Top 100 Surface But Quotes
#1. A multifaceted writer, very easy on the surface to pin down but incredibly difficult once you actually read him with any depth.
Joshua Ferris
#2. If things look right on the surface the underside is rarely questioned. However, things may be great in reality, but if one perceives them to be amiss, it is difficult to change that perception.
Aleatha Romig
#3. If people are given the chance to experience life in more than one country, they will hate a little less. It's not a miracle potion, but little by little you can solve problems in the basement of a country, not on the surface.
Marjane Satrapi
#4. And with all of the enemy's citizens living at the bottom of huge gravity wells, we don't even have to aim particularly well. Einstein was right. We will be fighting the next war with rocks. But the Belt has rocks that will turn the surface of Mars into a molten sea.
James S.A. Corey
#5. My mother and I had a lot of distance between us emotionally, although, on the surface, most of the time, we appeared good and friendly, and all that. But I was a problem. I was a street kid.
George Carlin
#6. I say everything and I do whatever I want to do. I'm just me. The polished version of me, I suppose, because I have on clothes and makeup. But emotionally, I am very on the surface.
India.Arie
#7. Romantic Love delivers us into the passionate arms of someone who will ultimately trigger the same frustrations we had with our parents, but for the best possible reason! Doing so brings our childhood wounds to the surface so they can be healed.
Harville Hendrix
#8. They knew that mere appearance and disappearance are on the surface like waves on the sea, but life which is permanent knows no decay or diminution.
Rabindranath Tagore
#9. The ordinary is simply the universal observed from the surface, that the direct approach to reality is not without, but within. Touch life anywhereand you will touch universality wherever you touch the earth.
Ellen Glasgow
#10. By turning herself into a fucking machine, she has created a kind of temporary grid. But underneath, in the place of dream and feeling, she is going places that she, on the surface, would not understand.
Mary Gaitskill
#11. One who provokes a person by speaking has only called to the surface the passion that was already there. The person who becomes disturbed is like a rotten loaf of bread, which looks all right outside, but inside is mouldy, so that if anyone breaks it its rottenness appears. - Dorotheos
Dee Pennock
#12. The hideous thing is this: I want to forgive him. Even after everything, I do. A baby before my 17th birthday and a future as lonely as the surface of the moon and still the sight of him feels like a homecoming, like a song I used to know but somehow forgot.
Katie Cotugno
#13. In our absence, the violet early evening light pours in the bay window, filling the still room like water poured into a glass. The glass is delicate. The thin, tight surface of the liquid light trembles. But it does not break. Time does not pass. Not yet.
Marya Hornbacher
#14. There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below, creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played.
Ruth Ozeki
#15. The main reason for rewriting is not to achieve a smooth surface, but to discover the inner truth of your characters.
Saul Bellow
#16. We must see that music theory is not only about music, but about how people process it. To understand any art, we must look below its surface into the psychological details of its creation and absorption.
Marvin Minsky
#17. I had found that Americans were quick to smile when they greeted you, but often the smile was only on the surface
Twesigye Jackson Kaguri
#18. The old deep sadness of life lay in the bottom of her heart and she knew it was there, but she would not allow herself to sink into it. Out of the dark and sullen bottom of a lake the lotus flowers bloomed upon its surface, and she would pluck the flowers.
Pearl S. Buck
#19. Surface beauty: blond hair, blue eyes" - she was looking at me - "is always easy to recognize. But if someone is braver, stronger, smarter, that's harder to see." - Kendra Hilferty
Alex Flinn
#20. But history is that rare woman who doesn't like to look at herself in the mirror. History, when she finds herself in front of one, wipes and wipes its surface at though in this way she might change her face to something better
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#21. I felt like I'd been swimming so hard, and the water growing warmer and warmer the closer I got to the top. I wasn't there yet, but now I could see the surface, rippling just beyond my fingers.
Sarah Dessen
#22. Not to live for the day, that would be materialistic - but to treasure the day. 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
#23. On the surface, humans appear to hate conflict, but in reality, they seek it.
Nagaru Tanigawa
#24. Where would I find enough leather
To cover the entire surface of the earth?
But with leather soles beneath my feet,
It's as if the whole world has been covered.
Santideva
#25. He couldn't do anything now but sit and wait for La Familia to surface, and when they did, he'd be ready.
