appearances on Clothing

How do we tell ourselves apart from what we wear, in the end?

For thousands of years human beings have communicated with one another first in the language of dress. Long before I am near enough to talk to you on the street, in a meeting, or at a party, you annou...

Things Are Different: You never know the story By the cover of the book. You can’t tell what a dinner’s like By simply looking at the cook. It’s something everybody needs to know Way down deep inside ...

In every walk of life each man puts on a personality and outward appearance so as to look what he wants to be thought; in fact you might say that society is entirely made up of assumed personalities.

It is not your outward appearance that you should beautify, but your soul, adorning it with good works.

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

A sure way of retaining the grace of heaven is to disregard outward appearances, and diligently to cultivate such things as foster amendment of life and fervor of soul, rather than to cultivate those ...

Chan eil breth le nochd; beairteach cridhe dh’fhaodadh a bhith fo bochd còta. Do not judge by appearances; a rich heart may be under a poor coat.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It’s cheaper.

No physical appearance is worth not eating pasta for.

Be not proud of race, face, place, or grace.

Though beauty gives you a weird sense of entitlement, it's rather frightening and threatening to have others ascribe such importance to something you know you're just renting for a while.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

I was shy by nature, and rendered worse in that respect by a consciousness of my own ugliness. I am certain that nothing so much influences the development of a man as his exterior—though the exterior...

One Ash Wednesday a decade ago, when I was new to Anglicanism, I knelt at a rail as Fr. Thomas, my priest, smeared a black cross on each forehead. “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall ret...

Watches, cars, and Christians can all look chromed and shiny. But watches don't tick, cars don't go, and Christians don't make a difference without insides. For a Christian, that's the...

The world has enough women who know how to do their hair. It needs women who know how to do hard and holy things.

It is a spiritual disaster for a man to rest content with his exterior identity, with his passport picture of himself. Is his life merely in his fingerprints?

The Texas-based pastor Matt Chandler spent a decade working with teenagers, and during that time, he realized how a specific change takes place between sixth graders and ninth graders. As Chandler say...

A missionary was preaching in the village market, and some of the people were laughing at him because he was not a very handsome man. He took it for a time, and then he said to the crowd, “It is true ...

The author Oscar Wilde once remarked that by the age of forty everyone has the face they deserve. This is a truly profound, if painful, truth. But it really applies to the “within” expressed by the fa...

“I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!”

“But to appear happy when I am so miserable — Oh! who can require it?”

Character is like a tree and reputation its shadow. The shadow is what we think it is and the tree is the real thing.

Alexander Schmemann, the late priest who led a reform movement in Russian Orthodoxy, tells of a time when he was traveling on the subway in Paris, France, with his fiancée. At one stop an old and ugly...

Some people's affability is more deadly than the violence of coarser souls.

[God’s grace is] always hidden under the strangest appearances.

“All that glistens is not gold; Often have you heard that told: Many a man his life hath sold But my outside to behold: Gilded tombs do worms enfold.”

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? A Gospel for a Jewish Community Matthew’s Gospel presents a favorable view of the Jewish Law and its traditions. In contrast to Luke...

So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why doesn't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?