Top 100 What Seems Quotes
#1. Our job is to become more and more of what we are. The growth of a poet seems to be related to his or her becoming less and less embarrassed about more and more.
Marvin Bell
#2. He who wishes to exert a useful influence must be careful to insult nothing. Let him not be troubled by what seems absurd, but concentrate his energies to the creation of what is good. He must not demolish, but build. He must raise temples where mankind may come and partake of the purest pleasure.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#3. Finally, I spoke of the necessity of recounting frankly every human experience, including, I said emphatically, what seems unsayable and what we do not speak of even to ourselves.
Elena Ferrante
#4. [...] 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
#5. 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
#6. Do you stick with the position you've mastered? Or do you push yourself to master the position that seems out of reach? Do you listen to what everyone else thinks is best for you? Or do you listen to your own voice? Do you settle? Or do you dream?
Reggie Love
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#11. I'm dying to go to India ... because the culture seems so vastly different from what I'm used to in the States. I would love to do some yoga there. And be amongst people who are so different than myself. There's so much you can learn from people who grew up in a different environment.
Christa B. Allen
#12. 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
#13. Essential characteristics of a gentleman: The will to put himself in the place of others; the horror of forcing others into positions from which he would himself recoil; and the power to do what seems to him to be right without considering what others may say or think.
John Galsworthy
#14. The gifts we treasure most over the years are often small and simple. In easy times and tough times, what seems to matter most is the way we show those nearest us that we've been listening to their needs, to their joys, and to their challenges.
Fred Rogers
#15. People joke, in our field, about Pythagoras and his religious cult based on perfect geometry and other abstract mathematical forms, but if we are going to have religion at all then a religion of mathematics seems ideal, because if God exists then what is He but a mathematician?
Matt Haig
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Drink and be thankful to the host! What seems insignificant when you have it, is important when you need it.
Franz Grillparzer
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. I realise I might pass down an incurable illness to my son, but living based on what might go wrong seems like less and less of a life as I get older. The one thing I can try to control is whether I teach my child to be ruled by anxiety, by fear. That's something that gets passed down, too.
Victor LaValle
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. People who make decisions based merely on what seems most advisable to them will inevitably choose something inferior to God's best. Jesus, the ultimate model for the Christian life, did not rely on His own best thinking, but depended completely on His heavenly Father for wisdom in everything.
Henry Blackaby
#27. Sometimes the safest place is when you flee to what seems the most dangerous," said Granny, and then she described how the prince rode right into the darkest forest and the shadows stopped, hissing, at the edge.
Fredrik Backman
#28. Seems a lot of men never saw one such as me. A girl what could keep up and fight and ride and curse with the best of them. A girl what ain't trapped in some dress or some house or some bed. A girl what ain't waiting on some man to do what she ought to her own damn self.
J.D. Jordan
#29. Some guy refuses to fight and we call that the sin, but he's standing up for what he believes in and that seems pretty damned American to me.
Iris Dement
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. While I fear that we're drawn to what abandons us, and to what seems most likely to abandon us, in the end I believe we're defined by what embraces us.
J.R. Moehringer
#33. You make what seems a simple choice: choose a man or a job or a neighborhood- and what you have chosen is not a man or a job or a neighborhood, but a life.
Jessamyn West
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. Nothing is altered and in spite of God's mercy I am still alone. Though my suffering seems senseless I am still in agony. There is no explanation of my life. Indeed there was not, nor was this what he'd meant to convey.
Malcolm Lowry
#37. We cannot say what reality is, only what it seems like to us.
Gaston Bachelard
#38. You would think as you get older your mind would fill up with what they call the spiritual side of things, but mine just seems to get more and more practical, trying to get something settled.
Alice Munro
#39. 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
#40. What seems today inconceivable will appear one day, from a higher stand point, quite simple and harmonious.
Max Planck
#41. There seems to be no way to save wildness from human intrusion without establishing and enforcing rules and regulations that are themselves intrusions on what, by definition, are meant to be areas outside humanity's control.