Joe Awsum
#26. Our point isn't to make an examination of popular film but to illustrate that the yearning for a heroic adventure lies just beneath the surface of our consciousness; film, television, literature, sports, and travel are in a sense vicarious adventures.
Alan Hirsch
#27. Americans are so often thrown by Japan. It looks familiar but, an inch below the surface, it isn't anything like the West at all.
Cathy Davidson
#28. Nothing moved on the surface but faint coruscations of starlight, caught like fireflies in a spider's web.
Diana Gabaldon
#29. I felt I should have been the happiest person in the world. But I looked inside, and that happiness was only on the surface, not so deep. Beneath it was hollow. Up until that time, I had been thinking meditation was a joke, a fad and a waste of time.
David Lynch
#30. Sometimes people are layered like that. There's something totally different underneath than what's on the surface. But sometimes, there's a third, even deeper level, and that one is the same as the top surface one. Like with pie.
Joss Whedon
#31. Elimae was a magician with a key in her mouth, a foreign language, a matryoshka doll: uncomplicated on the surface, but with a dozen secret selves hidden inside. She thought I didn't notice her, but she's all I did notice.
Kirsty Logan
#32. You can have your pick of pretty women. Why me?
You're like the ocean, Pattyn. Pretty enough on the surface, but dive down into your depths, you'll find beauty most people never see. Lucky me. I fell in, headfirst.
Ellen Hopkins
#33. The camel has his virtues - so much at least must be admitted; but they do not lie upon the surface.
Amelia B. Edwards
#34. Ah, what balance is needed at the edges of such an abyss. I am left alone on the surface of a turning planet. What to do but, like Michelangelo 's Adam, put my hand out into unknown space, hoping for the reciprocating touch?
R.S. Thomas
#35. I can spend years studying and being in therapy and having a very analytic spiritual meditation practice, but without the emotional component, without the softening that comes with love and vulnerability, everything else I do is really just surface.
Moby
#36. You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.
Margaret Atwood
#37. There are, in short, a multitude of ways for trash to escape and plastic to go missing. But there is only one ultimate end point for this wild trash: the greatest future, the biggest surface, the deepest chasm, the broadest desert and the largest burial ground on the planet. It's the ocean.
Edward Humes
#38. I mean, jillian gushed. you have this force connecting you. it's under the surface, but it runs deep.
Joan Bauer
#39. Response is what we have trained ourselves to be; it is a reflection of our manhood, character, ideals. We cannot always control our surface reactions, but we can sit at the helm of our lives and control our responses to the blows of life.
Wilferd Peterson
#40. A subtle-witted man is like an arrow, which, rending little surface, enters deeply, but they whose minds are dull resemble stones dashing with clumsy force, but never piercing.
Magha
#41. But nothing is lasting in this world. Even joy begins to fade after only one minute. Two minutes later, and it is weaker still, until finally it is swallowed up in our everyday, prosaic state of mind, just as a ripple made by a pebble gradually merges with the smooth surface of the water.
Nikolai Gogol
#42. Voluptuaries, consumed by their senses, always begin by flinging themselves with a great display of frenzy into an abyss. But they survive, they come to the surface again. And they develop a routine of the abyss: It's four o clock. At five I have my abyss ...
Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
#43. [Through practice] we can get to the point where some disturbance may occur but the negative effects on our mind remain on the surface, like the waves that may ripple on the surface of an ocean but don't have much effect deep down.
Dalai Lama XIV
#44. The last word smelled of desperation,and the old lawyer sighed. 'I can tell you that the law is an ocean of darkness and truth, and that lawyers are but vessels on the surface. We may pull one rope or another, but it is the client, in the end, who charts the course.
John Hart
#45. There's always a fundamental misery that's with me that I always relate to some bit of loss or something. I don't know what it is about me, but even though I'm happy on the surface, there's something there, I guess. So, it all comes from wherever it comes from. I really don't know where that is.
Don McLean
#46. Don't strive to be beautiful from the outside, strive to be beautiful from the inside. Surface beauty will fade through time and age, but beauty from the heart, however, will never fade.
Emily Eaton
#47. 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
#48. After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.
Edward Hopper
#49. When we skim along the surface of history we see little but the rough barren rocks that rise out of it.
Augustus William Hare
#50. I'm always sort of anticipating life being difficult, but on a basic level, that's sort of on the surface, on a basic level, I'm optimistic in the sense that I think it's all going to be alright in the end.
