These veneer quotes will inspire you. a thin decorative covering of fine wood applied to a coarser wood or other material.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging veneer quotes, veneer sayings, and veneer proverbs.
Famous Veneer Quotes
- “We veneer civilization by doing unkind things in a kind way.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
- “It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.” ~ George Santayana
- “The destruction that barbarians leave behind has a grim fascination, doesn’t it? We’re reminded how thin is the veneer of civilization.” ~ Dean Koontz
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“Courtesy is only a thin veneer on the general selfishness.” ~ Honore de Balzac
- “The Peloponnesian War turns out to be no dry chronicle of abstract cause and effect. No, it is above all an intense, riveting, and timeless story of strong and weak men, of heroes and scoundrels and innocents too, all caught in the fateful circumstances of rebellion, plague, and war that always strip away the veneer of culture and show us for what we really are.” ~ Thucydides
- “This is where we are at right now, as a whole. No one is left out of the loop. We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.” ~ Bill Hicks
- “I worry about younger generations who were born to view their country trampling on humanity of everyone that comes in its way, as the ‘normal state of affairs” – because they knew no other. We know how easy it is to shed, under such circumstances, the thin and frail veneer of civilization, not to mention the moral standards of which the Jews were presumed to be the world’s teachers.” ~ Zygmunt Bauman
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“The purpose of satire has been rightly stated as to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half truth, and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again!” ~ Michael Flanders
- “To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement, but to those who entered the meat grinder itself the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning, life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu had eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.” ~ Eugene B. Sledge
- “There is no short cut to achievement. Life requires thorough preparation – veneer isn’t worth anything.” ~ George Washington Carver
- “The gentleman is solid mahogany; the fashionable man is only veneer.” ~ J. G. Holland
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“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” ~ Steve Jobs
- “Racism has always been able to come up with a scientific veneer.” ~ Andrew Hacker
- “Hope is tomorrow’s veneer over today’s disappointment.” ~ Evan Esar
- “Wearing a veneer of perfection never did me any good.” ~ Liz Phair
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“It has long been my belief that in times of great stress, such as a 4-day vacation, the thin veneer of family wears off almost at once, and we are revealed in our true personalities.” ~ Shirley Jackson
- “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” ~ Steve Jobs
- “I belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer.” ~ John McGahern
- “Accustomed to the veneer of noise, to the shibboleths of promotion, public relations, and market research, society is suspicious of those who value silence.” ~ John Lahr
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“What happened with Hurricane Katrina was the American electorate was forced to look at what lay behind the veneer of chest-beating. We all saw the consequences of having terrible government leadership.” ~ Susan Faludi
- “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
- “Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation” ~ Steve Jobs
- “I was convinced that worship at its best is a social experience with people of all levels of life coming together to realize their oneness and unity under God. Whenever the church, consciously or unconsciously, caters to one class it loses the spiritual force of the “whosoever will, let him come, doctrine and is in danger of becoming a little more than a social club with a thin veneer of religiosity.”” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“I don’t love Photoshop; I like imperfection. It doesn’t mean ugly. I love a girl with a gap between her teeth, versus perfect white veneers. Perfection is just… boring. Perfect is what’s natural or real; that is beauty.” ~ Marc Jacobs
- “If we are at all sensitive to the life around us, to one another’s pains and joys,
to the beauty and fragility of the Earth, it is all about being broken open, allowing ourselves to
step out from out hardened veneers and expose our core, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable in our emotional response to the world. And how can we not respond? This is what I mean by being ‘broken open.’ To engage. To love. Any one of these actions of the heart will lead to a personal transformation that bears collective gifts.” ~ Terry Tempest Williams - “True beauty lies not upon gilded veneers,
But found in the soul within.” ~ E. A. Bucchianeri - “Knowing is a veneer out minds create and lay over the landscape like a painter’s drop cloth set upon a forest floor. Its uniformity protects us from the pine needles and beetles, but it also obscures them, as well as the soft moss, fragrant soil, and the teeming complexity of nature’s bed. In moments, however, we catch glints and feel the breezes of something more direct, something outside that self system.” ~ Greg Kramer
