Convention warns us not to look too far beneath the surface

• I don’t dig beneath the surface for things that don’t appear before my own eyes. John Singer Sargent
• All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Oscar Wilde

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We fear that beneath the surface, we’ll find monsters and pain…

• Stir not murky waters if you know not the depth or the creatures that dwell beneath the surface. Bryan Davis
• The underground of the city is like what’s underground in people. Beneath the surface, it’s boiling with monsters. Guillermo del Toro
• Our darkest angels in Europe are always somewhere under the surface. Frans Timmermans
• Reality is like a fruitcake; pretty enough to look at but with all sorts of nasty things lurking just beneath the surface. A. Lee Martinez
• As a grim skull lies covered beneath the fairest face; so does an abyss of torment lie beneath the surface of the glittering sea of sensual pleasure and dissipation. William Scott Downey
• The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface . Aldous Huxley
• Everyone can feel the nothingness, the void, just beneath the surface of everyday routines and securities. John Zerzan

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…and death and decay

• Death is always there, just beneath the surface. Mason Cooley
• Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it. Samuel Beckett
• I learned that just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn’t find the proof. It was just a kind of feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force – a wild pain and decay – also accompanies everything.David Lynch
• Love is like a tide. When it’s in, everything looks beautiful and inviting. Only when love recedes can you see the debris beneath the surface – the old bottles, the rusty prams, the sewage pipes, the bloated cats and dogs weighted down to drown. The man I had once loved so passionately I now saw as weak, gutted like a fish. Kathy Lette

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As a result, few look beneath the surface

• We are acquainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Henry David Thoreau

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Dare to look beneath the surface of things…

• I have always wanted to know what’s going on under the surface. Marcia Cross
• Look beneath the surface; let not the several quality of a thing nor its worth escape thee. Marcus Aurelius
• I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and mysterious going on beneath the surface of something. Steven Pinker

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… deep under the surface levels of your consciousness…

• We are like icebergs in the ocean: one-eighth part consciousness and the rest submerged beneath the surface of articulate apprehension. William Gerhardie
• The tendrils of a new, deeper form of spirituality are growing. It’s the greening under the surface crust of consciousness and social paradigm. Jean Houston
• One of the key concepts here is the Iceberg Model and mental models, where although most thinking is done on the surface level, we must dive deeper under the surface to explore the majority of the mass. Leyla Acaroglu

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…into the depths of the psyche

• You never know what lurks just beneath the surface of my fragile sanity. Ashly Lorenzana
• Is it not clear that a reviewer’s psyche, like an iceberg, is seven-eighths beneath the surface? Delmore Schwartz
• My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots. William Carlos Williams
• 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
• 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
• I’m interested in psychic phenomena, I’m interested in things that are happening invisibly beneath the surface. Allan Moyle

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Dare to look beneath the surface of life

• There are two sorts of curiosity — the momentary and the permanent. The momentary is concerned with the odd appearance on the surface of things. The permanent is attracted by the amazing and consecutive life that flows on beneath the surface of things. Robert Lynd
• The Glittering World is a stunning phantasmagoria drawn from the world just beneath the surface, aswarm with great and memorable characters and a plot that twists and turns as it hurtles forward. A grand debut. One taste, and you’ll be addicted. Keith Donohue
• Stop being an escapist! Stop being a surface liver who stays right in the froth of the surface. There are millions of these people, and they never find anything really worthwhile. Be willing to face life squarely and get down beneath the surface of life where the verities and realities are to be found. That’s what we are doing here now. Peace Pilgrim

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Dare to look beneath the surface of mere words

• The world is satisfied with words, few care to dive beneath the surface. Blaise Pascal

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Dare too to look beneath the surface of the collective psyche

• It’s not unusual to find big political shifts that take place beneath the surface before they’re visible above the surface. Al Gore
• Any group has a sense of who it is and what is values, but this sense often remains beneath the surface. A wise leader can discern these unspoken beliefs and articulate them. Diane Dreher
• What leaders have to remember is that somewhere under the somnolent surface is the creature that builds civilizations, the dreamer of dreams, the risk taker. And remembering that, the leader must reach down to the springs that never dry up, the ever-fresh springs of the human spirit. John W. Gardner

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Below the surface of things, we discover more treasure than we can imagine

• There is more going on beneath the surface than we think, and more going on in little, finite moments of time than we would guess. Malcolm Gladwell
• I catch a flash of red-gold beneath the surface of the water, and realize that there are koi in the pond, massive, serene, and I wonder: are they dreams of fish, or fish who dream? Sarah Monette
• I have always been fascinated by the ocean, to dip a limb beneath its surface and know that I’m touching eternity, that it goes on forever until it begins here again. Lauren DeStefano

