Mark Twain Quotes

Things are NEVER what they seem, Pa, I thought. I used to think they were, but I was wrong or stupid or blind or something. Old folks are forever complaining about their failing eyesight, but I think your vision gets better as you get older. Mine surely was.

Nothing is as it seems; everything is as you allow it to be

I spent a lot of time looking at that picture. Wondering what I’d think of that girl, if I was someone else, seeing how easily she sits in her boyfriend’s lap, laughing, with his arms around her. I would have thought her life was perfect, the way I once thought Cass’s was. It was too easy, I was learning, to just assume things.

I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don't.

I think certain people are the way they are for certain reasons that we can't necessarily judge without knowing.

Good or bad is a matter of perspective. I met an immortal hunami once, a man called William Shakespeare, who wrote that there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

The world isn't what you think it is.

The claim that everybody sees the world differently is not a claim that there's no reality. It's a different kind of claim.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

It's presumptuous to say you know how somebody feels.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

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

Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty.

From a distance it is something; and nearby it is nothing.

We do not see people as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

You can't go by what things look like on paper.

People want to see the world the way they want to see it, not the way it is.

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.

All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it.

It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.

You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself." "Hang on, can I write this down?" said Arthur, excitedly fumbling in his pocket for a pencil.

Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer.

Life is not always what we think it is.

Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman – how dense! Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too. Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle.

Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did.