These surface quotes will inspire you. Surface the outside part or uppermost layer of something (often used when describing its texture, form, or extent).
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging surface quotes, surface sayings, and surface proverbs.
Best Surface Quotes
- “I love mirrors. They let one pass through the surface of things.” ~ Claude Chabrol
- “Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.” ~ Virginia Woolf
- “There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
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“Photos have no narrative content. They only describe light on surface.” ~ Garry Winogrand
- “Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.” ~ Paul Valery
- “Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.” ~ Michael Caine
- “The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.” ~ Franz Kafka
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“There’s no love more intense than the love we have for our kids – and where there is intense love, there is also intense fear lurking beneath the surface.” ~ Arianna Huffington
- “The camera can’t see space. It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting.” ~ David Hockney
- “I’ve always said that the only thing a photograph is good at capturing faithfully is another flat surface.” ~ David Hockney
- “Man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.” ~ Jacques Yves Cousteau
- “When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other’s feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves.” ~ Marcel Proust
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“From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.” ~ Jacques Yves Cousteau
- “On the surface, humans appear to hate conflict, but in reality, they seek it.” ~ Nagaru Tanigawa
- “It’s the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “Humanity has only scratched the surface of its real potential.” ~ Peace Pilgrim
- “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
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“We with our lives are like islands in the sea… The islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom.” ~ William James
- “The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” ~ Douglas Adams
- “Confession of errors is like a broom which sweeps away the dirt and leaves the surface brighter and clearer. I feel stronger for confession.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
- “After about 20 years of marriage, I’m finally starting to scratch the surface of what women want. And I think the answer lies somewhere between conversation and chocolate.” ~ Mel Gibson
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“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” ~ Andy Warhol
- “If there are ripples on the surface of a lake, we cannot see the depth. Similarly unless the mind is restful, we cannot experience the harmony and union within us.” ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
- “We who in engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr. , Surface quotes tension
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“An enlightened entertainer, via story, casts her line into the souls of others, hooks their heart, and pulls their greater potential to the surface.” ~ Derek Rydall
- “The skin is no more separated from the brain than the surface of a lake is separate from its depths; the two are different locations in a continuous medium…The brain is a single functional unit, from cortex to fingertips to toes. To touch the surface is to stir the depths.” ~ Deane Juhan
- “The attributes of God, though intelligible to us on their surface yet, for the very reason that they are infinite, transcend our comprehension, when they are dwelt upon, when they are followed out, and can only be received by faith.” ~ John Henry Newman
- “She sowed in my mind the idea that reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and color it to make our journey through life less trying.” ~ Isabel Allende
- “It’s easy to look back and see it, and it’s easy to give the advice. But the sad fact is, most people don’t look beneath the surface until it’s too late.” ~ Wendelin Van Draanen
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“When you scratch the surface, every one of us has something that we deeply want to contribute to the world. All we have to do is step up and do it.” ~ Jack Canfield
- “I love you on the surface of seas Red like the egg when it is green” ~ Andre Breton
- “Work is the miracle by which talent is brought to the surface and dreams become reality.” ~ Gordon B. Hinckley
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“You can’t be deep without a surface” ~ Jonathan Lethem
- “Are you referring to the fact that you can’t walk across a flat, stable surface without finding something to trip over?” ~ Stephenie Meyer
- “The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind . . . From the very first he set before the consciousness things which it could not tolerate.” ~ Georges Bataille
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“I work with a lot of music programs and there’s a steep learning curve to a lot of them. You can really find yourself trying to figure out how to do things, instead of making music. Now I have another tool with the Surface music kit.” ~ Joe
- “What I find is that many times when I work with chance, with indeterminacy, I am more open to experience, less prone to a fixed process, and I think it creates a very important challenge. It creates a way of writing that is, in a way, flatter or smooth, a surface conducive to release, to movement. And in this way, the form of writing gets delightfully melded with the process of the writing.” ~ Sergio Chejfec
- “The question ‘Why white kids love hip-hop?’ forces us immediately to deal with the historical weight of race in America. On the surface people see hip-hop and race as nothing new. I think the ways young white Americans are engaging hip-hop suggest something more.” ~ Bakari Kitwana
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“Usually, people tend to see someone on the surface and think that that’s who that person is.” ~ Mamoru Hosoda
- “People who are open about their own faults, especially, often want to ferret out “inner feelings” beneath the surface and expose any falsehood, and they think that it’s in their inner feelings that the truth lies. But I don’t think that’s the truth.” ~ Mamoru Hosoda
- “I never felt like I had a surface image to rely on that people would like – I always felt like my music would not be very fancy music, my voice is not very fancy, there is nothing hiding me from the audience.” ~ Jeffrey Lewis
- “What the writers do, and we hopefully can bring to life, is that they present characters who, on the surface, aren’t always heroic and their acts aren’t always devoid of selfishness.” ~ Charlie Cox