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Below the surface, we find repressed emotions that need to be acknowledged, felt and released

• By choosing not to allow parts of ourselves to exist, we are forced to expend huge amounts of psychic energy to keep them beneath the surface. Debbie Ford
• 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
• God’s acceptance is always conditional. He puts on a good face but is quietly seething under the surface, just waiting for the day when punishment will restore justice. Doug Hammack
• A lot of guys are walking around with a lot simmering beneath the surface, and sometimes it explodes. George Pelecanos
• There’s a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn’t really expect to find it, either. Marilynne Robinson
• 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
• 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
• Most of us have gotten the message that some feelings are not acceptable, not polite, not to be experienced as part of the self. We’ve stuffed or denied or dissociated ourselves from those feelings, but the emotions underneath remain there, under the surface.  They can motivate our behaviour without our awareness, and cause us guilt and shame that seems to come from nowhere.   Richard O’Connor
• Most of us have gotten the message that some feelings are not acceptable, not polite, not to be experienced as part of the self. We’ve stuffed or denied or dissociated ourselves from those feelings, but the emotions underneath remain there, under the surface. They can motivate our behavior without our awareness, and cause us guilt and shame that seems to come from nowhere.  The chemistry from those emotions is there too, flowing into our body with no outlet, contributing to the sense of perpetual stress.  We need to “build a cradle for the baby”—to hold ourselves, to recognize and validate our own experience, in a way that has probably never been done for us. Richard O’Connor

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Below the surface, we find issues that need addressing

• Ignoring a problem does not make it go away. In fact, it can simmer away beneath the surface and lead to poor mood and energy levels, and can also cause your moods to become unstable. Liz Miller

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Below the surface, we find an underlying reality…

• A synchronicity can serve as guidance, warning, affirmation, creative inspiration, confirmation that we’re on the right track. It can be evidence of individuation and psychological growth. Or it can simply serve to attune our awareness that beneath the surface of daily life there’s an underlying reality and unity that may not be immediately obvious. All synchronicities, even the ones that caution us, have a mysterious quality. Trish and Rob MacGregor
• Arts and the Sciences are a natural symbiosis. They stem from the same human existential impulse – exploration. Exploration of what lies beneath the surface, and re-configuration of elements of what we call reality. Wole Soyinka
• If we look below the surface of things another dimension of reality is revealed. This is the great discovery of science. And it’s paralogically complementary to the message of spirituality, which also teaches that if we look beyond the superficial appearances a deeper reality is revealed. Tim Freke

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…and the truth of things

• There are no secrets in life; just hidden truths that lie beneath the surface. Michael C. Hall
• The past lies beneath the surface, intransigent truth. Remembered or not, what we say and do remains, always. Meredith Hall
• Be willing to face life squarely and get down beneath the surface of life where the verities and realities are to be found. Peace Pilgrim
• While there is evidence everywhere to the contrary, train your mind to look beneath the surface and see the truth: life is good; the world is a beautiful place and you, complete with your human weaknesses and shortcomings, are magnificent. David Sunfellow
• There is a tradition that the church represents, without which we wouldn’t have the church, that’s all about diving deep beneath the surface of the culture and finding those timeless, eternal truths that the whole Christian enterprise is rooted in. And one of those is that you don’t come to God at 180 miles an hour. Parker J. Palmer

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Below the surface, we find the authentic self…

• Beneath the surface of your ego’s insatiable cravings, your authentic desires are waiting patiently for you to acknowledge, claim and express them. Debbie Ford
• And so behind the scene, that is to say in reality, under the surface, you are all the actor marvellously skilled in playing many parts and in getting lost in the mazes of your own minds and entanglements in your own affairs as if this were the most urgent thing going, but behind the scenes you always have a very tiny have sneaking suspicion you might not be the you who you think you are. Alan Watts
• Beneath the surface level of conditioned thinking in every one of us there is a single living spirit. The still small voice whispering to me in the depths of my consciousness is saying exactly the same thing as the voice whispering to you in your consciousness. ‘I want an earth that is healthy, a world at peace, and a heart filled with love.’ It doesn’t matter if your skin is brown or white or black, or whether you speak English, Japanese, or Malayalam – the voice, says the Gita, is the same in every creature, and it comes from your true self. Eknath Easwaran

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…including our true desires and motivations

