Semblance Quotes - Page 2

• We are surrounded by curtains. We only perceive the world behind a curtain of semblance. At the same time, an object needs to be covered in order to be recognized at all.

  Rene Magritte

  Order, Needs, World

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• In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality. At times monstrous images are created, but the setting and the whole picture are so truth-like and filled with details so delicate, so unexpectedly, but so artistically consistent, that the dreamer, were he an artist like Pushkin or Turgenev even, could never have invented them in the waking state. Such sick dreams always remain long in the memory and make a powerful impression on the overwrought and deranged nervous system.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Life, Dream, Memories

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (2015). “Crime and Punishment: Dostoevsky's Collections”, p.46, 谷月社

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• The contrasts between what is spent today to educate a child in the poorest New York City neighborhoods, where teacher salaries are often even lower than the city averages, and spending levels in the wealthiest suburban areas are daunting challenges to any hope New Yorkers might retain that even semblances of fairness still prevail.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Teacher, New York, Children

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• Consciousness-raising is at the very least supposed to bring about an intimacy, but what it seems instead to bring about are the trappings of intimacy, the illusion of intimacy, a semblance of intimacy.

  Nora Ephron

  Feminism, Consciousness, Illusion

  Nora Ephron (2012). “Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble: Some Things About Women and Notes on Media”, p.97, Vintage

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• From prescription, in the case of hypaethral edifices, open to the sky, in honor of Jupiter Lightning, the Heaven, the Sun, or the Moon: for these are gods whose semblances and manifestations we behold before our very eyes in the sky when it is cloudless and bright.

  Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

  Eye, Moon, Sky

  "De architectura". Book by Vitruvius. Book I, Chapter II, Section 5,

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• The customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the semblance of casting their slough annually; they have the idea of the thing, whether they have the reality or not.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Reality, Ideas, Savages

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.189, Penguin

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• We may be unable to maintain even a semblance of order in our urban schools, which increasingly resemble happy hour in Beirut. But, hallelujah, we sure know how to protect kids from God.

  Don Feder

  Christian, Religious, School

  Don Feder (1993). “A Jewish conservative looks at pagan America”, Vital Issues Pr

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• But nothing is better than a truth which appears not to have the semblance of truth. There is always something incomprehensible about the great heroic deeds performed by humanity because they rise so far beyond the mediocre measure of mere mortals; but it is always only because of the incredible feats that human beings have accomplished that humanity recovers its faith in itself.

  Stefan Zweig

  Truth, Heroic Deeds, Humanity

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• If I could get any semblance of, not really anonymity, but control over my public image, that would be nice. But no, I think it's impossible [to maintain that], for one thing. I don't think anyone can do that, apart from Denzel Washington. It's a strange place that the film industry is at, where you can just play superhero after superhero.

  Robert Pattinson

  Nice, Thinking, Strange Places

  Source: collider.com

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• The fact of our deriving constant pleasure from whatever is a type or semblance of divine attributes, and from nothing but that which is so, is the most glorious of all that can be demonstrated of human nature; it not only sets a great gulf of specific separation between us and the lower animals, but it seems a promise of a communion ultimately deep, close, and conscious, with the Being whose darkened manifestations we here feebly and unthinkingly delight in.

  John Ruskin

  Animal, Promise, Delight

  John Ruskin (1858). “Modern Painters: (pt.3) Of ideas of beauty”, p.86

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• Voices of the glorified urge us onward. They who have passed from the semblances of time to the realities of eternity call upon us to advance. The rest that awaits us invites us forward. We do not pine for our rest before God wills it. We long for no inglorious rest. We are thankful rather for the invaluable training of difficulty, the loving discipline of danger and strife. Yet in the midst of it all the prospect of rest invites us heavenward. Through all, and above all, God cries, "Go forward!" "Come up higher!

  William James

  Reality, Voice, Discipline

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 564, 1895.

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• No deceit is so veiled as that which lies concealed behind the semblance of courtesy.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Lying, Deceit, Courtesy

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• A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

  Katherine Paterson

  Book, Writing, Thinking

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• By a kind of fashionable discipline, the eye is taught to brighten, the lip to smile, and the whole countenance to emanate with the semblance of friendly welcome, while the bosom is unwarmed by a single spark of genuine kindness and good-will.

  Washington Irving

  Kindness, Eye, Discipline

  Washington Irving (1897). “The Works of Washington Irving...: Illustrated”

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• Superstition moulds nature into an arbitrary semblance of the supernatural, and then bows down to the work of its own hands.

  John Sterling

  Hands, Arbitrary, Superstitions

  John Sterling (1848). “Essays and Tales: Fragments from the travels of Theodore Elbert. Thoughts. Tales and apologues”, p.128

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• Misery still delights to trace
  Its semblance in another's case.

  William Cowper

  Delight, Misery, Cases

  William Cowper (1851). “The Works of William Cowper: His Life, Letters, and Poems. Now First Completed by the Introduction of Cowper's Private Correspondence”, p.446

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• Before I was ten I became critical of the anthropomorphic God as interpreted in the churches. I did not warm to One thus revealed as the semblance of a bullying and mean old man who must have all his own way, be praised all the time and for attributes which were deplorable in us.

  Miles Franklin

  Bullying, Mean, Men

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• Fashion is the veriest goddess of semblance and of shade; to be happy is of far less consequence to her worshippers than to appear so; even pleasure itself they sacrifice to parade, and enjoyment to ostentation.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Fashion, Sacrifice, Shade

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.255

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• The manly pride of the Romans, content with substantial power, had left to the vanity of the East the forms and ceremonies of ostentatious greatness. But when they lost even the semblance of those virtues which were derived from their ancient freedom, the simplicity of Roman manners was insensibly corrupted by the stately affectation of the courts of Asia.

  Edward Gibbon

  Pride, Greatness, Vanity

  Edward Gibbon (1875). “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.107

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• It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Ambition, Reality, Men

  Nathaniel Hawthorne (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated)”, p.1640, Delphi Classics

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• Civilisation is hooped together, brought
  Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
  By manifold illusion.

  William Butler Yeats

  Civilization, Together, Uprooting

  William Butler Yeats (2011). “The Yeats Reader, Revised Edition: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose”, p.215, Simon and Schuster

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• For those who have lived on the edge of poverty all their lives, the semblance of poverty affected by the affluent is both incomprehensible and insulting.

  Lillian B. Rubin

  Insulting, Poverty, Rich

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• One of the most marked characteristics of our day is a reckless neglect of principles, and a rigid adherence to their semblance.

  Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington

  Adherence, Principles, Reckless

  Marguerite Countess of Blessington, Marguerite GARDINER (Countess of Blessington.) (1839). “Desultory Thoughts and Reflections”, p.40

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• An electric chain seems to vibrate, as it were, between our brain and him or her preserved there [in a Daguerreotype] so well by the limner's cunning. Time, space, both are annihilated, and we identify the semblance with the reality.

  Walt Whitman

  Reality, Space, Brain

  Walt Whitman (1998). “The Journalism: 1834-1846”, Peter Lang Pub Incorporated

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• Masculine observers, if the birth-mark did not heighten their admiration, contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might possess one living specimen of ideal loveliness, without the semblance of a flaw.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Wish, World, Might

  Nathaniel Hawthorne (2015). “The Birthmark (Unabridged): A Dark Romantic Story on Obsession with Human Perfection From the Renowned American Author of “The Scarlet Letter”, “The House with the Seven Gables” & “Twice-Told Tales” (Including Biography)”, p.76, e-artnow

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