Surface Quotes - Page 22

• The similarities among animals that are on the surface very different are no coincidence. In fact, animal locomotion is no different than other flows, animate and inanimate they all develop in space and in time such that they optimize the flow of material.

  Adrian Bejan

  Animal, Space, Flow

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• Thought is like a bubble rising to the surface. When thought is joined to will, we call it power. That which strikes the sick person whom you are trying to help is not thought, but power.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Power, Sick, Trying

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.2624, Manonmani Publishers

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• Spots are on the surface of the solar body where they are produced and also dissolved, some in shorter and others in longer periods. They are carried around the Sun; an important occurrence in itself.

  Galileo Galilei

  Science, Important, Body

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• Here in Miami, on weekends, amusement-seekers will come to the marina, set up folding chairs, and spend a highly entertaining day watching boat owners perform comical maneuvers such as forgetting to set their parking brakes and having their cars roll down the ramp and disappear, burbling gaily, below the surface.

  Dave Barry

  Funny, Weekend, Car

  Dave Barry (2010). “Dave Barry Talks Back”, p.88, Crown Archetype

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• We often say that the earth is a sphere, but to be precise, the term sphere refers only to the surface. The correct mathematical term for the solid earth is a ball.

  Leonard Susskind

  Balls, Earth, Spheres

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• We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious - the people, events, and things of the day - to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.

  Annie Dillard

  Children, Lying, Color

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• He is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. But it may be that the way of life that he has chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and sweetness of his character may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow men so that, long after his death perhaps, it may be realized that there lived in this age a very remarkable creature.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Character, Men, Rivers

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• Maybe staying on the surface keeps her from returning to a place where she can't breathe.

  Mary E. Pearson

  Life, Breathe, Staying

  Mary E. Pearson (2014). “The Jenna Fox Chronicles”, p.102, Macmillan

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• WE DASH THE BLACK RIVER, ITS flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back.

  James Salter

  Dream, Lying, Fall

  James Salter (2011). “Light Years”, p.3, Vintage

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• A sensual life is a ghostly existence where you live on the surface and your soul passes through everything, touching nothing.

  John J. Geddes

  Soul, Touching, Sensual

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• I love that moment in writing when language falls short. There is something more there. A larger body. Even by the failure of words I begin to detect its dimensions. As I work the prose, shift the verbs, look for new adjectives, a different rhythm, syntax, something new begins to come to the surface.

  Susan Griffin

  Fall, Writing, Different

  Susan Griffin (1996). “The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society”, Anchor

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• The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.

  Robert Smithson

  Eye, Artist, Museums

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• The primary rocks, ... I regard as the deposits of a period in which the earth's crust had sufficiently cooled down to permit the existence of a sea, with the necessary denuding agencies,-waves and currents,-and, in consequence, of deposition also; but in which the internal heat acted so near the surface, that whatever was deposited came, matter of course, to be metamorphosed into semi-plutonic forms, that retained only the stratification.

  Hugh Miller

  Agency, Rocks, Sea

  Hugh Miller, Harriet Myrtle (1859). “Sketch book of popular geology: Popular geology: A series of lectures read before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh”, p.297

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• Moreover he saw a skull floating on the surface of the water and he said unto it: Because you drowned others they drowned you; and those that drowned you will eventually be drowned.

  Hillel the Elder

  Skulls, Water, Floating

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• You see with your eyes. This means you can be misled by charm, by outward appearance. By webs of glamour, by surface pretences. I do not see with my eyes. I see good and I see evil. Nothing else.

  Neil Gaiman

  Mean, Eye, Evil

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• Here the people seem to possess the secret of tranquility and to live lives of more than surface contentment.

  Louise Dickinson Rich

  Live Life, People, Secret

  Louise (Dickinson) Rich (1971). “The peninsula”

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• Gentlemen, four-fifths of the earth's surface is covered by seas; that is unquestionably too much; the world's surface, the map of oceans and dry land, must be corrected. We shall give the world the workforce of the sea, gentlemen. This will no longer be the style of Captain van Toch; we shall replace the adventure story of pearls by the hymnic paean of labour.

  Karel Capek

  Ocean, Adventure, Land

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• Perfection is crucial in building an aircraft, a bridge, or a high-speed train. The code and mathematics residing just below the surface of the Internet is also this way. Things are either perfectly right or they will not work. So much of the world we work and live in is based upon being correct, being perfect.

  Brené Brown

  Bridges, Perfection, Way

  Brené Brown (2012). “Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead”, p.115, Penguin

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• I'll burn myself, or I'll cut myself. For a burn or a cut might be shown, might be nursed, might scar or heal, would be a miserable kind of emblem; would anyway be there, on the surface of her body, rather than corroding it from within. Now the thought came to her again, that she might scar herself in some way. It came, like the solution to a problem: I won't be doing it like some hysterical girl. I won't be hoping she'll come catch me at it. It won't be like lying on the sitting-room floor. I'll be doing it for myself, as a secret.

  Sarah Waters

  Girl, Lying, Cutting

  Sarah Waters (2011). “The Night Watch”, p.114, Hachette UK

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• ...a condemned man who, at the hour of death, says or thinks that if the alternative were offered him of existing somewhere, on a height of rock or some narrow elevation, where only his two feet could stand, and round about him the ocean, perpetual gloom, perpetual solitude, perpetual storm, to remain there standing on a yard of surface for a lifetime, a thousand years, eternity! - rather would he live thus than die at once? Only live, live, live! - no matter how, only live!

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Ocean, Men, Thinking

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• Here, beside this great black surface that is my desk, I feel as though I am on a desert island.

  Etty Hillesum

  Writing, Islands, Black

  Etty Hillesum, K. A. D. Smelik, Arnold Pomerans (2002). “Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943”, p.175, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• The virtue of the imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity, a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things.

  John Ruskin

  Imagination, Intuition, Essentials

  John Ruskin (2013). “Ruskin as Literary Critic”, p.124, Cambridge University Press

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• Secondly, the nature of the revolutions which have altered the surface of the earth must have had a more decisive effect on the terrestrial quadrupeds than on the marine animals.

  Georges Cuvier

  Marine, Animal, Earth

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• For what gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. Travel robs us of such refuge. Far from our own people, our own language, stripped of all our props, deprived of our masks (one doesn't know the fare on the streetcars, or anything else), we are completely on the surface of ourselves.

  Albert Camus

  Kind, Breaking Down, Mask

  "Lyrical and Critical Essays".

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• We don't have to look far for miracles because they're all around us. Everything is astonishing. The universe on it's surface is alive with mystery.

  Terence McKenna

  Miracle, Looks, Alive

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