• In order to reveal the gifts that lie beneath the surface of your heart’s greatest desires, you must look beyond your years here on earth, reconnect with the Divine, and bring forth your soul’s legacy into the present moment. Debbie Ford
• Our point isn’t to make an examination of popular film but to illustrate that the yearning for a heroic adventure lies just beneath the surface of our consciousness; film, television, literature, sports, and travel are in a sense vicarious adventures. Alan Hirsch
• We have learned that beneath the surface of an ordinary everyday normal casual conscious existence there lies a vast dynamic world of impulse and dream, a hinterland of energy which has an independent existence of its own and laws of its own: laws which motivate all our thoughts and our actions. Robert Edmond Jones

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…and the assumptions that drive us

• Dialogue is a space where we may see the assumptions which lay beneath the surface of our thoughts, assumptions which drive us, assumptions around which we build organizations, create economies, form nations and religions. These assumptions become habitual, mental habits that drive us, confuse us and prevent our responding intelligently to the challenges we face every day. David Bohm

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Below the surface, we find silence and calmness

• A few feet under the ground reigns so profound a silence, and yet so much tumult on the surface! Victor Hugo
• On the surface of the ocean, men wage war and destroy each other; but down here, just a few feet beneath the surface, there is a calm and peace, unmolested by man. Jules Verne
• It’s like, imagine the ripples on top of an ocean. And I’m in a rowboat, reactively dealing with the waves and water coming into my boat. What I need to do is dive into the deeper solace, the calmness beneath the surface. Mehmet Oz
• 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
• Inner peace is not found by staying on the surface of life, or by attempting to escape from life through any means. Inner peace is found by facing life squarely, solving its problems, and delving as far beneath the surface as possible to discover its verities and realities. Peace Pilgrim

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Below the surface, we find beauty and light

• …to slip beneath the surface and soar along the silent bottom of the sea agile and shining in water honeycombed with light. Ellen Meloy
• Freshness trembles beneath the surface of Everyday, a joy perpetual to all who catch its opal lights beneath the dust of habit. Freya Stark
• Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise, the noise of words, sunk deep as Atlantis. The only thing left of it is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year. Milan Kundera

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Below the surface, we find power and strength

• As you become more rooted inside — as you drink from this silent stream of life that runs beneath the surface of everything — as you live from that depth of your own being more and more, then you’ll be able to rise taller and stronger in this world; more than you may have ever thought possible. Derek Rydall
• Joley seemed as wild and turbulent as the sea, yet beneath her fiery passion, at the very core of her, she was as forceful and strong and as constant as the deepest ocean currents. Ilya seemed as calm as a windless sea, yet beneath the surface smoldered a volcano of such explosive magnitude, his power could easily sweep everything from his path. Together they completed each other, his melody and hers merging together into a single, perfect harmony. Christine Feehan

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Below the surface, we find aliveness and meaning

• I did not know I was on a search for passionate aliveness. I only knew I was lonely and lost and that something was drawing me deeper beneath the surface of my life in search of meaning. There is a hunger in people to go to those deep depths; to know that our lives are sacred; that our hearts are truly capable of love. It is a yearning to be all the we can be. A longing for what is real. Anne Hillman

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Below the surface, we find freedom

• 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
• Late, by myself, in the boat of myself, no light and no land anywhere, cloudcover thick. I try to stay just above the surface, yet I’m already under and living within the ocean. Rumi
• The whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate beneath the surface of a man’s life, to get behind the façade of conventional gestures and attitudes which he presents to the world, and to bring out his inner spiritual freedom, his inmost truth, which is what we call the likeness of Christ in his soul. Thomas Merton
• See how peaceful it is here. The sea is everything. An immense reservoir of nature where I roam at will…. Think of it. On the surface there is hunger and fear. Men still exercise unjust laws. They fight, tear one another to pieces. A mere few feet beneath the waves their reign ceases, their evil drowns. Here on the ocean floor is the only independence. Here I am free. Earl Felton

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Below the surface, we find life pulsating

• Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing. Robert Musil
• Even if you couldn’t see it beneath the surface, molecules were bonding, energy pushing up slowly, as something worked do hare, all alone to grow. Sarah Dessen
• As one looks across the barren stretches of the pack, it is sometimes difficult to realise what teeming life exists immediately beneath its surface. Robert Falcon Scott
• Love like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive. Mitch Albom

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Below the surface, we discover our commonality and connectedness