J. Meredith Neil
#42. 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
#43. Everyone had heard what happened and they were all so pleased, so very pleased. Which seems a little odd, but in Cainsville "a little odd" was the norm.
Kelley Armstrong
#44. 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
#45. Each of us in our own way can try to spread compassion into people's hearts. Western civilizations these days place great importance on filling the human brain with knowledge, but no one seems to care about filling the human heart with compassion. This is what the real role of religion is.
Dalai Lama
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. If you limit your choice only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise.
Robert Fritz
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition.
Learned Hand
#56. If what you have seems insufficient to you, then though you possess the world, you will yet be miserable.
Seneca.
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#65. 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
#67. Thank You, Lord, that You are with me in everything that I face. No matter what comes against me, You are greater and more powerful. I ask You to be with me in the things I face today. I praise You and Your greatness in the midst of all that seems large and looming in my life.
Stormie O'martian
#68. 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
#69. What we don't realize is that the very option of being allowed to change our minds seems to increase the chances that we will change our minds.
Barry Schwartz
#70. What kind of Muslim are you? The question seems odd, but for those who seek to divide and conquer Islam, the answer has become increasingly important. Even more disturbing are the labels we assign ourselves.
Yasmin Mogahed
#71. I cannot go on ... All that I have written seems to me like so much straw compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.
Thomas Aquinas
#72. Gimmicks come and go; the cop show seems one genre that will never leave - not as long as people like to sit at home in the suburbs and see what awful things go on in the cities.
Tom Shales
#73. In general, the heart seems to have a more reliable memory for what benefits the psyche than does the head, which has a rather unhealthy tendeny to lead an 'abstract' existence, and easily forgets that its consciousness is snuffed out the moment the heart fails its duty.
C. G. Jung
#74. 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
#75. Everyone who deals with teens seems to agree that the most important and toughest job is staying in connection and conversation ... not delivering a lecture but saying what we think.
Ellen Goodman
#76. What seems tragic now won't even be an issue in a few years time.
Cecelia Ahern
#77. 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.
#78. Let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be.
Plato
#79. Who you are is less important than what you seem.
Iain Pears
#80. 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
#81. What we've done, it seems to me, is allow women to get older, but not to age.
Caryl Rivers
#82. 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
#83. No matter what calamities befall him in everyday life, the true hacker still needs the pressure and inconvenience of four hours of trudging in wind or rain or sleet or sun (or all of them at once), hacking at a white pellet that seems to have a mind of its own and a lousy sense of direction.
Tom O'Connor
#84. I know what I write about seems exotic to a lot of people, but not for me. I pulled up to an old trading post and saw a few elderly Navajos sitting on a bench. I felt right at home.
Tony Hillerman
#85. Don't envy those who seems having everything, they don't really have everything. They have what they want and live the life they want but they don't have what they really need.
Ann Marie Aguilar
#86. No matter what a situation or circumstance looks like; know that nothing is ever what it seems. Never loose hope.
Barbara Hart
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. A week after his State of the Union address, political observers are still trying to figure out what President Obama's game is. That's because rhetorically and substantively, he seems to be in another world ...
Jonah Goldberg
#91. There seems to be a great propensity in this business to write tear-jerkers, 'You-left-me' songs. I thought, 'Why don't I count my blessings by looking at what I have?' I'm pretty much an optimistic guy.
Jerry Jeff Walker
#92. What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise
Oscar Wilde
#93. In combat situations, your choices can be judged based only against what you knew at the time. To expect anything more of a soldier is to demand that he or she be superhuman. Which seems, to me, unreasonable.
Jim Butcher
#94. 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
#95. I guess I just grew up thinking that when we become adults, we get to do what we love. For work, for fun, forever. I don't know where I got that from. Seems silly now.
Crystal Woods
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. What seems true is that something in life, on the highways or in our hearts, is always being installed, or being repaired, or being torn down for the next installation.
Anne Lamott
#99. 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
#100. 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
