"Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.

These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is – I repeat it – a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them."
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"Is that why you've been pushing me away? Because of how you look? [...] I waited for you my whole life. Yearned for you my whole life. After Tersa told me you were coming, I spent seven hundred years searching for you[....] I never gave a damn what you looked like--tall, short, fat, thin, plain, beautiful, ugly. Why would I care about what you looked like? The flesh was the shell that housed the glory[....] Even if I couldn't be your physical lover, there are other ways to be a lover and I know them all. So don't stand there and tell me how you feel depends on how you look!"
— Anne Bishop (Dreams Made Flesh)

"People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools. "
— Alice Walker

"People who need to bully you are the easiest to push around."
— Douglas Adams (The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul)

"Nothing is like it seems (to be) "
— Various

"Some people's affability is more deadly than the violence of coarser souls."
— Arthur Conan Doyle (The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes)

"The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance."
— Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)

""I'm wondering whether I can explain," said Lee. "Where there is no likeness of experience it's very difficult. I understand you were not born in America."
"No, in Ireland."
"And in a few years you can almost disappear; while I, who was born in Grass Valley, went to school and several years to the University of California, have no chance of mixing."
"If you cut your queue, dressed and talked like other people?"
"No. I tried it. To the so-called whites I was still a Chinese, but an untrustworthy one; and at the same time my Chinese friends steered clear of me. I had to give it up.""
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

" "I'll say this, Arik: the old man's warning proved to be true - things are not always what they seem. She was no young lady -"
"If it's the demon you speak of," interjected Rith, as she stepped back into the ruin, Lyssa following after, "she was not even a toothless old hag.""
— Dennis L. McKiernan (Caverns of Socrates)

"The devil, depend upon it, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing."
— Robert Louis Stevenson