Surface Quotes - Page 36

The phrase 'contrary to all expectations' rings through the story of the progress of human knowledge. It was 'contrary to all expectations' that the Earth was found to revolve around the sun, and not the other way round, and that a mould growing in one of Dr. Alexander Fleming's dishes was found to be capable of destroying bacteria. When in 1989 the spacecraft Voyager 2 got close enough to the planet Naptune to take detailed pictures of the surface, they were 'contrary to all expectations'.

Anthony Terence Quincey Stewart

Science, Expectations, Progress

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The biggest energy losses for most people are relationships, interrelations with other people. That is where we lose the most energy, through our attachments - opening up to people who might be very nice on the surface but underneath they have a lot of problems.

Frederick Lenz

Nice, Loss, Attachment

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Creeds like pacifism or anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics ... the more you are in the right (and) everybody else should be bullied into thinking otherwise.

George Orwell

Thinking, Mind, Atheism

George Orwell, Keith Gessen (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.335, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Good music often starts in underground culture and then comes to the surface.

Felix Buxton

Culture

Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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When you're a teenager, you don't want to bring your emotions to the surface and talk about them. You want to push them away.

Emma Roberts

Teenager, Want, Emotion

Source: collider.com

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One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.

C. S. Lewis

Book, Errors, Sea

C. S. Lewis (2014). “Image and Imagination”, p.14, Harper Collins

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Thomas Teal, a luminous translator of Jansson's twin talent for surface and depth, simplicity and reverberation in language, and someone who knows exactly how to convey her gift for sensing the meaning embedded in the most mundane act or turn of phrase.

Ali Smith

Simplicity, Depth, Phrases

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I realize that most of us live on the skin - on the surface - without appreciating just how wonderful it is simply to be alive at all.

Audrey Hepburn

Appreciate, Skins, Alive

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Depth must be hidden. Where? On the surface.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Depth

Hugo Von Hofmannsthal (2008). “The Whole Difference: Selected Writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal”, p.148, Princeton University Press

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Everything - a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being - is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg. Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected with everything else, but also with the Source of all life out of which it came. Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself.

Eckhart Tolle

Flower, Simple, Reality

Eckhart Tolle (2006). “A New Earth (Oprah #61): Awakening to Your Life's Purpose”, p.30, Penguin

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But when I close my eyes, I'm more like THIS under the surface: I'm laughing and scheming and dreaming.

Laura Lee

Dream, Eye, Laughing

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I have, for my own projected works and ideas, only the silliest and dewiest of hopes; no matter what, I am romantic enough or sentimental enough to wish to contribute something to life's fabric, to the world's beauty.... [S]imply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, of that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful!

Frank O'Hara

Beautiful, Ideas, Wish

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But there is always creative destruction in markets: there are always new winners taking the place of those that are. So if you only look at the market's surface, it may appear flat, but there's always huge turbulence taking place within.

Kerr Neilson

Creative, Looks, May

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Place, time, life, death, earth, heaven are divisions and distinctions we make, like the imaginary lines we trace upon the surface of the globe.

Fanny Kemble

Oneness, Heaven, Division

Fanny Kemble (1882). “Records of Later Life”

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It is much easier to meet with error than to find truth; error is on the surface, and can be more easily met with; truth is hid in great depths, the way to seek does not appear to all the world.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Errors, Depth, Doe

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What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. ... What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live.

Annie Dillard

Book, Imagination, People

Annie Dillard (2016). “An American Childhood”, p.174, Canongate Books

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Spurn not a seeming error, but dig below its surface for the truth.

Martin Farquhar Tupper

Errors, Seeming

Martin Farquhar Tupper (1848). “Gems from Tupper: Consisting of Extracts from the Following Works: Proverbial Philosophy; Thousand Lines; Twins; Hactenus; An Authr's Mind; Geraldine, and Other Poems; Heart; Crock of Gold; and Probabilities, an Aid to Faith”, p.191

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Men scanning the surface count the wicked happy; they see not the frightful dreams that crowd a bad man's pillow.

Martin Farquhar Tupper

Dream, Men, Wicked

Martin Farquhar Tupper (1849). “Poetical works”, p.15

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Travel is a ceaseless fount of surface education,
But its wisdom will be simply superficial, if thou add not thoughts to things.

Martin Farquhar Tupper

Travel, Add, Superficial

Martin Farquhar Tupper (1851). “Tupper's Proverbial philosophy: a book of thoughts and arguments, originally treated : first and second series”, p.220

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Hemingway, damn his soul, makes everything he writes terrifically exciting (and incidentally makes all us second-raters seem positively adolescent) by the seemingly simple expedient of the iceberg principle - three-fourths of the substance under the surface. He comes closer that way to retaining the magic of the original, unexpressed idea or emotion, which is always more stirring than any words. But just try and do it!

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Writing, Simple, Ideas

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A dull speaker, like a plain woman, is credited with all the virtues, for we charitably suppose that a surface so unattractive must be compensated by interior blessings.

A. P. Herbert

Blessing, Unattractive, Dull

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A few feet under the ground reigns so profound a silence, and yet so much tumult on the surface!

Victor Hugo

Death, Feet, Profound

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A scholar's heart is a dark well in which are buried many aborted feelings that rise to the surface as arguments.

Natalie Clifford Barney

Learning, Heart, Dark

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... not only is life put in new patterns from the air, but it is somehow arrested, frozen into form. (The leaping hare is caught in a marble panel.) A glaze is put over life. There is no flaw, no crack in the surface; a still reservoir, no ripple on its face. Looking down from the air that morning, I felt that stillness rested like a light over the earth. The waterfalls seemed frozen solid; the tops of the trees were still; the river hardly stirred, a serpent gently moving under its shimmering skin.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Morning, Moving, Light

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Of all studies, the most delightful and the most useful is biography. The seeds of great events lie near the surface; historians delve too deep for them. No history was ever true. Lives I have read which, if they were not, had the appearance, the interest, and the utility of truth.

Walter Savage Landor

Lying, True Life, Biographies

Walter Savage Landor (1853). “The works of Walter Savage Landor [ed. by J. Forster].”, p.243

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