Agnes Repplier Quotes

Most loverspicture to themselves, in their mistresses, a secret reality, beyond and different from what they see every day. They are in love with somebody else--their own invention. And sometimes there is a secret reality; and sometimes reality and appearance are the same. The discovery, in either case, is likely to cause a shock.

Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.

Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn't mean it is simple.

Nothing that you want ever is what you think it is.

You never see what you want to see, forever playing to the gallery.

I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.

Clearness is so often one of the characteristics of truth that often it even passes for truth itself.

I used to take everything at face value. Because, when I say something, I mean it... so I used to feel that everybody else meant what they said. But of course that wasn't true. And life isn't that sweet and simple.

We continually want to unmask our heroes as if there were more to be learned from their nakedness than from their choice of clothing.

something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. before that, it is something real. what caused the disillusionment? no one told me the print on the wall was just ink and paper and had no life of its own. at some point the cat stopped blinking, and i stopped thinking it could.

All the things she planned to feel, the way she planned to look and seem, the appropriate things she planned to say. None of them came to pass.

Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe.

Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them... there is nothing.

Nothing in nature is as simple as it sometimes seems when reduced to words.

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

People are like birds - from a distance, beautiful: from close up, those sharp beaks, those beady little eyes.

We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream.

How foolish of me to believe that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearance of trees and automobiles, and people with a reality itself, and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

What men call knowledge, is the reasoned acceptance of false appearances. Wisdom looks behind the veil and sees.

The concept, the label, is perpetually hiding from us all the nature of the real.

What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real.

When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

Illusions are hazardous, and so are disillusions.