Emily Mortimer
#51. Like a duck on the pond. On the surface everything looks calm, but beneath the water those little feet are churning a mile a minute.
Gene Hackman
#52. It's good when it gets messy,' Sully said. 'Hard, but good, because that's when the stuff we need to see comes to the surface. That's where God is.
Nancy Rue
#53. If you aren't a fisher you'll see many things, but the river, except where it is ridden by waterfowl or waded by moose, will rarely enter your thoughts, much less stimulate your spirit. It's different if you fish. The surface of the water tells a story ...
Paul Schullery
#54. Common sense is merely unaided intuition, and unaided intuition is reasoning performed in the absense of instruments and the tested knowledge of science. Common sense tells us that massive satellites cannot hang suspended 36,000 kilometers above the one point on the earth's surface, but they do ...
E. O. Wilson
#56. Until then she had been blind, but when she saw those mountains, she slipped beneath the surface of the war and found the country.
Tatjana Soli
#57. My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance. I want to see growth in wood, time in stone, nature in a city, and I do not mean its parks but a deeper understanding that a city is nature too-the ground upon which it is built, the stone with which it is made.
Andy Goldsworthy
#58. Eroticism bubbles beneath the surface of every vampire story, but Anne Rice is a writer to make the pot boil.
Janet Maslin
#59. Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it.
Neil Gaiman
#60. I could see where the faded ink intersected with its surface, half-absorbed but half not, rendering part of every word a mere whisper, the shadow left behind when all its thicker parts had rotted away.
Gemma Files
#61. Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.
C. G. Jung
#62. There's plenty going on that's substantial and transformative, beneficial and authentic. Just because somebody is in the media, it doesn't mean they're bad. It may mean they're the best, and occasionally you know the cream rises to the surface, but not always everything on the surface is cream.
Surya Das
#63. So it is with scripture. The word of God is there, able to transform your life. But you must probe for it. You have to penetrate the surface with more than just a cursory glance.
Howard G. Hendricks
#65. It had all dropped into place, like the last bit of the jigsaw, which you thought all along was a bit of left-hand sky, but when you turn it over you realise it's the last chunk of right-hand sea, or the sky tricksily reflected in the surface of the pond.
Tom Holt
#66. People say I make strange choices, but they're not strange for me. My sickness is that I'm fascinated by human behavior, by what's underneath the surface, by the worlds inside people.
Johnny Depp
#67. One thing I know from living with Jack is that war, any war, stains a man deep, and nothing can get the stain out. They can wear clothes like a rancher or a banker, but the stains are under there, never far from the surface of their skin.
Nancy E. Turner
#68. The first opinion that occurs to us when we are suddenly asked about something is usually not our own but only the current one pertaining to our class, position, or parentage; our own opinions seldom swim on the surface.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#69. To our eyes, our crude eyes, nothing is changing, but if we could see it a billion times magnified, we would see that from its own point of view it is always changing: molecules are leaving the surface, molecules are coming back.
Richard Feynman
#70. High school's actually kind of boring. It's a little bit like living in the Center. Everyone thinks they know everything about everyone else, but really there's a lot more under the surface.
Kiersten White
#71. I knew that meant we were done and that we'd smooth over the surface I'd just tossed a rock into, but even the waves that crash down on the beach start out as tiny ripples, far out at sea.
They just gain strength over time.
Jessi Kirby
#72. I swore that I would not suffer from the world's grief and the world's stupidity and cruelty and injustice and I made my heart as hard in endurance as the nether millstone and my mind as a polished surface of steel. I no longer suffered, but enjoyment had passed away from me.
Sri Aurobindo
#73. There is always more in one of Ramanujan's formulae than meets the eye, as anyone who sets to work to verify those which look the easiest will soon discover. In some the interest lies very deep, in others comparatively near the surface; but there is not one which is not curious and entertaining.
G.H. Hardy
#74. Just as words have two functions - information and creation - so each human mind has two personalities, one on the surface, one deeper down. The upper personality ... is conscious and alert ... The lower personality is a ... perfect fool, but without it there is no literature ...
E. M. Forster
#75. So when he touched me, it was deeper and slower than the wildfire, like the flow of molten rock far beneath the surface of the earth. Too deep to feel the heat of it, but it moved inexorably, changing the very foundations of the world with its advance.
