Below The Surface Quotes

• 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.

  Carl Jung

  Leadership, Pride, Average

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• The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface.

  Howard Zinn

  Memories, Taken, People

  Howard Zinn (2014). “A People's History of the United States”, p.395, Pan Macmillan

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• Behavior which appears superficially correct but is intrinsically corrupt always irritates those who see below the surface.

  James Bryant Conant

  Irritated, Behavior, Surface

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• Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.

  Matthew Arnold

  Strong, Thinking, Light

  Matthew Arnold (1892). “St. Paul and Protestantism: With Other Essays”

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• If the children acquiesce, they may learn to suppress their anger to avoid retribution. But the rage remains inside, often just below the surface.

  Alvin Rosenfeld

  Inspirational, Courage, Children

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• Man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.

  Jacques Yves Cousteau

  Ocean, Men, Free Diving

  Time, March 28, 1960.

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• Deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, "There is something not right," no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or moral code.

  Carl Jung

  Men, Average, Voice

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• Primitive superstition lies just below the surface of even the most tough-minded individuals, and it is precisely those who most fight against it who are the first to succumb to its suggestive effects.

  Carl Jung

  Lying, Fighting, Superstitions

  Carl Gustav Jung, Herbert Read, Michael Scott Montague Fordham, Gerhard Adler (1972). “The Collected Works of C.G. Jung: The structure and dynamics of the psyche”

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• A tree reaches below the surface to gather strength for stargazing.

  Dolly Parton

  Tree, Survival, Surface

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• Now imagine that you are going beneath the surface of the ocean. Below the surface all is calm, silent, and serene. As you visualize yourself going deeper and deeper into the depths of the ocean, feel that a profound peace is entering you.

  Frederick Lenz

  Ocean, Profound, Depth

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• I hear the words, the thoughts, the feeling tones, the personal meaning, even the meaning that is below the conscious intent of the speaker. Sometimes too, in a message which superficially is not very important, I hear a deep human cry that lies buried and unknown far below the surface of the person.
  So I have learned to ask myself, can I hear the sounds and sense the shape of this other person's inner world? Can I resonate to what he is saying so deeply that I sense the meanings he is afraid of, yet would like to communicate, as well as those he knows?

  Carl Rogers

  Lying, Feelings, Important

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• Underneath our nice, friendly facades there is great unease. If I were to scratch below the surface of anyone I would find fear, pain, and anxiety running amok. We all have ways to cover them up. We overeat, over-drink, overwork; we watch too much television.

  Joko Beck

  Running, Pain, Nice

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• Our psychological reality, which lies below the surface, frightens us because it endlessly surprises us and drives us in a direction which society's rules and organizations define as wrong or dangerous.

  Anais Nin

  Lying, Reality, Organization

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• Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.

  Bertrand Russell

  Lying, Philosophy, Asking Questions

  Bertrand Russell (2016). “The Problems of Philosophy”, p.18, Bertrand Russell

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• If you scratch below the surface and ask what really makes me tick, it's the liberalism of trying to promote freedom and opportunity. Promoting social mobility is one of the keys to that.

  Nick Clegg

  Opportunity, Keys, Trying

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• Many fires burn below the surface.

  Empedocles

  Fire, Surface

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• Almost all of my early art dealt with the fallout from middle-class taboos, the messy, the ambivalent emotions couples felt, the inherent racism, the sexual tensions and the unhappiness roiling below the surface of our prim suburban lives. Meanwhile I was a suburban bad boy - cynical, sarcastic, contemptuous of all authority.

  Eric Fischl

  Sarcastic, Art, Couple

  "Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas". Book by Eric Fischl and Michael Stone, www.huffingtonpost.com. 2012.

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• Deep Listening is listening to everything all the time, and reminding yourself when you're not. But going below the surface too, it's an active process. It's not passive. I mean hearing is passive in that soundwaves hinge upon the eardrum. You can do both. You can focus and be receptive to your surroundings. If you're tuned out, then you're not in contact with your surroundings. You have to process what you hear. Hearing and listening are not the same thing.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Music, Mean, Focus

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• He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

  Edith Wharton

  Loneliness, Winter, Profound

  Ethan Frome preface (1911)

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• I love mirrors. They let one pass through the surface of things.

  Claude Chabrol

  Love, Mirrors, Surface

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• Literature presents you with alternate mappings of the human experience. You see that the experiences of other people and other cultures are as rich, coherent, and troubled as your own experiences. They are as beset with suffering as yours. Literature is a kind of legitimate voyeurism through the keyhole of language where you really come to know other people's lives--their anguish, their loves, their passions. Often you discover that once you dive into those lives and get below the surface, the veneer, there is a real closeness.

  Chaim Potok

  Real, Passion, Other Cultures

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• You might think you made a new world or a new self, but your old self is always gonna be there, just below the surface, and if something happens, it'll stick its head out and say 'Hi.' You don't seem to realize that. You were made somewhere else.

  Haruki Murakami

  Thinking, Self, Somewhere Else

  "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle". Book by Haruki Murakami, 1994.

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• All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.

  Shirley Jackson

  Powerful, Jewels, Land

  Shirley Jackson (2010). “Novels and Stories: The Lottery, The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Other Stories and Sketches”

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• All penguins are the same below the surface, which I think is as perfect an analogy as we're likely to get for the futility of racism.

  Russell Brand

  Thinking, Racism, Perfect

  Russell Brand (2008). “My Booky Wook”, p.48, Hachette UK

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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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