heroic in our own lives is that we work to heal ourselves and be better than we were yesterday.

Robert Crais

#99. There's times when the crockery seems alive, an' flies out o' your hand like a bird. It's like the glass, sometimes, 'ull crack as it stands. What is to be broke will be broke.

George Eliot

#100. Nothing is what it seems on the surface of Heroes.

George Takei