Surface Quotes - Page 36

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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Huge lemons, cut in slices, would sink like setting suns into the dusky sea, softly illuminating it with their radiating membranes, and its clear, smooth surface aquiver from the rising bitter essence.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Food, Cutting, Sea

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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

Thinking, Should Have, Meditation

"His Mission to Change the World Through Meditation". Interview with Marianne Schnall, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 9, 2014.

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Surface cures are not going to get rid of the torment that's inside.

David Lynch

Cures, Torment

"His Mission to Change the World Through Meditation". Interview with Marianne Schnall, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 9, 2014.

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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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As a breeze ruffles the surface of a lake and distorts the images reflected therein, so also the chitta vrtti (fluctuations of mind) disturb the peace of the mind. The still waters of a lake reflect the beauty around it. When the mind is still, the beauty of the Self is seen reflected in it.

B.K.S. Iyengar

Lakes, Self, Water

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[When working on a book] I have an almost complete detachment from the world I live in, a sort of armor against distraction. I talk to people, move about, appear on the surface much as usual. But later on I have only a confused memory of what has happened during that period.

Mary Roberts Rinehart

Memories, Confused, Moving

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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.

Beatrice Webb

Running, Ego, Personal History

Beatrice Webb, Beatrice Potter Webb (1979). “My Apprenticeship”, p.43, Cambridge University Press

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... Rembrandt is not a painter at all. He is a creator, who creates his beings, three dimensional living beings, on a two-dimensional flat surface which acts as a mute, and enforces silence on them.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Two, Silence, Three

Sylvia Townsend Warner, William Maxwell (1982). “Letters”

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Virtue, without the graces, is like a rich diamond unpolished--it hardly looks better than a common pebble; but when the hand of the master rubs off the roughness, and forms the sides into a thousand brilliant surfaces, it is then that we acknowledge its worth, admire its beauty, and long to wear it in our bosoms.

Jane Porter

Hands, Long, Grace

Sir Philip Sidney, Jane Porter (1807). “Aphorisms of Sir Philip Sidney: With Remarks”, p.104

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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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In a city you thought of all life as human life. You had to live in the heart of the woods to realize that humanity was a slight ripple on the surface of a flood of life that seeped into every vacant crack, flowed into every biological vacuum the moment it occurred.

Helen McCloy

Heart, Cities, Humanity

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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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Many times when I stop working on a problem consciously, my mind continues to work on it below the surface. Often solutions come on me quite by surprise. I've learned over time to allow that to happen, rather than to feel that I can simply solve the problem by continuous, grueling effort.

Marilynne Robinson

Effort, Mind, Problem

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Eating, drinking. sleeping, pro-creating. A little laughter, a lot of tears. Is this all there is to life? Don't die like a worm on the surface of the planet. WAKE UP and be all that you can be, you are so much more than that.

Sivananda

Laughter, Drinking, Sleep

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The physical body is acknowledged as dust, the personal drama as delusion. It is as if the world we perceive through our senses, the whole gorgeous and terrible pageant, were the breath-thin surface of a bubble, and everything else, inside and outside, is pure radiance. Both suffering and joy come then like a brief reflection, and death like a pin.

Stephen Mitchell

Drama, Reflection, Dust

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How close beneath the surface, even in the happiest family, is the chronic grievance! I sometimes think that tinderboxes are inert and powder kegs mere talcum compared to the explosive possibilities in the most commoplace domestic situation.

Margaret Halsey

Thinking, Kegs, Sometimes

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English life is seventh-eighths below the surface, like an iceberg, and living in England for a year constitutes merely an introduction to an introduction to an introduction to it.

Margaret Halsey

Years, England, Life Is

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Vegetarians may be appalled, but much of gardening is actually raising animals: the tiny ones under the earth's surface

Toby Hemenway

Animal, Gardening, Earth

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