Things do not pass for what they are, but for what they seem. Most things are judged by their jackets.

Things away from home often look better than they are.

You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be.

These days even reality has to look artificial.

People are trying harder to look right than to be right.

Odd that a thing is most itself when likened

It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.

A lot of things seem one way but are another. And how a thing seems is often just the game we play to save ourselves from great, panicking pain.

Sometimes the real looks fake, especially when you’ve looked at the fake for so long.

Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

In actuality, it was like the homes of all people who are not really rich but who want to look rich, and therefore end up looking like one another: it had damasks, ebony, plants, carpets, and bronzes, everything dark and gleaming — all the effects a certain class of people produce so as to look like people of a certain class. And his place looked so much like the others that it would never have been noticed, though it all seemed quite exceptional to him.

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

Alas! Victor, when falsehood can look so like the truth, who can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?

That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.