Blaise Pascal Quotes

The man [President Woodrow Wilson] has no sense of things that penetrates below the surface. With him the rhetoric of a thing is the thing itself.

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

The world is content with setting right the surface of things.

We lament the speed of our society and the lack of depth and the nature of disposable information.

His words span rivers and mountains, but his thoughts are still only six inches long.

A smattering of everything, and a knowledge of nothing.

The thinking of the world leads us to think shallowly and act too quickly.

Cynics know the answers without having penetrated deeply enough to know the questions. When challenged by mysterious truths, they marshall 'facts.

I've known him since 1954 and I've never taken Mujib Rahiman seriously - I understood from the very first moment that there was no depth to him, no preparation, that he was an agitator breathing a lot of fire and with an absolute lack of ideas.

You can't be deep without a surface

I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface ofthings. We think that that is which appears to be.

Certainly when you read someone's diary [ superficial] that's a word that jumps to mind.

People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

The words are all around but the words are only sounds and no one ever seems to listen.

The fool multitude, that choose by show, not learning more than the fond eye doth teach.

When I see a man of shallow understanding extravagantly clothed, I feel sorry - for the clothes.

You know, people seldom go to the trouble of scratching the surface of things to find the inner truth.

Music is another lady that talks charmingly and says nothing.

For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than his surface to others. There are few demands to be met, and no commitment is required. Marriage, on the other hand, closes the door. Your existence is confined to a narrow space in which you are constantly forced to reveal yourself – and therefore, constantly obliged to look into yourself, to examine your own depths.

Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.

I am deeply superficial.

When people look only at the surface and that satisfies them and they think from that surface they see, that is to be truly blind.

nothing is more common than to mistake the sign for the thing itself; nor is any practice more frequent than that of endeavoring to acquire the exterior mark, without once thinking to labor after the interior grace.

The man is a humbug — a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull.

Any man will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of; and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and classbooks, and when we leave school, the Little Reading, and story books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.