Things are seldom what they seem.

The line is from W. S. Gilbert’s libretto for the comic opera H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), written for composer Arthur Sullivan. It appears in the famous “Things are seldom what they seem” duet (often called “The Buttercup Song”), sung by Little Buttercup, a Portsmouth bumboat woman who sells provisions to sailors, and Captain Corcoran. In the scene, Buttercup hints that appearances can be deceptive—an oblique foreshadowing of the opera’s central twist involving switched identities and social rank. Gilbert’s Savoy operas frequently satirize Victorian class assumptions, and this lyric neatly encapsulates that theme in a memorable, epigrammatic form.

On its surface, the line is a wry warning against trusting first impressions. Within Gilbert’s comic world, it also functions as social critique: outward markers of respectability, authority, or “birth” may conceal arbitrary or accidental foundations. The opera’s plot ultimately literalizes the idea through a revelation that upends the characters’ perceived status. The aphoristic phrasing helps explain its afterlife as a general proverb-like quotation, detached from the operatic context and used to suggest hidden motives, mistaken assumptions, or the unreliability of appearances in everyday life.

Things are seldom what they seem,
Skim milk masquerades as cream;
Highlows pass as patent leathers;
Jackdaws strut in peacock's feathers.

1) “Things are seldom what they seem, / Skim milk masquerades as cream.”
2) “Things are seldom what they seem.” (often quoted alone from the lyric couplet)