Superficial Quotes - Page 4

• A girl's brain is mysterious, but only in a superficial way-a way very exasperating to me.

  James Agee

  Girl, Brain, Intelligence

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• His (God) love is not a passing fancy or superficial emotion; it is a profound and unshakable commitment that seeks what is best for us.

  Billy Graham

  Love, Commitment, Profound

  Billy Graham (2007). “The Journey: Living by Faith in an Uncertain World”, p.22, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race - we are a very unfair one.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Book, Race, Names

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010). “The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility"”, p.28, Random House

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• A man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man. The instructed man is ashamed to pronounce in an orphic manner what everybody knows, and because he is silent people think he is making fun of them. They like a man who expresses their own superficial thoughts in a manner that appears to be profound. This enables them to feel that they are themselves profound.

  Van Wyck Brooks

  Fun, Successful, Men

  Van Wyck Brooks (1958). “From a writer's notebook”

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• A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here or there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions, is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of "choice" when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses.

  Thomas Merton

  Freedom, Choices, Tasks

  Thomas Merton (1979). “Love and Living”, p.6, Macmillan

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• Boredom dismantles the mind, renders it superficial, out at the seams, saps it from within and dislocates it.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Boredom, Mind, Sap

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• It is because of the hasty and superficial conversation with God that the sense of sin is so weak and that no motives have power to help you to hate and flee from sin as you should.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Hate, Helping, Sin

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• It is not to be disguised, that a war has broken out between the North and the South. - Political and commercial men are industriously striving to restore peace: but the peace, which they would effect, is superficial, false, and temporary.

  Gerrit Smith

  Peace, War, Men

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• It is not a question of skimming the surface of the art, it must be probed to its depths, for to seize upon superficial things only is to degenerate into mediocrity and obscurity.

  Jean-Georges Noverre

  Art, Superficial Things, Ballet

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• Fortunately or otherwise we live at a time when the average individual has to know several times as much in order to keep informed as he did only thirty or forty years ago. Being "educated" today requires not only more than a superficial knowledge of the arts and sciences, but a sense of inter-relationship such as is taught in few schools. Finally, being "educated" today, in terms of the larger needs, means preparation for world citizenship; in short, education for survival.

  Norman Cousins

  Time, Art, School

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• You become really ugly when you become very superficial and self-obsessed.

  Annie Lennox

  Self, Ugly, Obsessed

  "The Look: Annie Lennox". Interview with Harry Brant, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 23, 2014.

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• Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular.

  Thomas Merton

  Self, Firsts, Contemplation

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.7, New Directions Publishing

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• Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality.

  Manuel Puig

  Reality, Cinema, Literature

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• Faith in the gospel restructures our motivations, our self-understanding, our identity, and our view of the world. Behavioral compliance to rules without heart-change will be superficial and fleeting… We can only change permanently as we take the gospel more deeply into our understanding and into our hearts. We must feed on the gospel, as it were, digesting it and making it part of ourselves. That is how we grow.

  Timothy Keller

  Motivation, Heart, Self

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• To read great books does not mean one becomes ‘bookish’; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.

  John Cowper Powys

  Book, Mean, People

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• The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid , uninteresting, petty and chaotic.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Lying, Ideas, Giving

  "SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL".

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• Never lose your sense of the superficial.

  Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe

  Journalist, Loses

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• I have to say that, though it sounds so superficial, the accent really does help. I like having accents preparing for a part.

  Emily Mortimer

  Sound, Doe, Helping

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• When you demand the nature of my motives, you reveal the style of your thinking to be callow, captious, superficial, craven, uncertain and impudent.

  Jack Vance

  Thinking, Style, Demand

  Jack Vance (2011). “The Languages of Pao”, p.61, Hachette UK

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• The most superficial student of Roman history must be struck by the extraordinary degree in which the fortunes of the republic were affected by the presence of foreigners, under different names, on her soil.

  Henry James Sumner Maine

  Names, Degrees, Different

  Henry Sumner Maine, Sir, J. H. Morgan (2000). “Ancient Law”, p.27, Beard Books

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• Any change in customs ... takes generations to accomplish, and must come about by general consent. Even a superficial study of sociology shows the futility of past efforts to make a lasting change in manners by an act of will or authority.

  Millicent Fenwick

  Past, Lasting Change, Effort

  Millicent Fenwick (1948). “Vogue's book of etiquette: a complete guide to traditional forms and modern usage”

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• Time, as a river, hath brought down to us what is more light and superficial, while things more solid and substantial have been immersed.

  Joseph Glanvill

  Time, Light, Rivers

  Joseph Glanvill (1885). “Scepsis Scientifica: Or, Confest Ignorance, the Way to Science ; in an Essay of the Vanity of Dogmatizing and Confident Opinion”

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• there are people who are born superficial ... They prefer not to have to deal with more than a limited number of oversimplified ideas - they prefer the book reviews to the books, the headlines and the leading paragraph to the full report, the generalization to the facts, and the negative to the positive.

  Gwethalyn Graham

  Book, Ideas, Numbers

  Gwethalyn Graham (1944). “Earth and High Heaven”, Philadelphia and New York : J.B. Lippincott

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• [On writing biography:] ... every human life is at once so complex and so simple, so perplexing and so clear, so superficial and so profound, that any attempt to present it as a unified, consistent whole, to enclose it within a rigid frame, inevitably tempts one to cheat or to falsify.

  Iris Origo

  Writing, Simple, Profound

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• I'm proud of the two adjectives, superficial and frivolous.

  Jeanloup Sieff

  Two, Adjectives, Proud

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