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“What matters is discovering myself under the veneer, under the layers that are wrapped around me. There are two ‘yous’; there’s ‘you’, the real you, and then there’s the image.” ~ Ted Dekker
- “The lyric abstrusities of Auden ring mystically down the circular canals of my ear and it begins to look like snow. The good gray conservative obliterating snow. Smoothing (in one white lacy euphemism after another) out all the black bleak angular unangelic nauseous ugliness of the blasted sterile world: dry buds, shrunken stone houses, dead vertical moving people all all all go under the great white beguiling wave. And come out transformed. Lose yourself in a numb dumb snow-daubed lattice of crystal and come out pure with the white virginal veneer you never had.” ~ Sylvia Plath
- “It’s good to have a brand that is consistent that people know about and trust. But it’s also good to mix it up and adapt it, to polish it a bit and give it a new aspect. To not violate the reputation you’ve established but give it a new edge and veneer to show other aspects that people hadn’t suspected.” ~ Robert Greene
- “Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer.” ~ Camille Paglia
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“I think of part of myself as a very passionate person, but I don’t think that comes across. I don’t know where it comes from, that reserve or veneer of British niceness. But it doesn’t bother me if other people don’t spot the passion. I know it’s there.” ~ Julie Andrews
- “The scary truth is, you have to scratch some veneer off to gauge where the moral fiber really is in certain pockets of society. It’s raw. It’s scary. But it gives us a place to work with.” ~ Ani DiFranco
- “My mother and my father taught me to look at the actual problem, not the face of it, not the veneer of it. So for me, I was never – I was impressed that it – racially, I was impressed, right, but now in America it’s about economics, and it’s been about economics, and honestly, everything’s been about economics since I don’t want to say the beginning of time, but it’s been about economics for a long while.” ~ Lupe Fiasco
- “But you know, eventually that does kind of veneer, chemical veneers that you apply, they sink in. For better or for worse, so it’s good to think about what kind of veneer you shellac yourself with. How superficial it may seep into your skin and into your blood stream and totally take over your heart, your brain, everything.” ~ Surya Das
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“People are sad. People are broke. People are worried about money, people are worried that they’re not enough and not amounting to anything and they don’t feel good about themselves. People have rough times, and everybody’s pretending it’s not true, and we need to break that veneer.” ~ Eve Ensler
- “The queers of the sixties, like those since, have connived with their repression under a veneer of respectability. Good mannered city queens in suits and pinstripes, so busy establishing themselves, were useless at changing anything.” ~ Derek Jarman
- “Since the days of Peter the Great, Russians have been maybe Europeans who didn’t share in the enlightenment and the reformation, or are they Mongol Asians with the European veneer. And they’ve gone back and forth.” ~ Brent Scowcroft
- “In the middle-class United States, a veneer of “alternative lifestyles” disguises the reality that, here as everywhere, women’s apparent “choices” whether or not to have children are still dependent on the far from neutral will of male legislators, jurists, a male medical and pharmaceutical profession, well-financed lobbies, including the prelates of the Catholic Church, and the political reality that women do not as yet have self-determination over our bodies and still live mostly in ignorance of our authentic physicality, our possible choices, our eroticism itself.” ~ Adrienne Rich
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“Arrogance is a veneer — a thin covering of excuses hiding deep performance deficiencies.” ~ Bob Lewis
- “Quiet book-learning in monasteries and ethereal music, sonn”Underneath this veneer of slightly crazy and mildly socially retarded, I’m a complete disaster.” ~ Rainbow Rowell’ets and courtly lovethat stuff is all fantasyand veneer? You couldn’t afford to let the beauty of the thing seduce you too far or you forgot the truth and the truth was always hard as iron bloody bars.” ~ Janice Galloway
- “Drop the veneer periodically and be like “OK, I’m an imperfect human. Let’s try to get through this.”” ~ Dennis Miller
- “Only when the true ends of society have nothing to do with the sublime does “culture” become necessary as a veneer to cover over the void. Culture can at best appreciate the monuments of earlier faith; it cannot produce them.” ~ Allan Bloom
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“We don’t have a good language to talk about this kind of thing. In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer… But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation.” ~ Steve Jobs
