Best Surface Quotes

In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.

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.

Renewing the mind is a little like refinishing furniture. It is a two-stage process. It involves taking off the old and replacing it with the new. The old is the lies you have learned to tell or were taught by those around you; it is the attitudes and ideas that have become a part of your thinking but do not reflect reality. The new is the truth. To renew your mind is to involve yourself in the process of allowing God to bring to the surface the lies you have mistakenly accepted and replace them with truth. To the degree that you do this, your behavior will be transformed.

I’m an artist. Artists don’t need permission to work. Regardless of whether I’m acting or not, I write. I write when I’m tired in fact, because I believe your most pure thoughts surface.

The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.

As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance. They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep – as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny.

When we don’t enjoy what we do, we only nick the surface of our potential.

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.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

Beneath the surface of our daily life, in the personal history of many of us, there runs a continuous controversy between an Ego that affirms and an Ego that denies.

For the Persian poet Rumi, each human life is analogous to a bowl floating on the surface of an infinite ocean. As it moves along, it is slowly filling with the water around it. That’s a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge. When the water in the bowl finally reaches the same level as the water outside, there is no longer any need for the container, and it drops away as the inner water merges with the outside water. We call this the moment of death. That analogy returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves.

The limiting surface of one thing is the beginning of another.

The happiest woman sees not gladness alone reflected from her mirror; its surface will inevitably be sometimes dimmed with sighs.

Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.

December is a month that is rife with nostalgia. If there’s anything deep in your heart that you want to keep buried, you can count on December to bring it to the surface.

No one has more than scratched the surface when it comes to understanding and explaining the miracle of the market.

There was a time when all these things would have passed me by, like the flitting figures of a theatre, sufficient for the amusement of an hour. But now, I have lost the power of looking merely on the surface.

Even if we don’t see it, God is always working underneath the surface, behind the scenes and orchestrating His plans and purposes.

I’ve always been interested in the idea of the artificial landscape. Reforming the landscape. Architecture being a method of reforming the earth’s surface.

I had to learn that a good actor, like an iceberg, reveals only a small part of his ability on the surface. You suggest; you don’t serve on a platter. You hold back. You don’t expose it all to view. That’s the way to put the audience’s imagination to work.

The glacier was God’s great plough . . . set at work ages ago to grind, furrow, and knead over, as it were, the surface of the earth?

What is painting but the act of embracing, by means of art, the surface of the pool?

If you want to become a fossil, you need to die somewhere where your bones will be rapidly buried. You then hope that the Earth moves in such a way as to bring the bones back up to the surface.

DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he’s got nothing underneath.

It is the surface I am interested in. Because the surface is the inside.

The function of the painter is to render… the visible surface so that at a certain distance… and position it appears… like the body itself.

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

I no longer need to have what I see as the surface of the dance so connected to the underlying structure.

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.

In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.

When we take a slight survey of the surface of our globe a thousand objects offer themselves which, though long known, yet still demand our curiosity.

The flesh is the upper surface of the unknown.

So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then.

You get to be analytical about the process and now I can watch the movie and see all the different connection things and see all the things that are underneath the surface.

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.