- “Storytelling is more like a skin. You start with the outermost layer, what it’s going to look like, then you kind of get deeper into it. What’s actually going on beneath the surface is not really dictated by or related to the surface genre. It’s more about what’s going to happen between the characters and what’s taking place in the story.” ~ Charlie Jane Anders
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“Genres are like the surface of the ocean. There are waves and things moving, but you don’t instantly see all the reefs and ecosystems that’s happening beneath the surface.” ~ Charlie Jane Anders
- “One of the metaphors of the book is the carpet. Not just the flying carpet, but the carpet as a woven surface in which many repetitions and motifs recur and mirror one another. This is very much reflected within the stories: they have borders within borders, repeated motifs which change. They have their feet in oral conventions, and for the mnemonics, the storyteller needs to have a structure in order to remember the stories.” ~ Marina Warner
- “I see the carpet reflecting that narratological structure of the storytelling, with Scheherazade as the outside frame story on the outside, with the stories woven on the inside. It’s also demonstrative of the infinity of it, with no beginning and no end. The carpet is also a kind of metonym for cinema, this idea that the flat surface carries a terrific depth of imaginative field while remaining totally flat.” ~ Marina Warner
- “You should only be doing the thing that makes you happy. Not just surface happy. That content, all-is-well-with-my-soul happy. It’s the thing you would do for free, and if you do it, you actually become hugely successful and make a lot of money, because the universe is going to send you the resources.” ~ Kim Coles
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“I’m interested in psychic phenomena, I’m interested in things that are happening invisibly beneath the surface.” ~ Allan Moyle
- “Every NBA arena has six cameras in the ceiling. The question is what does the software do with video feeds? How to surface that in a set of analytics? There are some “playbooks,” but in most sports these days what you really want to share out with coaches and players is a set of video that lets you visualize what’s going on and what’s the best way to do things.” ~ Steve Ballmer
- “The thought was, ‘We’re going to go to California, where the soil is black and ten feet deep, and there are no rocks, and there’s gold in the hills.’ The West becomes the surface onto which people project their fantasies, where once the future had been the place they projected their fantasies. So it’s not just the war that ends the utopian communities, but what follows.” ~ Christine Jennings
- “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
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“I don’t think that we are capable of anything like this many possible color responses. Instead, I argue that the perception of color differences between two surfaces viewed side-by-side is a gestalt phenomenon.” ~ David Papineau
- “We believe that introducing surface-to-air missiles in Syria is going to change the balance of power on the ground. It will allow the moderate opposition to be able to neutralize the helicopters and aircraft that are dropping chemicals and have been carpet-bombing them, just like surface-to-air missiles in Afghanistan were able to change the balance of power there.” ~ Adel al-Jubeir
- “The orthodox view of color experience assumes that, when we see a color difference between two surfaces viewed side-by-side, this is because we have different responses to each of the two surfaces viewed singly. Since we can detect color differences between something like ten million different surfaces, this implies that we are capable of ten million color responses to surfaces viewed singly.” ~ David Papineau
- “From a client perspective, I really think the work Microsoft’s doing with Surface, with HoloLens, with Xbox, that stuff’s absolutely essential to the company’s future. Because innovation in the future will either be from the cloud out to all devices, or from devices as supported by software in the cloud. I think it’s important for Microsoft to participate both ways.” ~ Steve Ballmer
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“I think we need to always mimic reality in our fiction. I think that we can stir things up and reveal a truth beneath the surface in that way as well.” ~ Christopher Rice
- “I think my view is rather more radical than Pete Mandik’s. Both of us want to show that color perception doesn’t transcend what can be conceptualized, but I don’t think he goes so far as to deny that it doesn’t involve different responses to all the discriminable surfaces.” ~ David Papineau
- “If neuroscientific research shows that those mechanisms only contain comparative information about color differences, and have ‘thrown away’ more fine-grained information about the absolute colors of single surfaces, then that would support my position, in a way that just introspecting our color experiences can’t.” ~ David Papineau
- “Dolphins frequently leap above the water surface. One reason for this behavior could be that, when traveling longer distances, jumping can save the dolphins energy as there is less friction while in the air.” ~ Thomas Metzinger , Water surface quotes
- “There is a brain mechanism that works to identify color differences directly, without first identifying the absolute color of each surface. So on my view, there is no reason to suppose anything like ten million color responses to surface viewed singly.” ~ David Papineau
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“By raising tall trees for windbreaks, citrus underneath, and a green manure cover down on the surface, I have found a way to take it easy and let the orchard manage itself!” ~ Masanobu Fukuoka
- “According to “Huffington Post”, one Democratic opposition research firm said they spent the past eight months compiling material on [Donald] Trump as he`s risen on the ranks. And that research estimated that if the all material compiled, court and property records, newspaper clips and video, approximately 80 percent of it has yet to surface in this election cycle.” ~ Chris Hayes
- “There’s always a pattern in order to make a thing, but the starting point must be something I’ve never seen before. It’s not two-dimensional, but it’s like a sample. I work with patterns like a sculptor. I try to get [the team] not to work on a body, [but] to work on a free space, on a table. The work is basically on flat surfaces.” ~ Rei Kawakubo
- “What geographic profiling does is it takes a look at the locations of a connected series of incidents – say murders in a serial murder case or robberies in a serial bank robber case – and it spatially analyzes the point pattern of incidents, and creates a probability surface from those, working from the basis of an algorithm that says people offend close to where they live, but not too close.” ~ Kim Rossmo
- “Especially with iPhones, iPads and apps, there’s just so much detachment that you’re just flicking your fingers on a smooth surface to get the weather or whatever.” ~ Tristan Perich