Stephenie Meyer
#76. Meditation is not to be on the surface of a thing or underneath it or above it, but it is to be in everywhere and to be in nowhere!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#77. The digestive canal represents a tube passing through the entire organism and communicating with the external world, i.e. as it were the external surface of the body, but turned inwards and thus hidden in the organism.
Ivan Pavlov
#78. And myself? Observe me. There is something to be gained from my surface uses, and perhaps a little more from my lower depths, but my very bottom? That's where I am alone, the observer and the observed.
Jeanette Winterson
#79. But what I knew then was that nobody-not even my mother-was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself in the surface.
Robertson Davies
#80. One day work is hard, and another day it is easy; but if I had waited for inspiration I am afraid I should have done nothing. The miner does not sit at the top of the shaft waiting for the coal to come bubbling up to the surface. One must go deep down, and work out every vein carefully.
Sir Arthur Sullivan
#81. Always behave like a duck- keep calm and unruffled on the surface, but paddle like the devil underneath.
Jacob M. Braude
#82. I turn back to the lake, stare at the ice slowly moving on the surface of the water. Pieces of the solid fall into the liquid, but it's all just water no matter what its form.
Carrie Jones
#83. On the surface, reality may appear the same each day, but in essence, we are new every moment of our lives. The potential for change and growth is unlimited if we allow ourselves to surrender to the flow.
Dorit Brauer
#84. But very quickly I discovered that passing didn't just mean slipping below the surface, it meant being buried alive. I was still me on the inside, trapped in there with all my wounds and fears. But I was no longer me on the outside.
Leslie Feinberg
#85. The snow is lovely because it has only one colour, the sea is lovely because it appears to be a completely flat surface, but both sea and snow are deep and know their own qualities.
Paulo Coelho
#86. I don't try to call myself a poet. But I know that my stuff is pretty literal, in that the themes are pretty simple and on the surface.
Bo Burnham
#87. In me all affections take place on the surface, but sincerely. I've always been an actor, and in earnest. Whenever I've loved, I've pretended to love, pretending it even to myself.
Fernando Pessoa
#88. I'm glad," she said with sudden fierceness, and her raptor gaze unexpectedly pierced me. "Even if nothing lurks beneath the surface of the world but madness, I'm glad to know there is something more. That this isn't everything.
Jordan L. Hawk
#89. Did you?' the producer said. 'He's so clownish on the surface, all joke and dazzle. How in the world could you have seen it?'
'But I did. The moment I met him," she said. "A fucking supernova. Every day since.' She thought, but did not say, almost.
Lauren Groff
#90. Didn't we just talk about this the other night?" Denise sighed with exasperation. "Yeah, we talked. Or rather, I talked. But you didn't say much at all." "Sure I did." "No, you didn't. But then, you never have. You just talk about surface things, never the things that are really bothering you.
Nicholas Sparks
#91. God made solids, but surfaces were the work of the devil.
Wolfgang Paul
#92. I think that wealthy white people would like to have a country that resembles the Fifties, when all the minorities were tucked away in ghettos and paid in very low wages but on the surface it was very bright and shiny and free and the rest of the world would look on it longingly.
Alice Walker
#93. She was like a lone angel floating above the surface of the earth, laughing with delight because she could fly but crying out of loneliness.
Markus Zusak
#94. I admit that when challenging times first surface, it's not first instinct to do a happy dance. But when you take time to pause and add insight to injury, you will immediately start to feel empowered to make those majorly needed life shifts.
Karen Salmansohn
#95. I think that we live in a moment in time where people have a lot of information about a lot of people kind of instantly, but it's all sort of surface information and it doesn't really mean anything.
Jon Hamm
#96. Vegetarians may be appalled, but much of gardening is actually raising animals: the tiny ones under the earth's surface
Toby Hemenway
#97. Be like a duck . . . keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle like the devil underneath. - Unknown
Jolene Brackey
#98. It's always like this after a few days here. I start to lose my bearings. The surface is one way, but then there are all these other things going on, sometimes going back decades, swirling undercurrents that I just don't understand. [p. 336]
Kim Edwards
#99. Doubt is nothing but a trivial agitation on the surface of the soul, while deep down there is a calm certainty.
Francois Mauriac
#100. Gods are but greater demons," the Cishaurim said, "hungers across the surface of eternity, wanting only to taste the clarity of our souls. Can you not see this?
R. Scott Bakker