• On the surface, we’re polar opposites. Under the skin, though, we’re the same: people think they know what they’re getting, and they’re always wrong. Jodi Picoult
• We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep. William James
• Beneath the surface of states and nations, ideas and language, lies the fate of individual human beings in need. Kofi Annan
• The connections may be invisible, he often preached to his symbology classes at Harvard, but they are always there, buried just beneath the surface. Dan Brown

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Below the surface, we find out what really going on with others which allows compassion to flow

• We have the tendency to judge others by their surface appearance, and to find only their negative qualities. But if we search beneath the surface we discover that a myriad of strains mix together to create a particular person’s nature. The faults we perceive are likely to be the effect of circumstances, the psychological response to trauma, abuse, rejection, heartbreak, insecurity, pain, confusion, or disease. Radhanath Swami
• Practice makes us more observant and deliberate; we become more thoughtful about reacting to emotions and impulses; more curious, ready to look beneath the surface, not so hasty about jumping to conclusions; kinder, more patient, more tolerant of others and ourselves. One of the key elements in mindfulness is detaching a little from thoughts, worries, and impulses; not taking immediate action but expecting that if you take a step back, think, and look inside yourself, you’ll probably make a wiser decision. Richard O’Connor
• An excellent way to practice love is to set your intention on seeing beyond someone’s behavior or personality. Try to realize that beneath the surface insecurity, negative thinking, and poor behavior, everyone is connected to God. Just as you wouldn’t get angry at someone simply because he or she is in a wheelchair, you need not be angry because a person hasn’t yet opened his or her heart to the nourishment of his or her Soul.  When people act in unloving ways, it only means that they are out of touch with their Souls and aren’t feeling spiritually nourished.  Richard Carlson

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Below the surface, we discover God

• Just beneath the surface of all experiences in life is God’s, or the Guru’s, compassionate face. Mata Amritanandamayi

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Below the surface, we gain access to creativity

• Beneath the surface, unnoticed by many, an even deeper force was at work—the rise of creativity as a fundamental economic driver, and the rise of a new social class, the Creative Class. Richard Florida

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Going below the surface is the source of great art

• Whether it is photography, assemblage art or filmmaking, my work is to see beneath the surface. Christophe Agou
• When we neglect the artist in ourselves, there is a kind of mourning that goes on under the surface of our busy lives. Pat Schneider
• Some of my favorite music is incredibly repetitive, or on the surface has an element of repetition. But once you go beneath the surface, you realize in the repetition is constant variation. John Dieterich
• My father was a psycho-analyst and I think that fact was very influential on my development as an artist. Trying to search beneath the surface of things for an unexpected sense of mystery. Gregory Crewdson
• To be an artist is a blessing and a privilege. Artists must never betray their true hearts. Artists must look beneath the surface and show that there is more to this world than what meets the eye. Marvin Gaye
• Do not imagine that I would disregard that thing that lies beneath the mask… but be sure that when the outside is rightly seen, the thing that lies under the surface will be found upon your canvas. William Merritt Chase
• The underlying tension of a lot of my art is to try and look through the surface appearance of things. Inevitably, one way of getting beneath the surface is to introduce a hole, a window into what lies below. Andy Goldsworthy
• I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue. Andy Goldsworthy
• As with all my work, whether it’s a leaf on a rock or ice on a rock, I’m trying to get beneath the surface appearance of things. Working the surface of a stone is an attempt to understand the internal energy of the stone. Andy Goldsworthy
• Nothing worthy can be built on a neglect of higher meanings and on a relativistic view of concepts and culture as a whole. Indeed, something greater than a phenomenon confined to art can be discerned shimmering here beneath the surface – shimmering not with light but with an ominous crimson glow. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Art historians agree that Da Vinci’s paintings contain hidden levels of meaning that go well beneath the surface of the paint. Many scholars believe his work intentionally provides clues to a powerful secret… a secret that remains protected to this day by a clandestine brotherhood of which Da Vinci was a member. Dan Brown

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Going below the surface is the source of great literature

• 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
• If we get caught up in a story, it’s because we’ve started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we’ve moved beneath the surface. Morris Gleitzman
• As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren’t so different. Amy Waldman
• 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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Going below the surface is the source of great acting

• As an actor, what’s interesting is what’s hidden away beneath the surface. You want to be like a duck on a pond – very calm on the surface but paddling away like crazy underneath. Alexander Skarsgard

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On a lighter note

• I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface. Stephen Sondheim
• To some people, I may seem calm. But if you could peer beneath the surface, you would see that I’m like a duck–paddling, paddling, paddling. Scott Stossel