- “People who think of themselves as tough-minded and realistic, among them influential political leaders and businessmen as well as go-getters and hustlers of smaller caliber, tend to take it for granted that human nature is selfish and that life is a struggle in which only the fittest may survive. According to this philosophy, the basic law by which man must live, in spite of his surface veneer of civilization, is the law of the jungle. The “fittest” are those who can bring to the struggle superior force, superior cunning, and superior ruthlessness.” ~ S. I. Hayakawa
- “There are loads of sociopolitical, racial, class and future-planet situations that really interest me, but I’m not really interested in making a film about them in a film that feels like reality because people view that in a different way. I like using science fiction to talk about subjects through the veneer of science fiction.” ~ Neill Blomkamp
- “Barrons has something the rest of us don’t have. I don’t know what it is, but I feel it all the time, especially when we’re standing close. Beneath the expensive clothes, unplaceable accent, and cultured veneer, there’s something that never crawled all the way out of the swamp. It didn’t want to. It likes it there.” ~ Karen Marie Moning
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“Good design is not an applied veneer.” ~ Raymond Loewy
- “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
- “[T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A veneer of civilization descends quickly, like a shining rain. Dust is settled.” ~ Lorrie Moore
- “Each of us is leading a difficult life, and when we meet people we are seeing only a tiny part of the thinnest veneer of their complex, troubled existences. To practise anything other than kindness towards them, to treat them in any way save generously, is to quietly deny their humanity.” ~ Derren Brown
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“Underneath this veneer of slightly crazy and mildly socially retarded, I’m a complete disaster.” ~ Rainbow Rowell
- “Therefore, teaching, talk and tale, however lucid or fascinating, effect nothing until self-activity be set up; that is, self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child’s nature.” ~ Charlotte Mason
- “It’s the spirit within, not the veneer without, that makes a man.” ~ Baden Powell de Aquino
- “You feel a certain way in a glass or concrete or limestone building. It has an effect on your skin – the same with plywood or veneer, or solid timber. Wood doesn’t steal energy from your body the way glass and concrete steal heat. When it’s hot, a wood house feels cooler than a concrete one, and when it’s cold, the other way around.” ~ Peter Zumthor
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“Law and freedom must be indivisible partners. For without law, there can be no freedom, only choas and disorder; and without freedom, law is but a cynical veneer for injustice and oppression.” ~ Ronald Reagan
- “There’s nothing more exciting for an actor than a chance to lose, to be someone who has lost – especially if it’s someone who starts off with a veneer of control. To be broken is wonderful.” ~ Lena Headey
- “What passes for education, culture or maturity in most minds is merely how individuals want to think of themselves, a contrived egocentric self-concept, not actual and effective principles and values. This is what is known in the cliche as the “veneer” of civilization.” ~ Kenny Smith
- “Well neither of us were “Buddhists” then because it was new to us. We were 60’s people. Psychedelic relics, you know… whatever, right on, radicals and world changers, social peaceniks perhaps, with a Buddhist spiritual veneer.” ~ Surya Das
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“I used to have the craziest fear of losing teeth. I would have nightmares about that all the time. But it’s the craziest thing, because I feel like that’s one of the easiest things to fix. You just get veneers or something.” ~ Kendall Jenner
- “Guns, double-crosses, hitmen… I can get used to a lot of things, but I’m never going to get used to sleeping where apocalypse bugs mate,” Wednesday said, walking into the room looking around. She dropped her Birkin on the floor and heard something scuttling behind the cheap plastic wood print veneer-covered dresser. She turned to face Alvin, her head cocked to the side. “Seriously. I’m not saying five-star… I’m saying go on Expedia and find a place that actually has stars… any stars.” ~ Dennis Sharp
- “Critics have found in the narrative a veneer of erudition that cloaks nothing more than a James Bond-style romp, albeit a highly addictive one. His publisher has described it as ‘a thriller for people who don’t like thrillers’. One newspaper put it thus: ‘It is terribly written, its characters are cardboard cutouts, the dialogue is excruciating in places and, a bit like a computer manual, everything is overstated and repeated – but it is impossible to put the bloody thing down.” ~ Dan Brown
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“Success is a very fragile veneer. I get wary of people who embrace celebrity. It ruins people.” ~ Douglas Kennedy
- “Leftism hides under an intellectual veneer, but underneath it is all emotion” ~ Dennis Prager
- “The proclamation of Jesus is not a veneer: the proclamation of Jesus goes straight to the bones, heart, goes deep within and change us. And the spirit of the world does not tolerate it, will not tolerate it, and therefore, there is persecution.” ~ Pope Francis
